Hands On: The Hacker Pager

July 31, 2025 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

It should come as no surprise that the hacker community has embraced the Meshtastic project. It’s got a little bit of everything we hold dear: high quality open source software, fantastic documentation, a roll-your-own hardware ethos, and just a dash of counterculture. An off-grid communications network cobbled together from cheap parts, some of which being strategically hidden within the urban sprawl by rogue operators, certainly sounds like the sort of thing you’d read about it in a William Gibson novel.

But while the DIY nature of Meshtastic is one of its most endearing features for folks like us, it can also be seen as one of its weak spots. Right now, the guidance for those looking to get started is to pick a compatible microcontroller development board, 3D print a case for it, screw on an antenna from AliExpress, flash your creation with the latest firmware, and then spend some quality time with the documentation and configuration tools to actually get it on the air. No great challenge for the average Hackaday reader, but a big ask for the weekend adventurer that’s just looking for a way to keep in touch with their friends while camping.

Quality hardware that offers a turn-key experience will be critical to elevating Meshtastic from a hobbyist’s pastime to something that could actually be fielded for applications such as search and rescue. Plus, let’s be honest, even those of us who like to put together our own gadgets can appreciate a more consumer-oriented piece of hardware from time to time. Especially if that hardware happens to be open source and designed to empower the user rather than hold them back.

Enter the Hacker Pager from exploitee.rs. As the name implies, it’s still very much a device intended for hackers — a piece of hardware designed for the halls of DEF CON rather than trekking through the wilderness. But it’s also an important step towards a new generation of Meshtastic hardware that meets the high standard of quality set by the software itself.

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Supersonic Flight May Finally Return To US Skies

July 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 51 Comments

After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans to develop commercial transport aircraft capable flight beyond Mach 1 in various stages of development.

Yet today, the few examples of supersonic transport (SST) planes that actually ended up being built are in museums, and flight above Mach 1 is essentially the sole domain of the military. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the few areas of technological advancement where the state-of-the-art not only stopped moving forward, but actually slid backwards.

But that might finally be changing, at least in the United States. Both NASA and the private sector have been working towards a new generation of supersonic aircraft that address the key issues that plagued their predecessors, and a recent push by the White House aims to undo the regulatory roadblocks that have been on the books for more than fifty years.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 329: AI Surgery, A Prison Camp Lathe, And A One Hertz Four-Fer

July 18, 2025 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. They’ll start things off with a small Supercon update, and go right into fusion reactors, AI surgeons, planned obsolescence, and robotic cats and dogs. They’ll also go over several entries from the ongoing 2025 One Hertz Challenge, an ambitious flight simulator restoration project, old school lightning detectors, and how Blu-ray won the battle against HD DVD but lost the war against streaming. Stick around to the end to hear an incredible story about a clandestine machine shop in a WWII prisoner of war camp, and the valiant fight to restore communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and add it to your collection.

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The Apollo–Soyuz Legacy Lives On, Fifty Years Later

July 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened approximately 220 kilometers (136 miles) over the surface of the Earth.

Although their spacecraft actually launched a few days earlier on the 15th, today marks 50 years since American astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald “Deke” Slayton docked their Apollo spacecraft to a specifically modified Soyuz crewed by Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov. The two craft were connected for nearly two days, during which time the combined crew was able to freely move between them. The conducted scientific experiments, exchanged flags, and ate shared meals together.

Politically, this very public display of goodwill between the Soviet Union and the United States helped ease geopolitical tensions. On a technical level, it not only demonstrated a number of firsts, but marked a new era of international cooperation in space. While the Space Race saw the two counties approach spaceflight as a competition, from this point on, it would largely be treated as a collaborative endeavour.

The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project lead directly to the Shuttle–Mir missions of the 1990s, which in turn was a stepping stone towards the International Space Station. Not just because that handshake back in 1975 helped establish a spirit of cooperation between the two space-fairing nations, but because it introduced a piece of equipment that’s still being used five decades later — the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS) docking system.

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The Fight To Save Lunar Trailblazer

July 15, 2025 by Tom Nardi 42 Comments

After the fire and fury of liftoff, when a spacecraft is sailing silently through space, you could be forgiven for thinking the hard part of the mission is over. After all, riding what’s essentially a domesticated explosion up and out of Earth’s gravity well very nearly pushes physics and current material science to the breaking point.

