Photographing Rocket Chute Deployment At 10 Km

April 22, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

For those who haven’t been following along, [BPS.space] aka [Joe] is on a journey to launch a home-built rocket past the Kármán line where it will officially reach outer space. But one does not simply launch a rocket to outer space on the first try. The process is long and involves not only building a series of rockets, but designing and building propellant mixtures, solving aerodynamic problems, gaining several model rocket certifications along the way, and a whole host of other steps. He’s also documenting the entire process on video as well, which involves some custom camera work like this rocket selfie camera which will take an image of his rockets at apogee.

Like most problems in high-power rocketry, extremely tiny problems have a way of causing catastrophic failure, so every detail needs to be considered and planned for in the final design. For a camera that needs to jettison itself from the rocket at a precise moment after experiencing an incredible amount of forces, this is a complicated problem to solve. The initial design involves building a sled for a small deconstructed GoPro which uses springs and a servo to launch itself out of the rocket. The major problem with the design is that even the smallest torque on the sled will cause the camera to point in a random direction by the time it’s far enough from the rocket to take a picture. [Joe] tried a number of design iterations but could not get these torques to vanish.

One of the design limitations with this camera is that it won’t have any sort of parachute or tether itself to the rocket, so it will hit the ground at its terminal velocity. To keep that velocity down and improve survivability chances of the footage, the mass has to stay low. Eventually he settled on a semi-active control system by mounting a brass weight on a small motor, giving the camera module enough stability to stay pointed at the rocket long enough to take the video. Even though it hasn’t flown yet, admitting his first design wasn’t working at compromising on this solution which adds a bit of mass seems to be a good design change. We’ve been following along with his entire process so be sure to check out his actual rocket motor builds and teardowns as well.

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Hackaday Links: May 18, 2025

May 18, 2025 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Say what you want about the wisdom of keeping a 50-year-old space mission going, but the dozen or so people still tasked with keeping the Voyager mission running are some major studs. That’s our conclusion anyway, after reading about the latest heroics that revived a set of thrusters on Voyager 1 that had been offline for over twenty years. The engineering aspects of this feat are interesting enough, but we’re more interested in the social engineering aspects of this exploit, which The Register goes into a bit. First of all, even though both Voyagers are long past their best-by dates, they are our only interstellar assets, and likely will be for centuries to come, or perhaps forever. Sure, the rigors of space travel and the ravages of time have slowly chipped away at what these machines can so, but while they’re still operating, they’re irreplaceable assets.

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New Documentary Details Ventilator Development Efforts During COVID

February 12, 2025 by Donald Papp 20 Comments

What would it be like to have to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in ten days? One that could be built entirely from locally-sourced parts, and kept oxygen waste to a minimum? This is the challenge [John Dingley] and many others faced at the start of COVID-19 pandemic when very little was known for certain.

Back then it was not even known if a vaccine was possible, or how bad it would ultimately get. But it was known that hospitalized patients could not breathe without a ventilator, and based on projections it was possible that the UK as a whole could need as many as 30,000 ventilators within eight weeks. In this worst-case scenario the only option would be to build them locally, and towards that end groups were approached to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in just ten days.

A ventilator suitable for use on a patient with an infectious disease has a number of design constraints, even before taking into account the need to use only domestically-sourced parts.

[John] decided to create a documentary called Breathe For Me: Building Ventilators for a COVID Apocalypse, not just to tell the stories of his group and others, but also as a snapshot of what things were like at that time. In short it was challenging, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, but also rewarding to be able to actually deliver a workable solution.

In the end, building tens of thousands of ventilators locally wasn’t required. But [John] felt that the whole experience was a pretty unique situation and a remarkable engineering challenge for him, his team, and many others. He decided to do what he could to document it, a task he approached with a typical hacker spirit: by watching and reading tutorials on everything from conducting and filming interviews to how to use editing software before deciding to just roll up his sleeves and go for it.

We’re very glad he did, and the effort reminds us somewhat of the book IGNITION! which aimed to record a history of technical development that would otherwise have simply disappeared from living memory.

You can watch Breathe for Me just below the page break, and there’s additional information about the film if you’d like to know a bit more. And if you are thinking the name [John Dingley] sounds familiar, that’s probably because we have featured his work — mainly on self-balancing personal electric vehicles — quite a few times in the past.

