2026-02-28 00:30:20
You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in the past. Fast forward a few centuries, and punch cards will decay, and tapes will lose their coating. More modern storage is just as bad. It simply isn’t made to last for thousands of years. Microsoft has Project Silica, which aims to store data in quartz glass with a potential lifetime of many thousands of years.
As you might expect, this is a write-once technology. Lasers write the data, and polarization-sensitive microscopes read it back. Electromagnetic fields don’t matter. You can’t accidentally change the data while reading. A square glass platter the size of a DVD can hold about 7 TB of data.
While the program is not a new one, they’ve recently published results using ordinary borosilicate glass (like your Pyrex baking dish is made from) as a storage medium. They say writing is also more efficient, and reading now requires only one camera instead of the three in the original system. The paper identifies birefringent voxel writing, phase voxels, and more.
Obviously, this isn’t for the casual project. But we have to wonder if hackers could do something similar with lower densities, for example. Unlike other methods we’ve seen, no DNA is involved.
2026-02-27 23:00:45
An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share all of that with you. It’s worth a moment to reflect on the last ten years in terms of what has made our world during that time.
With quite a few thousand articles under my belt I’ve sadly reached the point at which I can’t remember them all, indeed a hazard when thinking of new ones is that any idea might be something I’ve written before. But there are some of mine and from others which remain in the mind, such as our April Fool pieces, or my coverage of the needless panic about drone flights. Who can forget Brian Benchoff’s Apple Device, a spoof Apple take on a Raspberry Pi for which he even made real(fake) hardware.
Perhaps the only time I have ever found myself with what you might call a real scoop that has importance beyond Hackaday came at the end of 2018. London’s Gatwick airport was closed for several days due to drone sighting, soon followed by London Heathrow, and we were the first publication to pose the question as to whether the drone had existed at all.
The public were treated to a years-long saga of deceit from the authorities as they attempted to cover up the fact that they’d shut down two airports over nothing, with the eventual grudging admission made after years of Freedom of Information requests from activists, that there had never been any evidence of drone involvement at all. The craziest story in all of this was the time they chased a drone which turned out to be their own helicopter, which along with the rest of the sorry saga is related in a talk I did at a hacker camp in 2019. Given that in the week I write this there’s been an airspace closure over El Paso in Texas because of a mix-up over a US government test of an anti-drone weapon, it seems that drone panic is a story which will run and run.
It’s been my observation since long before Hackaday, that the hardware hacking world gains momentum following the appearance of new parts or technologies. I’ve referred to them in terms of epochs in the past. In the last decade we were fortunate that a happy confluence of several such events came within a short time; in the period from about 2005 to 2015 we received accessible and cheap single board computers, 3D printing affordable by mere mortals, cheap PCBs from China, and the explosion of parts and modules from AliExpress sellers. These have arguably been the backbone of Hackaday’s success, because you in our community have taken them and used them to craft such amazing projects. If I had to name a single part which embodies this it would be Espressif’s ESP8266, while it’s largely obsolete in 2026 its appearance in 2014 as a Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller for around a dollar was nothing short of revolutionary. Before the 8266 an Internet connected project was expensive and complex, afterwards it’s done as a matter of course, and ubiquitous.
If I have a perennial concern about where our community is going, it’s in wondering where the next of those epochs will come from. Sadly, we haven’t yet gotten our crystal ball working, but maybe it’s time to look ahead for a minute anyway.
Perhaps the most likely direction will come not from new parts or technologies, but from a reaction to the world around us. As trust in monolithic online services plummets I’m sure our community will respond, and I hope that in the next few years I can have a truly open-source smartphone devoid of links to large corporates, that I’d want to use. Projects that help disconnect from cloud services are going to be popular in the coming years.
I don’t join the general hype around AI, but I think that locally-hosted LLMs will increasingly find their way into projects featured here as the hardware to run them becomes commoditised. A semblance of a personality in our home automation for example is surely going to tempt some hackers, but maybe it won’t be the epoch I’m looking for. For that I see custom semiconductors as one promising future, and I hope that for example Tiny Tapeoput will be only the start. I know nothing about IC design, but I look forward to the time I first sit down to learn the ropes and order the Jenny Chip. It’s next-level now, but in 2036 it’s likely to be as normal as ordering a PCB is for us today.