But in reality, getting into space is just the first on a long list of nearly impossible things that need to go right for a successful mission. While scientific experiments performed aboard the International Space Station and other crewed vehicles have the benefit of human supervision, the vast majority of satellites, probes, and rovers must be able to operate in total isolation. With nobody nearby to flick the power switch off and on again, such craft need to be designed with multiple layers of redundant systems and safe modes if they’re to have any hope of surviving even the most mundane system failure.

That said, nobody can predict the future. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there will always be edge cases or abnormal scenarios that don’t get accounted for. With proper planning and a pinch of luck, the majority of missions are able to skirt these scenarios and complete their missions without serious incident.

Unfortunately, Lunar Trailblazer isn’t one of those missions. Things started well enough — the February 26th launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 went perfectly, and the rocket’s second stage gave the vehicle the push it needed to reach the Moon. The small 210 kg (460 lb) lunar probe then separated from the booster and transmitted an initial status message that was received by the Caltech mission controllers in Pasadena, California which indicated it was free-flying and powering up its systems.

But since then, nothing has gone to plan.

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Video Game Preservation Through Decompilation

June 23, 2025 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Unlike computer games, which smoothly and continuously evolved along with the hardware that powered them, console games have up until very recently been constrained by a generational style of development. Sure there were games that appeared on multiple platforms, and eventually newer consoles would feature backwards compatibility that allowed them to play select titles from previous generations of hardware. But in many cases, some of the best games ever made were stuck on the console they were designed for.

Now, for those following along as this happened, it wasn’t such a big deal. For gamers, it was simply a given that their favorite games from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) wouldn’t play on the Nintendo 64, any more than their Genesis games could run on their Sony PlayStation. As such, it wasn’t uncommon to see several game consoles clustered under the family TV. If you wanted to go back and play those older titles, all you had to do was switch video inputs.

But gaming, and indeed the entertainment world in general, has changed vastly over the last couple of decades. Telling somebody today that the only way they can experience The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is by dragging out some yellowed thirty-odd year old console from the attic is like telling them the only way they can see a movie is by going to the theater.

These days, the expectation is that entertainment comes to you, not the other way around — and it’s an assumption that’s unlikely to change as technology marches on. Just like our TV shows and movies now appear on whatever device is convenient to us at the time, modern gamers don’t want to be limited to their consoles, they also want to play games on their phones and VR headsets.

But that leaves us with a bit of a problem. There are some games which are too significant, either technically or culturally, to just leave in the digital dust. Like any other form of art, there are pieces that deserve to be preserved for future generations to see and experience.

For the select few games that are deemed worth the effort, decompilation promises to offer a sort of digital immortality. As several recent projects have shown, breaking a game down to its original source code can allow it to adapt to new systems and technologies for as long as the community wishes to keep them updated.

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End Of An Era: NOAA’s Polar Sats Wind Down Operations

June 12, 2025 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

Since October 1978, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has operated its fleet of Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) — the data from which has been used for a wide array of environmental monitoring applications, from weather forecasting to the detection of forest fires and volcanic eruptions. But technology marches on, and considering that even the youngest member of the fleet has been in orbit for 16 years, NOAA has decided to retire the remaining operational POES satellites on June 16th.

NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES)

Under normal circumstances, the retirement of weather satellites wouldn’t have a great impact on our community. But in this case, the satellites in question utilize the Automatic Picture Transmission (APT), Low-Rate Picture Transmission (LRPT), and High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) protocols, all of which can be received by affordable software defined radios (SDRs) such as the RTL-SDR and easily decoded using free and open source software.

As such, many a radio hobbyist has pointed their DIY antennas at these particular satellites and pulled down stunning pictures of the Earth. It’s the kind of thing that’s impressive enough to get new folks interested in experimenting with radio, and losing it would be a big blow to the hobby.

Luckily, it’s not all bad news. While one of the NOAA satellites slated for retirement is already down for good, at least two remaining birds should be broadcasting publicly accessible imagery for the foreseeable future.

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