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Hackaday Links: May 10, 2026

While Artemis II was primarily a demonstration flight of the architecture NASA plans to use for future lunar missions, it was also an excellent excuse for the crew to snap some photos of the Moon and Earth with the benefit of modern camera technology. If you’ve been looking forward to seeing more of the crew’s images, you’re in luck, as thousands of new images have recently been released.

Now we don’t mean to beat up on the folks at NASA, but browsing through these images, we couldn’t help but be reminded of an article we saw on PetaPixel that discussed the space agency’s haphazard approach to sharing images online.

It’s really more like an unsorted file dump than anything, made worse by the fact that you have to access it through a government website that looks and performs like it was designed in the early 2000s. There’s even a prominent button that attempts to load a gallery feature that relies on the long-deprecated Adobe Flash. It would be nice to see the situation improved by the time astronauts actually touch down on the lunar surface, but we wouldn’t count on it.

Speaking of old tech, we’ve been following the resurgence of keyboard-equipped smartphones with great interest, as we imagine many of you have been. A recent CNBC article addresses the trend, although it didn’t quite take the nerd contingent into account. We want physical keys so we can work in the terminal and write code without fighting an on-screen keyboard, but of course, that’s not exactly what your average consumer is looking for.

It’s quite the opposite, in fact. A 20-something user referenced in the article explained how the younger generations see the physical keyboard as a way to be less connected to their phones, describing it as “an extra barrier of inconvenience that adds more steps into the thinking process.” If you need us, we’ll be collecting dust in the corner.

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2026 Green Powered Challenge: A Portable Solar Panel, Made Better

Many of us will have seen the portable solar panels offered on our favourite online purveyors of electronics, but some who have bought them remain unimpressed with their performance.  [t.oster92] had just such an issue, and concluded that since it had great dull-day performance, it wasn’t the panels themselves that were at fault. There followed a teardown and an investigation of the circuitry inside.

The panels fed a small PCB containing a buck converter, with an 8-pin SOIC carrying an untraceable part number. Some detective work revealed it was likely to be a rebadged version of a more common part, which exposed the problem as a converter without the rating to deliver the power it should. The solution, at least in part, was to replace it with a more powerful chip on a module and reap the benefits.

This would be the end of the story, but this is an ongoing project. Next up will be adding MPPT capability to extract the last bit of juice from those panels. That makes this one a story to keep an eye on, because we could all use a decent set of panels.

This hack is part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge.

SolMate Charger

2026 Green Powered Challenge: SolMate Charges On The Move

We’ve all had those times when your electrical device of choice is running low on battery. Sometimes you even plan ahead and are also carrying a battery pack, but what happens when you’ve forgotten to charge the battery pack? This is the problem that [Arnov Sharma] addressed with the SolMate, a portable solar panel that keeps a battery bank topped up.

The SolMate is built around an efficient 2 W photovoltaic panel that’s not much bigger than a cellphone. This panel can supply 5 V at 400 mA on a sunny day. The solar output is more than enough to keep the internal 2000 mAh battery topped up and ready for use. Charging the Li-ion battery is handled by an IP5306 power management chip, which pulls double duty: it safely regulates charging while boosting the battery’s 3.7 V to the 5 V expected at the USB charge ports. Speaking of charge ports, the SolMate includes both a USB-A and a USB-C port, plus a switch to enable or disable the unit.

The case is all 3D printed, with some clever design choices. Offsetting the bulk of the battery and PCB storage area to one side lets the SolMate naturally cant toward the sun. Even the clip used to attach it to a backpack is printed.

Be sure to check out the other entries into our latest challenge!

After Trucking Them Home, Old Solar Panels Keep On Trucking

The fact that there exist in our world flat rocks that make lightning when you point them at the sun is one of the most unappreciated bits of wizardry in this modern age. As hackers, we love all this of techno-wizardry–but some of us abhor paying full price for it. Like cars, one way to get a great discount is to buy used. [Backyard Solar Project] helped a friend analyze some 14-year-old panels to see just how they’d held up over the years, and it was actually better than we might have expected.

The big polycrystalline panels were rated at 235 W when new, and they got 6 of them for the low, low price of “get this junk off my property”. Big panels are a bit of a pain to move, but that’s still a great deal. Especially considering that after cleaning they averaged 180 W, a capacity factor of 77%. Before cleaning 14 years worth of accumulated grime cost about eight watts, on average, an argument for cleaning your panels. Under the same lighting conditions, the modern panel (rated to 200 W) was giving 82% of rated output.