I have spent a large proportion of my time in the world of hackerspaces over the last decade and before, ever since I saw my city had a group of people who’d started one. In them I have found my people, and found access to knowledge and experience well beyond my own. I’ve sat in spaces all across the UK and Europe and drunk caffeinated beverages with all manner of like-minded crazies, and it’s been a blast.
A good thing in that world over the years has been the extinguishing of the consensus model under which many early hackerspaces were run. I was a director of such a space whose drama level exceeded 1000 MilliNoiseBridges and it has marked me ever since, so it’s nice to see a much more sensible committee-based model take its place.
Every space has its own flavour, but the more recent ones I have been a member of in my peripatetic existence over the last few years have been blissfully stable and a joy to be part of. In Europe most established spaces are now in their second decade, and if I see a danger for them it’s in failing to keep attracting hackers in their 20s and fading into irrelevance. Maybe I’ll come back in another decade and tell you how that went.
A decade ago I was building a not-ultimately-successful electronic kit business when I saw one of Mike Szczys’ “We’re Hiring!” posts on my go-to hardware news website, and thought it looked like a fun thing to do. I didn’t realise that being the only electronic engineer who’d worked for the Oxford Dictionary put me uniquely in line for this, so from that happy accident onwards the last decade has been a blast. I’d like to thank you the Hackaday readers, my awesome Hackaday colleagues, and the wider community of crazy, weird, and talented people I have met along the way. The next decade of hardware hacking is now on.
2026-02-27 20:00:38
Although not as reviled as the sound of nails on chalkboard, the sound of adhesive tape being peeled is quite probably at least as distinctive. With every millimeter of the tape’s removal from the roll sounding like it’s screaming in protest, it has led some to wonder just why this process is noisy enough to be heard from across an open-plan office. Recently [Er Qiang Li] et al. had their paper on a likely theory published in Physical Review E, in which they examine the supersonic air pulses at the core of this phenomenon.
Using rolls of adhesive tape and two microphones synchronized with two high-speed cameras in a Schlieren imaging setup, they gathered experimental data of this stick-slip mechanism. Incidentally, in addition to this auditory effect, adhesive tape is also known for the triboluminescence effect, as well as the generating of X-rays, making them quite the source of scientific demonstrations, even when they’re not also being used to create graphene with.
What they deduced from the recorded data was that the transverse fractures that suddenly appear after the extended stick phase hold a vacuum until they reach the end of the fracture during the brief slip phase, at which point the vacuum collapses very suddenly. This produces a pressure of 9600 Pa and clearly visible shock fronts on the Schlieren images.
Now that we know why peeling adhesive tape from its roll is so noisy, it won’t make it any more quiet, but at least we can add another fascinating science fact to its role of achievements.
2026-02-27 17:00:32
The modern web browser is now far more than a thing for rendering web pages, it’s a multi-faceted environment that can provide a home for almost any application you could imagine. But why should JavaScript or Wasm have all the fun? CSS is Turing complete now, right? Why not, as [Lyra Rebane] has done, write an 8086 emulator in pure CSS?
The web page at the link above may contain an 8086, but missing MMU aside, don’t expect it to run Linux just yet. Instead it has limited resources, just enough to run a demo program. It needs a Chrome-adjacent browser because it uses some CSS functions not available in for example Firefox, but we’ll forgive it that oddity. Its clock is provided by a small piece of JavaScript not because CSS can’t provide one, but because the JS version is more stable.
On one hand this is of little practical use, but to dismiss it as such is to entirely miss the point. It’s in the fine spirit of experimentation, and we love it. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to see what could be done more efficiently with the same idea. A 1970s CISC microprocessor might not be the best choice, but would for example a minimalist and optimized RISC design be more capable? We’re looking forward to where others take this thread.
It’s not the first unexpected computing environment we’ve found, who could forget the DOOM calculator!
Header: Thomas Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0.
