2026-04-20 07:00:56
We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been systematically turning off various systems to extend the mission for as long as possible. It’s believed that deactivating LECP should buy them another year, during which engineers hope to implement a more ambitious power-saving routine. If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument back in March of 2025.
The JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to reactivate previously disabled systems on the twin space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, there’s no fighting the inevitable. At some point, there simply won’t be enough juice in the RTGs to keep the lights on. Although it’s going to be a sad day when we have to bring you that news, surviving a half-century in space is one hell of a run.
Speaking of ending a run, just a week after Amazon announced that pre-2012 Kindles would no longer be supported, the company is letting users know that the Kindle software for PCs will be discontinued in June. In its current form, at least. As Good e-Reader reports, Amazon is developing a new client for users who want to access the Kindle ecosystem from their computers, but it will only run on Windows 11. Since older software could be used to strip DRM from purchased ebooks, it seems likely this is another attempt to lock the platform down.
We’re not fans of arbitrary limits being placed on ebooks and the devices that read them, but on the other hand, there are definitely systems out there that could stand to be tightened up a bit. For example, research out of Quarkslab has shown that the electronic control unit (ECU) from a wrecked vehicle can reveal a surprising amount of information.
After picking up a used ECU, they were able to dump its NAND flash chip and decode the log files it contained. It turns out the car had GPS logs going back to the day it rolled off the assembly line, and the researchers were able to reconstruct every trip it ever made.
By cross-referencing the last recorded coordinates with social media posts, they were even able to find pictures of the crash that took the vehicle out of commission. It’s bad enough that personal information can be scraped off of secondhand hard drives; now we’ve got to worry about what happens to our cars after they get hauled off to the junkyard.
If these are the sort of stories that keep you on two wheels rather than four, you may be interested in the latest innovation from Škoda Auto. In an effort to reduce collisions with pedestrians, they’ve developed a bike bell that penetrates active noise cancellation (ANC) systems. The logic goes like this: if someone is walking around with headphones that feature ANC, they might not hear the bell of an approaching bike. So they teamed up with researchers from the University of Salford to essentially find the weaknesses in existing ANC systems.
As you might have guessed, irregular noises are harder to block out than constant tones. Researchers uncovered a gap between 750 and 780 Hz where sounds could sneak through. The mechanical bell uses both principles to defeat ANC, and in testing, it was shown to provide headphone-wearing pedestrians more time to react to an approaching bicycle.
Finally, we’ll bring this week’s post full circle by starting and ending on a space story: earlier this week, PBS released the hour-long documentary Artemis II: Return to the Moon on YouTube. Watching PBS programming on YouTube might seem a bit odd, but that’s the world we live in these days. At any rate, the video is a fascinating look into what went into the recently concluded Moon mission and has us even more excited for Artemis III and beyond.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
2026-04-20 04:00:20
Noise cancelling headphones are a great way to insulate yourself from the bustle of the city, but due to their power requirements, continuous use means frequent recharging. [Alessandro Sgarzi] has an elegant and unique solution — powering the noise cancelling electronics by harvesting energy from the ambient noise of the city via a sheet of piezoelectric film.
This impressive feat is achieved using a LTC3588-1 power harvesting IC and a pair of supercapacitors, while an STM32L011K4T6 microcontroller processes the input from a MEMS microphone and feeds a low-power class D amplifier. This circuit consumes an astounding 1.7 nW, a power that a noisy city is amply able to supply. Audio meanwhile comes via a traditional 3.5 mm connector, which we are told is the cool kids’ choice nowadays anyway.
We like this project, and since it’s part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge, it’s very much in the spirit of the thing. You’ve just got time to get your own entry in, so get a move on!
2026-04-20 01:00:52
Sometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka].
This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces of audio gear that are loosely stacked on top of each other and looking rather unkempt. It would be trivial with this tool to create some 3D printed adapters to get all that stuff laced up nice and neat in a rack instead.
If you’re eager to get tinkering, you can try out the browser-based version quite easily. We’ve featured similar work before, too—many a maker has trod the path of rackmounting, as it turns out.
