2026-04-22 22:00:47
If you read a headline that signs of intelligent life were found on the moon, you might suspect a hoax. But they are there! Humans have dumped a lot of stuff on the moon, both in person and via uncrewed rockets. So after the apocalypse, what strange things will some alien exo-archaeologist find on our only natural satellite?
Of course, we’ve left parts of rockets, probes, and rovers. Only the top part of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module left the moon. (See for yourself in the Apollo 17 ascent video below.) The bottoms are still there, along with the lunar rovers and a bunch of other science instruments and tools. There are boots and cameras, as you might expect.
But what about the strange things? As of 2012, NASA compiled a list of all known lunar junk that originated on Earth. The list starts with material from the non-Apollo US programs like the Surveyor and Lunar Prospector missions. Next up is the Apollo stuff, which is actually quite a bit (an estimated 400,000 pounds, we’ve heard), ranging from the entire descent stage and lunar overshoes to urine bags. There are even commemorative patches and a gold olive branch.
After that, the list shows what’s known to be on the surface from the Russian space program, along with objects of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and European origin.
Charles Duke on Apollo 16 left a framed family photo on the Moon’s surface with an inscription on the back. We figure if you go looking for it now, the sun will have bleached it white, but we appreciate the sentiment.
There are several objects meant to commemorate fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, including an Apollo 1 mission patch. You may recall that a fire during training killed all three of Apollo 1’s crew.
Lunar Prospector brought a portion of the ashes of Gene Shoemaker, a geologist who trained Apollo astronauts, to the moon. The capsule of ashes holds a quote from Romeo and Juliet:
And, when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
To date, Shoemaker is the only person who has remains on the moon.
While not exactly sentimental, NASA did send a silicon disc to the moon with Apollo 11 containing goodwill messages from 73 countries. The whole thing is about the size of a US half dollar, so if you want to read the messages, you might be better off reading the associated document.
Making tiny silicon wafers with finely-detailed etchings was pretty high tech in the late 1960s. GCA Corp used a reduction camera to make a negative photomask containing all the letters plus an inscription around its edge at its final size. This mask was given to Sprague, who etched it.
One of the strange things on the NASA list is a falcon feather. That was left by Apollo 15’s Davis Scott, who carried out the classic experiment of dropping a feather and a hammer to note that they fell at the same speed, even in the weak gravity of the moon. The feather was from Baggin, the Air Force Academy’s mascot, and remains on the lunar surface today.
Speaking of Baggin, there are 96 bags of — ahem — human waste sitting up there. Probably best not to bring that up the next time you and your partner are gazing at the romantic moon overhead.
Forrest Myers created a small ceramic wafer with tiny artwork from six artists, like Andy Warhol, titled “Moon Museum.” The tile features six drawings, including a stylized “AW” (Warhol), a line (Robert Rauschenberg), a black square (David Novros), a diagram (John Chamberlain), Mickey Mouse (Claes Oldenburg), and an interlocking design (Myers). Apparently, Novros and Chamberlain were inspired by circuit diagrams of some kind.
Bell Labs created the wafer. However, NASA failed to approve the project, and Myers sought an alternative.
Reportedly, Myers gave the chip to an unnamed Apollo 12 engineer who affixed it to the leg of the lunar module. However, NASA has not confirmed this, so we don’t know for sure if it is up there or not. Perhaps if you get to the neighborhood, you can check it out and let us know.
You might wonder why so much stuff was left, but if you think about it, it makes sense. The rockets can only bring back so much stuff. Every camera you leave behind means more moon rocks you can bring home. You can buy a new camera, but you can’t buy more moon rocks.
According to the Lunar Legacy Project, Apollo 11 (and presumably the other missions) had designated toss zones (we guess dumps didn’t sound good).
If you are looking for a more up-to-date list, the Wikipedia article can help fill in the gaps, at least for vehicles. There’s been quite a bit added since the NASA list, including items from the UAE, Israel, and Luxembourg. Plus, there are many new additions from other countries.
