infrastructure

40 Articles

Field Guide To North American Crop Irrigation

September 3, 2025 by 26 Comments

Human existence boils down to one brutal fact: however much food you have, it’s enough to last for the rest of your life. Finding your next meal has always been the central organizing fact of life, and whether that meal came from an unfortunate gazelle or the local supermarket is irrelevant. The clock starts ticking once you finish a meal, and if you can’t find the next one in time, you’ve got trouble.

Working around this problem is basically why humans invented agriculture. As tasty as they may be, gazelles don’t scale well to large populations, but it’s relatively easy to grow a lot of plants that are just as tasty and don’t try to run away when you go to cut them down. The problem is that growing a lot of plants requires a lot of water, often more than Mother Nature provides in the form of rain. And that’s where artificial irrigation comes into the picture.

We’ve been watering our crops with water diverted from rivers, lakes, and wells for almost as long as we’ve been doing agriculture, but it’s only within the last 100 years or so that we’ve reached a scale where massive pieces of infrastructure are needed to get the job done. Above-ground irrigation is a big business, both in terms of the investment farmers have to make in the equipment and the scale of the fields it turns from dry, dusty patches of dirt into verdant crops that feed the world. Here’s a look at the engineering behind some of the more prevalent methods of above-ground irrigation here in North America.

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A fisheye lens picture over the Junma Solar Power station in the Mongolian desert. There is a large image of a horse made out of solar panels in the image. A sunset is visible in the upper right of the image, but most the picture is brown sand where there aren't dark blue solar panels.

China’s Great Solar Wall Is A Big Deal

August 18, 2025 by 60 Comments

Data centers and the electrification of devices that previously ran on fossil fuels is driving increased demand for electricity around the world. China is addressing this with a megaproject that is a new spin on their most famous piece of infrastructure.

At 250 miles long and 3 miles wide with a generating capacity of 100 GW, the Great Solar Wall will be able to provide enough energy to power Beijing, although the energy will more likely be used to power industrial operations also present in the Kubuqi Desert. NASA states, “The Kubuqi’s sunny weather, flat terrain, and proximity to industrial centers make it a desirable location for solar power generation.” As an added bonus, previous solar installations in China have shown that they can help combat further desertification by locking dunes in place and providing shade for plants to grow.

Engineers must be having fun with the project as they also designed the Guinness World Record holder for the largest image made of solar panels with the Junma Solar Power Station (it’s the horse in the image above). The Great Solar Wall is expected to be completed by 2030 with 5.4 GW already installed in 2024.

Want to try solar yourself on a slightly smaller scale? How about this solar thermal array inspired by the James Webb Telescope or building a solar-powered plane?

Field Guide To The North American Weigh Station

June 26, 2025 by 39 Comments

A lot of people complain that driving across the United States is boring. Having done the coast-to-coast trip seven times now, I can’t agree. Sure, the stretches through the Corn Belt get a little monotonous, but for someone like me who wants to know how everything works, even endless agriculture is fascinating; I love me some center-pivot irrigation.

One thing that has always attracted my attention while on these long road trips is the weigh stations that pop up along the way, particularly when you transition from one state to another. Maybe it’s just getting a chance to look at something other than wheat, but weigh stations are interesting in their own right because of everything that’s going on in these massive roadside plazas. Gone are the days of a simple pull-off with a mechanical scale that was closed far more often than it was open. Today’s weigh stations are critical infrastructure installations that are bristling with sensors to provide a multi-modal insight into the state of the trucks — and drivers — plying our increasingly crowded highways.

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Reconductoring: Building Tomorrow’s Grid Today

June 11, 2025 by 65 Comments

What happens when you build the largest machine in the world, but it’s still not big enough? That’s the situation the North American transmission system, the grid that connects power plants to substations and the distribution system, and which by some measures is the largest machine ever constructed, finds itself in right now. After more than a century of build-out, the towers and wires that stitch together a continent-sized grid aren’t up to the task they were designed for, and that’s a huge problem for a society with a seemingly insatiable need for more electricity.

There are plenty of reasons for this burgeoning demand, including the rapid growth of data centers to support AI and other cloud services and the move to wind and solar energy as the push to decarbonize the grid proceeds. The former introduces massive new loads to the grid with millions of hungry little GPUs, while the latter increases the supply side, as wind and solar plants are often located out of reach of existing transmission lines. Add in the anticipated expansion of the manufacturing base as industry seeks to re-home factories, and the scale of the potential problem only grows.