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The Clever Design Behind Everyday Traffic Poles

February 3, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 32 Comments

Ever stopped at a red light and noticed something odd about the poles holding up the traffic lights? Look closer next time—many of them appear to hover just above the concrete, anchored by visible bolts. This video below explains it all. It’s not a job left unfinished. It is actually clever design, and all about functionality and easy maintenance. Let’s break down why engineers prefer this so-called ‘floating’ base plate setup.

At first, you might think mounting poles directly into concrete would be more stable—after all, that’s how heavy columns are often installed. But traffic light poles are lightweight, hollow, and face constant wind pressure. Instead of brute stability, they need flexibility and precise alignment. Enter the standoff base plate. By resting on leveling nuts, these poles can be fine-tuned for perfect verticality, even when the ground shifts slightly over time. That’s critical for keeping your 30-foot pole from leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

The open design also simplifies maintenance. If the pole tilts after years of wear, it takes just a few nut adjustments to fix it—no heavy cranes required. Plus, the gap helps prevent moisture buildup, reducing corrosion. So next time you’re waiting at an intersection, you’ll know it’s not just clever engineering—it’s practical street smarts. If you’re an infrastructure nut, this slightly older article might spark your interest.

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The Many Leaning Towers Of Santos, Brazil

January 14, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 55 Comments

If you’ve ever gazed at the shoreline of Santos, Brazil, and felt like something was tugging at your inner eye level, you’re not alone. In fact, you’ve spotted one of the world’s most bizarre architectural phenomena.

Santos is an interesting contradiction—it’s a sunny coastal city with pristine beaches that also plays host to a bustling port. What draws the eye, however, is the skyline—it’s decidedly askew. This isn’t a Photoshop job or some avant-garde urban planning experiment, either. It’s a consequence of engineering hubris, poor planning, and geology just doing its thing.

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Engineering Lessons From The Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory Failure

January 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 48 Comments

Every engineer is going to have a bad day, but only an unlucky few will have a day so bad that it registers on a seismometer.

We’ve always had a morbid fascination with engineering mega-failures, few of which escape our attention. But we’d never heard of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector implosion until stumbling upon [Alexander the OK]’s video of the 2001 event. The first half of the video below describes neutrinos in some detail and the engineering problems related to detecting and studying a particle so elusive that it can pass through the entire planet without hitting anything. The Super-Kamiokande detector was built to solve that problem, courtesy of an enormous tank of ultrapure water buried 1,000 meters inside a mountain in Japan and lined with over 10,000 supersized photomultiplier tubes to detect the faint pulses of Chernkov radiation emitted on the rare occasion that a neutrino interacts with a water molecule.

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An image of a desert with dramatically cloudy skies. In the middle of the image is a series of clay doorways with vertically-oriented wooden slats surrounding a central pole. These form the basis of a panemone windmill.

Help Wanted: Keep The World’s Oldest Windmills Turning

November 7, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 35 Comments

While the Netherlands is the country most known for its windmills, they were originally invented by the Persians. More surprisingly, some of them are still turning after 1,000 years.

The ancient world holds many wonders of technology, and some are only now coming back to the surface like the Antikythera Mechanism. Milling grain with wind power probably started around the 8th Century in Persia, but in Nashtifan, Iran they’ve been keeping the mills running generation-to-generation for over 1000 years. [Mohammed Etebari], the last windmill keeper is in need of an apprentice to keep them running though.

In a world where vertical axis wind turbines seem like a new-fangled fad, it’s interesting to see these panemone windmills are actually the original recipe. The high winds of the region mean that the timber and clay structure of the asbad structure housing the turbine is sufficient for their task without all the fabric or man-made composites of more modern designs. While drag-type turbines aren’t particularly efficient, we do wonder how some of the lessons of repairability might be used to enhance the longevity of modern wind turbines. Getting even 100 years out of a turbine would be some wicked ROI.

Wooden towers aren’t just a thing of the past either, with new wooden wind turbines soaring 100 m into the sky. Since you’ll probably be wanting to generate electricity and not mill grain if you made your own, how does that work anyway?

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