2026-04-09 19:00:44
Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.
It’s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer’s money, but the sad story here isn’t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit.
We normally write in the third person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there’s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam and the other test site at RAF Westcott in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He’s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I’ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK’s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.
In a related story, the trackers for the same program in Australia were saved from the scrapheap.
2026-04-09 16:00:41
For some types of embedded systems — especially those that are safety-critical — it’s considered bad form to dynamically allocate memory during operation. While you can usually arrange for your own code to behave, it’s the libraries that get you. In particular, it is hard to find a TCP/IP stack that doesn’t allocate and free memory all over the place. Unless you’ve found wolfIP.
The library supports a BSD-like non-blocking socket API. It can act as an endpoint, but can also support multiple interfaces and forwarding if you were building something like a router. It doesn’t appear to be bare-bones either. In addition to the normal things you’d expect for IPv4, there’s also ICMP, IPSEC, ARP, DHCP, DNS, and HTTP with or without SSL TLS. There is also a FIPS-compliant implementation of WireGuard for VPN, although it is not directly compatible with standard WireGuard, only with other instances of itself (known as wolfGuard). There is a Linux kernel module for WolfGuard, though.
The code should be fairly easy to port, and it includes a binding for FreeRTOS already. If you’ve used wolfIP, let us know in the comments.
If you want to really get down to the low-level, try this project. Of, if you want a refresher on basics, we can help with that, too.
2026-04-09 13:00:02
The Intel era of Apple Macs led to so-called “Hackintoshes”, more normal PCs running x86 MacOS X. Now Bryan Keller proves that a Hackintosh isn’t restricted to the x86 era, not by doing it with a modern ARM version, but by going back to PowerPC, and the Nintendo Wii.
The Wii can be thought of in hardware terms as not too far from a Mac G3 with a little less memory, having a PowerPC 750-family processor, a close relative as those in the first generation of MacOS X capable Macs. Since the roots of MacOS X are shared with its open-source equivalent Darwin, he reasons it should be possible to port just enough Darwin to the Wii to enable the closed-source OS X to run on top of it. He’s running OS X 10.0, the earliest version from 2001.
The write-up is a fascinating path through writing a bootloader and running a patched kernel that flashes the Wii LEDs, and then the process of making the Wii’s very different hardware from a Mac, accessible to the OS. It boots from an SD card and uses a framebuffer for display so perhaps it’s not as fast as you might hope, but he gets it working. Even for someone not versed in MacOS or the Wii, it’s a good write-up that makes its points accessible.
Something that makes us happy about this piece of work is its place in the greater picture, after all the Wii has found itself running classic MacOS too.
2026-04-09 10:00:09
Back in late February Nissan Leaf owners began to receive messages from Nissan informing them that the remote features in their cars would cease operation as the NissanConnect app would drop support for Leaf EVs produced before 2020 as well as eNV200 vehicles that were produced until 2022. The indicated cut-off date was March 30, giving affected users about a month to come to terms with the fact that their vehicle would soon to losing any and all remote control features.
What this highlights is an increasingly pertinent question when it comes to ‘connected cars’, which feature a built-in wireless modem to provide a range of additional features. These require access to a remote server for even simple remote features like controlling the charging process or turning on the heating. This has left many Leaf users rather dissatisfied.
While for such basic remote features you could make the argument that they’re just silly convenience features that do not affect the car’s functionality, modern cars are increasingly becoming reliant on such remote features, including for things like navigation and checking subscriptions for features like heated seats.
Increasingly it would seem that we’re looking at the Car-as-a-Service (CaaS) model being implemented.
2026-04-09 07:00:40
Quadcopters tend to have very poor efficency because of their high disk loading. High disk loading– that is, how much weight each square meter of area swept by the propellers must carry–is almost unavoidable with conventinal quadcopters, which are controlled by throttling the four props. Make the propellers too big, and their inertia slows down that control loop, leading to stability problems. [rctestflight] had an idea to solve this, by borrowing a technology from the world of fixed-wing aviation: variable-pitch propellers.
In aircraft use, they are not new, dating back to the end of the first world war. They’re made for everything from the largest turboprops to the 75 kW(100 HP) Rotax 912. By varying the propeller pitch, you can keep the engine turning in its ideal RPM range but still vary thrust by taking a larger or shallower ‘bite’ out of the air with each sweep of the prop. You can probably see how this applies to the quadcopter: a well-designed pitch-change mechanism is going to be much quicker than throttling a big prop with lots of rotational inertia. That’s the theory.
To test it, [rctestflight] builds some large 3D-printed variable pitch props, hooks them up to regular drone motors via a belt drive, before going on–you guessed it–an RC test flight. To make that work, he’s got the pitch servo being driven from what should be the flight controller’s thrust output to each motor. Aside from the vibrations from imperfect balance on the 3D-printed props, it flies quite well– and much better with pitch control than trying to vary the RPMs of those heavy props. He’s even able to reverse the propeller pitch, making this perhaps the first quadcopter capable of autorotation. Well, almost, given that it lost control and came apart when he cut the throttle.
As for efficiency, it is exactly what you’d expect from this disk loading– so, higher than a conventional quad–even with losses from the belt drive and the high-friction surface of a 3D print. Speaking of 3D-prints, the props did hold up to the maximum RPMs he could throw at them, so no ‘kaboom’ in this video. There is a fun rotary subwoofer bonus at the end, though.
Overall, [rctestflight] thinks his variable-pitch quadcopter proves the concept, but that if you’re going to all this effort you may as well build a helicopter and have fewer points of failure. We kind of have to agree. That is how it worked out historically, after all.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen hackers trying to improve drone efficiency– there was the hybrid ‘giant propeller’ drone a while back, and the ‘slap a wing on it’ technique featured more recently.
2026-04-09 04:00:11
Modern computers use dynamic RAM, a technology that allows very compact bits in return for having to refresh for about 400 nanoseconds every 3-4 microseconds. But what if you couldn’t afford even such a tiny holdup? [LaurieWired] goes into excruciating detail about how to avoid this delay.
But first, why do we care? It once again comes down to high-frequency trading; a couple nanoseconds of latency can be the difference between winning or losing a buy order. You likely miss all the caches and need to fetch data from the remote land of main memory. And if you get unlucky, you’ll be waiting on that price for a precious 400+ nanoseconds! [Laurie] explains all the problems faced in trying to avoid this penalty; you try to get a copy of the data on two independent refresh timers. That’s easier said than done; not only does the operating system hide the physical addresses from you, but the memory controllers themselves also scramble the addresses to the underlying RAM!
For the real computer architecture nerds, there’s a lot more to it, and [Laurie] goes over it in meticulous detail in the video after the break.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!