With the advent of high-resolution orbital cameras, you can see some of the landing sites better than ever. For example, the video below shows the Apollo 17 site imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.
Of course, we are on our way back to the moon, and so are other space programs. So there will probably be even more human debris on the moon soon. It is only a matter of time before lunar waste management becomes a hot topic.
Title image “Map of artificial objects on the Moon” by [Footy2000]
2026-04-22 19:00:45
If you wanted to host a website, you could use any one of a number of online services, or spin up a server on a spare computer at home. If you’re a bit more daring, you could also do what [Tech1k] did, and run one on an ESP32 microcontroller.
The site in question is available (or at least, should be) at HelloESP.com. The first revision ran entirely on an ESP32, serving pages from a SPIFFS filesystem. The device was also fitted with a BME280 environment sensor and an OLED screen. It had an uptime of 500 days before the board failed.
The site has since been relaunched, running on a board that is framed on [Tech1k]’s wall. It runs on an ESP32-WROOM-32D, paired with a BME280 again, along with a CCS811 CO2 and air quality sensor and a DS3231 RTC for accurate timekeeping. The ESP32 is setup to hold an outbound WebSocket to a Cloudflare worker, with the Worker routing HTTP requests to the site via that route. This avoids the need for port forwarding for the ESP32 to be visible to the outside world, and the Cloudflare Worker will also serve a static version of the page in the case of WiFi dropouts or other temporary failures.
It’s true that this isn’t a completely unheard of project—microcontrollers have been working as simple web servers for a long time now. Still, [Tech1k] did a great job of making this as robust as possible and more like a real functional webserver rather than just something that runs on a local network to serve up a config page. That’s worthy of note.
You can run webservers on all kinds of chips these days, even the Raspberry Pi Pico. If you’re doing web stuff on something weird, you know we always wanna hear about it on the tipsline!
2026-04-22 16:00:13
There’s a reason that the standards specifications for various wireless communications protocols are extremely long and detailed. [Made by Dennis] found this out first hand when he decided to build a wireless button from scratch.
The major issues with wireless devices is one of power consumption. If reliable power is available from a wall plug or solar panel, this isn’t as serious of a concern. But [Dennis] is using batteries for his buttons, so minimizing power consumption is a priority. He’s going with the nRF52, a microcontroller designed for low power and which has a built in wireless radio, and configuring it in a way that uses the least amount of energy possible.
From there, [Dennis] turns to the wireless communication. He goes into detail about how the microcontroller is woken up, how it sends its data packets to another wireless-enabled microcontroller, and how they handle handshakes and acknowledgements of data. For something as simple as a button press, it gets quickly more complicated especially when adding some basic encryption and security to the communications protocol.
With all the design decisions out of the way, the system can be built. [Dennis] has created custom PCBs for his devices, and also included some expansion I/O for other sensors and peripherals beyond just a pushbutton. All of the schematics and code are available on the project’s GitHub page and the STL files can be found at Printables.
For those new to offline home automation or who are turning away from cloud-based services lately, there are some easy entry points that don’t require much extra hardware or expenditure.
2026-04-22 13:00:06
Most synths happily get by with keyboard or pad inputs and make lovely sounds in response. [Becky Clarke] and her fellow collaborators are building a synth that works rather differently. DigitSynth is a wearable controller that’s rather fun to interact with.
The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi 5. It’s set up to talk to a TI ADS1115 ADC chip that lets it read a bunch of analog flex sensors embedded in a right-hand glove, while the Pi can also read a bunch of tactile buttons activated by the left hand. The flex sensors are used to control synth parameters like LFO rate and filter cutoffs, while the buttons control chord changes. The Raspberry Pi runs custom code to read these devices and generate the requisite MIDI commands to send to a Roland JD-Xi synth which is responsible for actually making the sound. Both sets of fingers are also dotted with LEDs for visual feedback, controlled via a TLC59711 PWM driver.