The bottom line to all this is that the grid needs to grow to support all this growth, and while there is often no other solution than building new transmission lines, that’s not always feasible. Even when it is, the process can take decades. What’s needed is a quick win, a way to increase the capacity of the existing infrastructure without having to build new lines from the ground up. That’s exactly what reconductoring promises, and the way it gets there presents some interesting engineering challenges and opportunities.

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Remotely Interesting: Stream Gages

May 28, 2025 by 32 Comments

Near my childhood home was a small river. It wasn’t much more than a creek at the best of times, and in dry summers it would sometimes almost dry up completely. But snowmelt revived it each Spring, and the remains of tropical storms in late Summer and early Fall often transformed it into a raging torrent if only briefly before the flood waters receded and the river returned to its lazy ways.

Other than to those of us who used it as a playground, the river seemed of little consequence. But it did matter enough that a mile or so downstream was some sort of instrumentation, obviously meant to monitor the river. It was — and still is — visible from the road, a tall corrugated pipe standing next to the river, topped with a box bearing the logo of the US Geological Survey. On occasion, someone would visit and open the box to do mysterious things, which suggested the river was interesting beyond our fishing and adventuring needs.

Although I learned quite early that this device was a streamgage, and that it was part of a large network of monitoring instruments the USGS used to monitor the nation’s waterways, it wasn’t until quite recently — OK, this week — that I learned how streamgages work, or how extensive the network is. A lot of effort goes into installing and maintaining this far-flung network, and it’s worth looking at how these instruments work and their impact on everyday life.

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38C3: Taking Down The Power Grid Over Radio

January 1, 2025 by 20 Comments

You know how you can fall down a rabbit hole when you start on a project? [Fabian Bräunlein] and [Luca Melette] were looking at a box on a broken streetlamp in Berlin. The box looked like a relay, and it contained a radio. It was a Funkrundsteueremfänger – a radio controlled power controller – made by a company called EFR. It turns out that these boxes are on many streetlamps in many cities, and like you do, they thought about how cool it would be to make lights blink, but on a city-wide basis. Haha, right? So they bought a bunch of these EFR devices on the used market and started hacking.

They did a lot of background digging, and found out that they could talk to the devices, both over their local built-in IR port, but also over radio. Ironically, one of the best sources of help they found in reversing the protocol was in the form of actually pressing F1 in the manufacturer’s configuration application – a program’s help page actually helped someone! They discovered that once they knew some particulars about how a node was addressed, they could turn on and off a device like a street lamp, which they demo with a toy on stage. So far, so cute.

But it turns out that these boxes are present on all sorts of power consumers and producers around central Europe, used to control and counteract regional imbalances to keep the electrical grid stable. Which is to say that with the same setup as they had, maybe multiplied to a network of a thousand transmitters, you could turn off enough power generation, and turn on enough load, to bring the entire power grid down to its knees. Needless to say, this is when they contacted both the manufacturer and the government.

The good news is that there’s a plan to transition to a better system that uses authenticated transmissions, and that plan has been underway since 2017. The bad news is that progress has been very slow, and in some cases stalled out completely. The pair view their work here as providing regulators with some extra incentive to help get this important infrastructure modernization back on the front burner. For instance, it turns out that large power plants shouldn’t be using these devices for control at all, and they estimate that fixing this oversight could take care of most of the threat with the least effort.

National power grids are complicated machines, to say the least, and the impact of a failure can be very serious. Just take a look at what happened in 2003 in the US northeast, for instance. And in the case of real grid failure, getting everything back online isn’t as simple a just turning the switches back on again. As [Fabian] and [Luca] point out here, it’s important to discover and disclose when legacy systems put the grid in potential danger.

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Hackaday Links: June 2, 2024

June 2, 2024 by 6 Comments

So you say you missed the Great Solar Storm of 2024 along with its attendant aurora? We feel you on that; the light pollution here was too much for decent viewing, and it had been too long a day to make a drive into the deep dark of the countryside survivable. But fear not — the sunspot that raised all the ruckus back at the beginning of May has survived the trip across the far side of the sun and will reappear in early June, mostly intact and ready for business. At least sunspot AR3664 seems like it’s still a force to be reckoned with, having cooked off an X-class flare last Tuesday just as it was coming around from the other side of the Sun. Whether 3664 will be able to stir up another G5 geomagnetic storm remains to be seen, but since it fired off an X-12 flare while it was around the backside, you never know. Your best bet to stay informed in these trying times is the indispensable Dr. Tamitha Skov.

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