2026-03-31 23:30:39
There are plenty of drones (and other gadgets) you can buy online that use proprietary control protocols. Of course, reverse-engineering one of these protocols is a hacker community classic. Today, [Zac Turner] shows us how this GPS drone can be autonomously controlled by a simple Arduino program or Python script.
What started as [Zac] sniffing some UDP packets quickly evolved into him decompiling the Android app to figure out what’s going on inside. He talks about how the launch command needs accurate GPS, how there’s several hidden features not used by the Android app, et cetera. And it’s not like it’s just another Linux SoC in there, either. No, there’s a proper Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) running, with a shell and a telnet interface. The list of small curiosities goes on.
After he finished reverse-engineering the protocol, he built some Python scripts, through which you can see the camera feed and control the drone remotely. He also went on to make an Arduino program that can do the latter using an Arduino Nano 33 IoT.
2026-03-31 22:00:09
Solar power has been around for a long time now. Once upon a time, it was mostly the preserve of research projects and large-scale municipal installations. Eventually, as the technology grew ever cheaper, rooftop solar came along, and cashed-up homeowners rushed to throw panels on their homes to slash their power bills and even make money in some cases.
Those in apartments or rented accommodations had largely been left out of the solar revolution. That was, until the advent of balcony solar. Popular in Germany, but little known in the rest of the world, the concept has brought home power generation to a larger market than ever.
Photovoltaic solar panels were very expensive to manufacture, a long time ago. This made it difficult for solar power to compete with traditional energy sources like fossil fuels. High install costs and limited power output made the business case difficult, even if the energy from the sun itself was effectively free. However, as the desire for cleaner sources of energy ramped up over the years, solar panel production ramped up in turn. Economies of scale did their thing, and panels grew cheap enough for individuals to consider installing them on their own homes. This led to the widespread uptake of rooftop solar, with installations commonly in the 5 kW to 10 kW range with inverter hardware to allow feeding energy back into the grid in a safe and controlled manner.
The problem with rooftop solar is that not everybody owns their roof. A great many people around the world live in apartments, or rent, and are not in a position to make permanent adjustments to their home. These groups were largely left out of the solar revolution. That was, until solar panels grew so cheap and power bills grew high enough that even small-scale installs started to make financial sense.
In Germany in particular, small solar installs have become quite popular, and the country has become a hotbed for so-called “balcony” solar installations. These involve simple setups of one or two solar panels which are designed to be easily mounted on a balcony or other outdoor area of a home, rather than permanently installed on a rooftop.
They come with small inverters to convert the DC output of the solar panels into AC power, which plug straight into an existing home power socket. This do-it-yourself install method eliminates the need for hiring an electrician, further improving the affordability of the system. The inverters used with these systems include anti-islanding protection so that the solar system does not power any circuits if the grid has been deenergized for service or repair.
Balcony solar does have some limitations compared to rooftop installs. Often, installation angles are imperfect for making the most of the sun available. There are also limitations to how much power you can get out of such a system. Germany’s initial regulations for “balkonkraftwerk” systems stated that feed in power had to be limited to 600 watts to avoid potential issues with household wiring and sockets that were never designed for feed-in solar power.
Updated regulations allow up to 800 watts of feed-in, with an additional regulation that the installed panels do not exceed a level of 2000 watts peak output. It might sound like a mismatch, but it’s possible to use the excess power from the panels to charge a battery when the output exceeds the 800-watt limit. Having larger panels with higher peak output is useful, too, for when the sun isn’t shining so bright. A 2000 watt peak panel setup will be outputting 800 watts or more far more often than a set of panels that only delivers 800 watts in peak conditions.
Despite the limitations, or perhaps because of them, it’s a cinch to get yourself going with solar in Germany. Just head to your local big box store, purchase a kit, and hang it off the side of your house. Once you plug it in to the wall, you’re pretty much done. Most kits come with some sort of app for monitoring the system so you can keep an eye on how much your panels are generating. The ease of access has led to an explosion in installs, with over 1 million balcony solar setups already operating in the country.
Thus far, balcony solar has been largely a German thing. However, other parts of the world are catching on. Other European nations like Spain, France, and Belgium have all got on board the train already. In the United States, the state of Utah has already approved a framework for balcony solar installs, and Virginia is following close behind. The key has been carving out special measures to allow easy, cheap DIY installs for small solar systems.
Typically, setting up rooftop solar in most states requires signing an agreement with the local utility regarding power feed-in to the grid, as well as hiring professional contractors for the installation. This adds a huge amount of cost which a small solar system would never recoup in a reasonable amount of time. By eliminating these hurdles for small-scale plug-in setups, they become viable and far more accessible to more of the community.
Balcony solar is unlikely to be an instant gamechanger that drastically shakes up the power grid. Most installs are low power. Their juice is mostly sucked up to run a fridge and a TV or two, and few make major feed-in contributions to the broader grid. However, their popularity in Europe shows that there is a serious eagerness amongst the broader community to get on board the solar train any which way or how. At the very least, balcony solar is a grand business opportunity and one that is bringing sustainability to more corners of the urban and suburban landscape than ever before.