2026-04-19 22:00:36
Rim-driven thrusters turn the normal propeller-motor arrangement inside out; rather than mounting the motor at the center of the propeller, they use a large hollow motor, with the blades attached to the inside of the rotor. They’re mostly used in ship propellers, though there have been some suggestions to use them in electric aircraft. [Integza], always looking for new and unusual ways to create propulsion, took this idea and made it into a jet engine.
Rather than using an electric motor, the fan in this design is propelled by miniature rocket nozzles along the edge. The fan levitates on a layer of high-pressure gas between the fan rim and the housing. To prevent too much pressurized gas from escaping, the fan and housing needed to fit together closely, but with minimal friction. A prototype made out of acrylic and resin and powered by compressed air proved that the idea worked, but [Integza] wanted to make to this a combustion-powered engine.
The full engine would be similar to a rocket engine, with the fan being the nozzle. The combustion chamber was built out of a brass fitting, and it burned propane in compressed air. The fan and housing were CNC-milled out of aluminium and brass, respectively. They worked well when powered with compressed air, but seized up when connected to the combustion chamber — the fan was thermally expanding and jamming in the housing. Progressively rounding down the edges of the fan failed to solve this, and a hole melted in the fan during one test. [Integza] machined a new fan, which he anodized to increase its heat resistance.
To keep it from overheating, he sprayed water into the combustion chamber, creating steam and cooling the exhaust stream to a manageable temperature. The engine did work, though we do wonder whether the fan actually increases its thrust over that of the base rocket engine.
This isn’t the first unconventional jet engine [Integza]’s built, nor the first which tries to amplify the thrust produced by a rocket engine.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!
2026-04-19 19:00:22
If you put a bunch of computers in charge of your house, it’s generally desirable to ensure their up-time is as close to 100% as possible. An uninterruptible power supply can help in this regard. To that end, that’s why [Bill Collis] whipped one up for his Home Assistant setup.
[Bill]’s UPS is charged with one job—keeping the Home Assistant Green hub and an Xfinity XB7 cable modem online when the grid goes dark. The construction is relatively straightforward. When the grid is up, everything is powered via a Mean Well AC-DC 12 V power supply, while the power is also used to charge a 12.8 V 10 Ah lithium iron phosphate battery pack. When the grid goes out, the system switches over to running the attached hardware on pure battery power. A Victron BatteryProtect is used to automatically disconnect the load if the battery voltage drops too low. Meanwhile, a Shelly Plus Uni module is used to monitor battery voltage and system status, integrated right into Home Assistant itself.
If you want to keep the basics of your smart home going at all times, something like this is a pretty simple way to go. We’ve featured some other great UPS builds in the past, too. If you’re whipping up your own hardware to keep your home or lab alive in the dark of night, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.
2026-04-19 16:00:23
Betteridge’s law applies, but with help and guidance by a human who knows his stuff, [Ready Z80] was able to get a functioning game of Wordle out of the French-named LLM, which is more than we expected. It’s not like the folks at Anthropic spent much time making sure 40-year-old opcodes were well represented in their training data, after all.
For hardware, [Ready Z80] is working with the TEC-1G single-board-computer, which is a retrocomputer inspired by the TEC-1 whose design was published by Australian hobbyist magazine “Talking Electronics” back in the 1980s. Claude actually seemed to know what that was, and that it only had a hex keypad — though when [Ready Z80] was quick to correct it and let the LLM know he’s using a QWERTY keyboard add-on, Claude declared it was confident in its ability to write the code.
As usual for a LLM, Claude was overconfident and tossed out some nonexistent instructions. Though admittedly, it didn’t persist in that after being corrected. It’s notable that [Ready Z80] doesn’t prompt it with “Give me an implementation of Wordle in Z80 assembly for the TEC-1G” but goes through step-by-step, explaining exactly what he wants each section of the code to do. As [Dan Maloney] reported three years ago, it’s a bit like working with a summer intern.
In the end, they get a working game, but that was never in question. [Ready Z80] reveals over the course of the video he has the chops to have written it himself. Did using Claude make that go faster? Based on studies we’ve seen, it probably felt like it, even if it may have actually slowed him down.
