TechyMagThings

The earliest all-electronic computers used vacuum tubes, and most of us will know about machines such as ENIAC or Colossus. Vast machines that required the budget of a country at war to build, andfill very large rooms. It’s very pleasing then to see that a useful vacuum tube computer can be made which has neither of these requirements, as with this example from [Mike] that uses former eastern bloc double-triodes.

It’s an 8-bit design following a von Neumann architecture with 16 instructions, whose operational block diagram would be instantly recognisable to anyone used to working with a 1970s-era 8-bit microcomputer. It follows a NOR-based design in the same manner as the famous NASA machines from the Apollo programme, and as we understand from the description it uses more modern parts for its I/O circuitry. Physically it’s a surprisingly compact wall-mounted unit, and it has an accompanying ex-British Rail flip-digit display as well as a control panel for a simple airship simulator game. There’s a website with full details, if you are interested.

We like this machine, a lot. It may not be the largest computer we’ve seen and it certainly isn’t the first one with vacuum tubes, but it’s a very impressive achievement to have created it. If tubes in computing interest you meanwhile, we took a trip to see the daddy of them all.

Should [Mike] enter this into the Retrocomputing Challenge? We think so.

Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar project, which is open-source under the GPL on GitHub. In spite of the name, there’s no Radio Direction or Range-Finding involved in this project– no radio at all, in fact, which makes this a bit interesting. It’s just an NES cartridge and a carefully constructed cable.

The cartridge is a standard ROM cart that holds the software — no hidden ESP32 or PicoW here, which is what we initially suspected the project would be. So how is it that when you start up the NES with the cartridge inside, you can input an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code, like, say, KATL, and get a visualization of the traffic? Well, okay, if you put in KATL, you won’t get all the traffic, since the software is limited to 8 sprites, and that’s the world’s busiest airport. Still, how does it know where those airplanes are?

The secret is in the carefully constructed cable mentioned above: this project is using the second controller port on the NES as a serial port, and getting the data that way. A handy Python script on a nearby computer is what actually fetches aircraft positions. It’s based on c64u-radar, also by [k6lcm], which does the same Python server trick but relies on the Commodore 64 Ultimate’s LAN port to get data rather than using serial. The NES has no such ports available, though, so the controller port it was. We saw a similar trick used for satellite tracking on the NES some years ago.

If you like the idea of tracking flights, perhaps you’d like to see it done on a real radar CRT, or projected directly onto the ceiling. Thanks to ADS-B and free APIs, it seems airplane trackers are everywhere; if an interesting one has come onto your radar, please send us a tip.

Speaking of tips, thanks to [Levi] for putting this one on our scopes!

Generally, we do not look at the gentle patter of raindrops on a surface with much concern, but according to a study by [Zhongyuan Ni] et al. in Nature, we should probably regard these droplets with a little scrutiny for their corrosion potential. What they found is that these drops can gather a significant electric potential as they gently slide down a surface, with over 1 kV measured. By first having droplets charge up on an insulating surface before hitting a target metal surface, they were able to induce significant corrosion.

Despite the target metal surface being coated with a protective layer, these charged droplets managed to gradually break down the coating, exposing the bare metal. In this example, a Teflon coating was used, with water droplets containing a small amount of dissolved sodium chloride to simulate natural raindrops.

It was postulated that this causes dielectric breakdown of the insulating protective coating, as the charged water drop acts as one electrode and the — often grounded — metal surface as another electrode. Subsequent investigations on the samples showed that this appears to be indeed the case.

A potential defense here would be to discharge any water before it can reach sensitive surfaces, but it’s not a straightforward problem to solve. As noted in the study’s conclusion, charged droplets can also be generated in clouds and waves, in addition to the insulating materials demonstrated in the study. It’s also a phenomenon that can cause issues anywhere charged droplets occur, such as in a wide range of industrial processes.

If you’re interested in the electrical generating properties of falling water, check out Lord Kelvin’s Generator! Hackaday’s own [Steven Dufresne] explored this phenomenon a few years back.