Featured image: “Sogenanntes Balkonkraftwerk” by [Triplec85]
2026-03-31 19:00:39
The Eufymake E1 is a recently-released prosumer UV printer that can print high-resolution color images onto pretty much anything. It also uses proprietary ink cartridges (which integrate a magnetic stirrer, nice) which are far more expensive than UV ink in bulk. So [charliex] set out to figure out how to refill the ink cartridges, including the cleaning cartridge.
UV printing in general is a bit of a maintenance hog, which has helped keep it from hobbyist use. UV ink doesn’t really like sitting idle in a machine, but the E1 automates cleaning and flushing of the print head as well as having swappable cartridges for each ink. This makes it a lot more user-friendly than UV printing has historically been.
The cartridge hardware can have a longer serviceable life than the ink inside, so it makes sense to try to refill them. There are more reasons to do this than just limiting costs. What if one wishes to print and the parent company is sold out of cartridges? What if they shut down? Refilling cartridges, and emptying waste from the cleaning cartridge, would become imperatives — lest an expensive prosumer UV printer turn into a paperweight. Thankfully software DRM control of the cartridges seems limited, at least so far.
Refilling cartridges can be carefully done with syringes combined with manual bypass of spring-loaded valve mechanisms. Emptying the cleaning cartridge can similarly be done by syringe, and it even has a hidden refill port under some plastic at its top.
[charliex] approaches all of this from a reverse-engineering perspective, indeed, he has a whole separate blog post about the software for the printer. So his solution is much more informed and elegant than, for example, just melting a new refill hole in the side of the things. It’s an interesting read, so check it out.
Our own Tom Nardi took a close, hands-on look at the E1 printer last year and came away pretty impressed with its capabilities. The cartridges are a big part of the user-friendliness of the system, but we hope there remains a viable option for manual refill for those of us who want to control costs or don’t wish to be locked in, and don’t mind violating a warranty or two in the process.
2026-03-31 16:00:10
As literally everything ought to be able to play DOOM in some fashion, [Adam Rice] recently set out to make the venerable DNS finally play the game after far too many decades of being DOOM-less. You may be wondering how video games and a boring domain records database relate to each other. This is where DNS TXT records come into play, which are essentially fields for arbitrary data with no requirements or limitations on this payload, other than a 2,000 character limit.
Add to this the concept of DNS zones which can contain thousands of records and the inkling of a plan begins to form. Essentially the entire game (in C#) is fetched from TXT records, loaded into memory and run from there. This is in some ways a benign form of how DNS TXT records can be abused by people with less harmless intentions, though [Adam] admits to using the Claude chatbot to help with the code, so YMMV.
The engine and WAD file with the game’s resources are compressed to fit into 1.7 MB along with a 1.2 MB DLL bundle, requiring 1,966 TXT records in Base64 encoding on a Cloudflare Pro DNS zone. With a free Cloudflare account you’d need to split it across multiple zones. With the TXT records synced across the globe, every DNS server in the world now has a copy of DOOM on it, for better or worse.
You can find the project source on GitHub if you want to give this a shake yourself.
Thanks to [MrRTFM] for the tip.
2026-03-31 13:00:37
When you think of iconic parings, your brain probably goes more to “cookies and milk” than “DEC and Ikea” but after watching [Dave]’s latest on Usagi Electric where he puts a PDP-11 into an Ikea desk, you may rethink that.
The PDP-11 is vintage hardware that actually lived inside of a different desk, once upon a time, serving as the control unit for an FTIR spectrometer. While the lab equipment has thankfully survived the decades, the desk did not and when [Dave] got the unit it was as a pile of parts. He revived it, of course– it’s kind of what he does– but it didn’t get a new desk for years, until his latest shop re-organization.
The one concession to modernity– and missing parts– is using switching power supplies rather than the bulky linear PSU that would have originally powered the unit. It’s a good thing, too, or we have trouble picturing how everything would fit! This particular PDP-11 comes with the high performance vector processing unit in order to crunch those spectrographs, and apparently those chips idle at about 60C, so the desk-case got some decent-sized 120V fans to keep everything cool and running for years to come.
This isn’t the most aesthetic or fanciest case-mod we’ve seen, mostly being made of surplus plywood and scrap metal fittings, but it certainly gets the job done. Given that the PDP-11 has been crammed into every form-factor known to man, from a system-on-a-chip (before anybody really talked about SOCs) to desktop workstations, and of course the hulking cabinets with their iconic blinkenlights-– it’s hard to say that this installation isn’t reasonably authentic, even if it isn’t the original desk.
2026-03-31 10:00:38
Have you ever wanted to see the computers behind the first (and for now only) man-made objects to leave the heliosphere? [Gary Friedman] shows us, with an archived tour of JPL building 230 in the ’80s.
A NASA employee picks up a camcorder and decides to record a tour of the place “before they replace it all with mainframes”. They show us computers that would seem prehistoric compared to anything modern; early Univac and IBM machines whose power is outmatched today by even an ESP32, yet made the Voyager program possible all the way back in 1977. There are countless peripherals to see, from punch card writers to Univac debug panels where you can see the registers, and from impressive cabinets full of computing hardware to the zip-tied hacks “attaching” a small box they call the “NIU”, dangling off the inner wall of the cabinet. And don’t forget the tape drives that are as tall as a refrigerator!
We could go on ad nauseum, nerding out about the computing history, but why don’t you see it for yourself in the video after the break?
Thanks to [Michael] for the tip!