2026-02-27 14:00:29
The good part about older game consoles like the Super Nintendo is that they have rather rudimentary region locks, but unfortunately this also gives some people the idea that installing something like the SuperCIC mod chip to make a SNES region-free is easy. The patient that arrived on [Skawo]’s surgery table was one such victim, with the patient requiring immediate surgery to remove the botched installation before assessing the damage.
Here the good news was that the patient features the revision B CPU, making it a good console to rescue. The bad news was that the pads of the old CIC chip had been ripped up, there was a solder bridge on S-PPU1 between two pins and both the installed wiring and soldering were atrocious, requiring plenty of touch-ups.
With the CIC pads already a loss, finishing the SuperCIC mod seemed like a good plan, also since this would make for a nice region-free console. This mod involves a PIC16F630 with special firmware that works with the corresponding CIC IC in each cartridge, while also switching between 50/60 Hz mode to fit the cartridge’s region. After an initial test with PAL and NTSC cartridges everything seemed all right. Then [Skawo] ran the SuperNES Burn-In test from its cartridge, which gave dire news.
Something was wrong with one of the VRAM ICs, leading [Skawo] to first try replacing the IC in question with a replacement from a donor board, which unfortunately did not fix the issue. This led him back to the suspicious solder bridge between pins 25 and 26 on S-PPU1. This would have put 5V into a pin that was not expecting it, and may have led to permanent damage.
One lifting of a donor S-PPU1 IC and nerve-wrecking swap later, it was time for a retry. This time the test passed with flying colors, allowing Super Mario RPG to be played again without funny graphical artefacts and hopefully fixing the last of the issues caused by the botched SuperCIC installation. Fortunately the damage was fixable, but along with a destroyed case it also took out the S-PPU1, which is not an easy to replace chip.
Moral of the story is perhaps that if you really want to mod your SNES, you should leave it to someone who has the requisite skills, lest people like [Skawo] have to rescue another hapless victim from such displays of depravity.
2026-02-27 11:00:59
2000 m above ground level (AGL), winds are stronger and much, much more consistent than they are at surface. Even if the Earth were a perfect sphere, there’d be a sluggish boundry layer at the surface, but since it’s got all these interesting bumps and bits and bobs, it’s not just sluggish but horribly turbulent, too. Getting above that, as much as possible, is why wind turbines are on big towers. Rather than build really big tower, Beijing Lanyi Yunchuan Energy Technology Co. has gone for a more ambitious approach: an aerostat to take power from the steady winds found at high altitude. Ambitiously called the Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System (SAWES), the megawatt-scale prototype has recently begun feeding into the grid in Yibin, Sichuan Province.
The name might be a bit ambitious, since its 2000 m test flight is only one tenth of the way to the stratosphere, but Yibin isn’t a bad choice for testing: as it is well inland, the S2000 prototype won’t have to contend with typhoons or other ocean storms. The prototype is arguably as ambitious as the name: its 12 flying turbines have a peak capacity of three megawatts. True, there are larger turbines in wind farms right now, but at 60 m in length and 40 m in diameter, the S2000 has a lot of room to grow before hitting any kind of limit or even record for aerostats. We’re particularly interested in the double-hull construction– it would seem the ring of the outer gas bag would do a good job funneling and accelerating air into those turbines, but we’d love to see some wind tunnel testing or even CFD renderings of what’s going on in there.
During its first test flight in January 2026, the system generated generated 385 kilowatt-hours of electricity over the course of 30 minutes. That means it averaged about 25% capacity for the test, which is a good safe start. Doubtless the engineers have a full suite of test flights planned to demonstrate the endurance and power production capabilities of this prototype. Longer flights at higher capacity may have already happened by the time you read this.
Flying wind turbines isn’t a new idea by any means; a few years ago we featured this homemade kite generator, and the pros have been in on it too. Using helium instead represents an interesting design choice–on the plus side, its probably easier to control, and obviously allowing large structures, but the downside is the added cost of the gas. It will be interesting to see how it develops.
We’re willing to bet it catches on faster than harvesting wind energy from trees.
All images from Beijing Lanyi Yunchuan Energy Technology Co., Ltd.