It’s a fun build that creates some ethereal sounds in an intuitive way, thanks to the nature of the interface. We’ve featured some similar builds before, using the flexure of the hand to create musical soundscapes. Video after the break.
2026-04-22 10:00:01
Itanium was once meant to be the next step in computing, to compete with the likes of IBM, Sun and DEC, but also for Intel to have an architecture that couldn’t be taken from it, as the PC was from IBM by its clones. Today, however, Itanium is a relic of the past. [Asianometry] tells us the story of Itanium.
By the ’90s, servers were an established market dominated by RISC architectures and Unix-like operating systems. Intel wanted to compete in this market, due in part to worries of losing control over x86. So, when Hewlett Packard came to Intel in late ’93, Intel eventually agreed to collaborate on a new project in EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).
The project initially called PA-WW (later IA-64 and Itanium), was also a radical approach to ILP (Instruction-Level Parallelism). As HP engineers saw RISC architectures potentially hitting performance limits in the future, the idea was a compromise between fully compiler-driven VLIW and the fully hardware-driven superscalar and out-of-order computers.
The collaboration between Intel and HP did not go without problems, however. Internal politics, both between HP and Intel disagreeing about design choices and Intel’s Itanium and x86 teams internally competing who was making the new big product, were early signs of trouble. The x86 team’s work eventually came to be the Pentium Pro, which was now catching up with the fastest RISC architectures.
In the mean time, Itanium had been delayed once and twice, due to Intel underestimating the true scale of the project and the fabrication technology required. The mounting delays eventually caused a release in 2003, 4 years late. And the competition wasn’t waiting in the mean time. New RISC chips were still being released year after year, eating in to what would have been Itanium’s performance advantage.
In an ironic twist, Itanium’s attempt to dislodge x86 actually solidified it. AMD realized that Intel had made a mistake; software developers would not want to recompile for a completely different architecture. And so, yet more competition began in the form of AMD’s 64-bit extension to x86, the specification written by the legendary Jim Keller. And, while sales numbers were lower than projected, AMD had still won; more AMD64 chips were being sold than Itanium ones.
In the end, Itanium died a slow death due to delays and increasing competition. With it, AMD made a major change to x86, the first time Intel was on the back foot in the x86 race, eventually leading to their adoption of AMD64 (now called x86-64) with some minor changes. By the time Itanium 2 launched, the writing was on the wall: Itanium had failed to capture the market.
History often rhymes, and so does the story of Itanium to that of VLIW; an architecture perhaps too ambitious for its own good.
Die shots of an Intel Itanium processor courtesy of [der8auer].
2026-04-22 07:00:33
In the ages before convenient global positioning satellites to query for one’s current location military aircraft required dedicated navigators in order to not get lost. This changed with increasing automation, including the arrival of increasingly more sophisticated electromechanical computers, such as the angle computer in the B-52 bomber’s star tracker that [Ken Shirriff] recently had a poke at.
We covered star trackers before, with this devices enabling the automation of celestial navigation. In effect, as long as you have a map of the visible stars and an accurate time source you will never get lost on Earth, or a few kilometers above its surface as the case may be.
The B-52’s Angle Computer is part of the Astro Compass, which is the star tracker device that locks onto a star and outputs a heading that’s accurate to a tenth of a degree, while also allowing for position to be calculated from it. Inside the device a lot of calculations are being performed as explained in the article, though the full equations are quite complex.
Not burdening the navigator of a B-52 with having to ogle stars themselves with an instrument and scribbling down calculations on paper is a good idea, of course. Instead the Angle Computer solves the navigational triangle mechanically, essentially by modelling the celestial sphere with a metal half-sphere. The solving is thus done using this physical representation, involving numerous gears and other parts that are detailed in the article.
In addition to the mechanical components there are of course the motors driving it, feedback mechanisms and ways to interface with the instruments. For the 1950s this was definitely the way to design a computer like this, but of course as semiconductor transistors swept the computing landscape, this marvel of engineering would before long find itself too replaced with a fully digital version.