That implies that after 14 years, the panels are still at about 94% of their original factory output, assuming the factory wasn’t being overoptimistic about the numbers to begin with. Still, assuming you can trust the marketing, a half a percent power drop per year isn’t too bad. It’s also believable, since the US National Renewably Energy Laboratory (yes, they have one) has done tests that put that better than the average of 0.75 %/yr. Of course the average American solar panel lives in a hotter climate than [Backyard Solar Project], which helps explain the slower degradation.

Now, we’re not your Dad or your accountant, so we’re not going to tell you if used solar panels are worth the effort. On the one hand, they still work, but on the other hand, the density is quite a bit lower. Just look at that sleek, modern 200 W panel next to the old 235 W unit. If you’re area-limited, you might want to spring for new, or at least the more energy-dense monocrystalline panels that have become standard the last 5 years or so, which aren’t likely to be given away just yet. On the gripping hand, free is free, and most of us are much more constrained by budget than by area. If nothing else, you might have a fence to stick old panels against; the vertical orientation is surprisingly effective at higher latitudes.

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Solar-Powered RC Boat Has Unlimited Range

For RC aircraft there are generally legal restrictions that require the craft to stay within line of sight of the operator, but an RC boat or car can in theory go as far as the signal will allow — provided there is ample telemetry to let the operator navigate. [Thingify] took this idea to the extreme with a remote-controlled boat that connects to a satellite internet service and adds solar panels for theoretically unlimited range, in more ways than one.

The platform for this boat is a small catamaran, originally outfitted with an electric powertrain running on a battery. Using a satellite internet connection not only allows [Thingify] to receive telemetry and pilot the craft with effectively unlimited range, but it’s a good enough signal to receive live video from one of a pair of cameras as well. At that point, the main limiting factor of the boat was the battery, so he added a pair of flexible panels on a custom aluminum frame paired with a maximum power point tracking charge controller to make sure the battery is topped off. He also configured it to use as much power as the panels bring in, keeping the battery fully charged and ready for nightfall where the boat will only maintain its position and wait for the sun to rise the next morning.

With this setup [Thingify] hopes to eventually circumnavigate Lake Alexandrina in Australia. Although he has a few boat design issues to work out first; on its maiden voyage the boat capsized due to its high center of gravity and sail-like solar panels. Still, it’s an improvement from the earlier version of the craft we saw at the beginning of the year, and we look forward to his next iteration and the successful voyage around this lake.

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Multi-Use Roof Eliminates Roof

One of the biggest downsides of installing solar panels on a rooftop is that maintenance of the actual roof structure becomes much more difficult with solar panels in the way. But for many people who don’t have huge tracts of land, a roof is wasted space where something useful could otherwise go. [Mihai] had the idea of simply eliminating traditional roofing materials altogether and made half of this roof out of solar panels directly, with the other half being put to use as a garden.

Normally solar panels are installed on top of a roof, whether it’s metal or asphalt shingles or some other material, allowing the roof to perform its normal job of keeping weather out of the house while the solar panels can focus on energy generation. In this roof [Mihai] skips this step, having the solar panels pull double duty as roof material and energy generation. In a way this simplifies things; there’s less to maintain and presumably any problems with the roof can be solved by swapping out panels. But we would also presume that waterproofing it might be marginally more difficult.

On the antisolar side of the roof, however, [Mihai] foregoes the solar panels in favor of a system that can hold soil for small garden plants. Putting solar panels on this side of the roof wouldn’t generate as much energy but the area can still be useful as a garden. Of course we’d advise caution when working on a garden at height, but at least for the solar panels you can save some trips up a ladder for maintenance by using something like this robotic solar panel scrubber.

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Keep Track Of The Compost With LoRaWAN

Composting doesn’t seem difficult: pile up organic matter, let it rot. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated– if you want that sweet, sweet soil amendment in a reasonable amount of time, and to make sure any food-born pathogens and weed seeds don’t come through, you need a “hot” compost pile. How to tell if the pile is hot? Well, you could go out there and stick your arm in like a schmuck, or you could use [Dirk-WIllem van Gulik]’s “LORAWAN Compostheap solarpowered temperaturesensor” (sic).

The project is exactly what it sounds like, once you add some spaces: a solar-powered temperature sensor that uses LoRaWAN to track temperatures inside (and outside, for comparison) the compost heap year round. Electronically it is pretty simple: a Helltech CubeCell AB01 LoraWAN module is wired up with three DS18B20 temperature sensors, a LiPo battery and a solar panel. (The AB01 has the required circuitry to charge the battery via solar power.) Continue reading “Keep Track Of The Compost With LoRaWAN”