Yesterday, Isar Aerospace secured its place in the history books when the upper stage of their Spectrum rocket put a payload of CubeSats into low Earth orbit (LEO). Not only does this make them the first European company to achieve such a feat, but it also marks the first time a booster departing from continental Europe has reached orbit. Not bad for a second attempt.

Standing 28 meters (92 feet) tall, the two-stage Spectrum rocket is just shy of half the size of the SpaceX Falcon 9 and designed to put a maximum of 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) into LEO and 700 kg (1,500 lb) into the Sun-synchronous orbits used by Earth observation satellites. That puts its performance considerably ahead of other commercial launchers such as Rocket Lab’s Electron. Although the booster is not reusable, Isar Aerospace has stated they’re targeting a respectable launch cost of €10,000 ($11,700) per kilogram. The German company notes there are several more Spectrum vehicles currently in production, and when their new factory is operational, they’ll have the capacity to produce up to 40 of them each year.

In other European space news, BepiColombo has now entered what the European Space Agency (ESA) is calling the “arrival phase” of its nearly decade-long journey to Mercury. On Thursday, the spacecraft jettisoned its ion propulsion module as it had achieved the necessary trajectory and velocity to be captured by the planet’s gravitational field when it swoops by in November.

Launched in 2018, the BepiColombo mission is actually carrying two separate craft: the ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter from Japan. After the two separate from each other in December, they will operate independently to study their respective aspects of the solar system’s innermost planet for the next year, although, as is often the case for missions like this, an extension is always possible if things are still going well at that point.

On the subject of hardware outliving its original design lifetime, an active community of hackers has done a fantastic job of keeping the Spotify Car Thing up and running after the company officially pulled the plug on it just two years after its 2022 release. They’ve got a full Linux distribution running on it featuring a slick UI that can launch apps, check the weather, tap into Home Assistant, and of course, play music. The community is currently running a contest with cash prizes to spur on development of new open source software for the liberated Car Thing, and we’re eager to see what comes of it.

Speaking of keeping things open, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has joined Bluesky — but they aren’t exactly thrilled with it. Being federated and largely comprised of free and open-source software, the FSF admits that Bluesky is the lesser evil when compared to something like X or Facebook. But they still can’t recommend others join the service, as the actual signup process requires your browser to run non-free JavaScript code.

One may wonder why the FSF would join Bluesky if they can’t recommend the service to others, and the answer is simply because they want to get the word out to a wider audience. While the FSF already operates an account on Mastodon, there’s a good chance that anyone who’s willingly regularly using said platform doesn’t need any additional convincing when it comes to the evils of proprietary software.

This is as good a time as any to point out that Hackaday is on Bluesky and Mastodon as well, and unlike the FSF, we’re also on Facebook, although the automatic sharing of new posts hasn’t worked for quite some time and honestly we can’t be bothered to figure out why. For our readers with a particular aversion to grass, we’ve even got an official IRC channel on libera.chat where you and nearly 50 others can feel superior to the thousands of immoral heathens that have joined our Discord server.

Finally, it’s been 50 years since the introduction of the ColorChecker — that little card with 24 blocks of colors that’s placed in the frame of a picture or video to provide a visual reference point. In honor of the milestone, Calibrite has put together a timeline that walks you through its history, starting with its inception in the 1976 paper “A Color-Rendition Chart” by C.S. McCamy, H. Marcus, and J.G. Davidson and running up to how the handy tool evolved for the digital age.

There are plenty of facts and trivia about the ColorChecker that you can bring up the next time you want to impress a photographer, and we especially appreciated the breakdown of what each of the original 24 colors was meant to represent.

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.

Although some would argue that the hexagon is the bestagon, astronomers have discovered that Saturn appears to favor the ten-sided decagon on its south pole. This comes as its south pole has recently been confirmed to show a pattern that’s oddly ten-sided, per a recent research article by [Agustín Sánchez-Lavega] et al. in Science Advances.

Because Saturn is a gas giant, this naturally isn’t some gigantic planet-sized rock formation, but rather an interesting wave phenomenon in this massive gas bubble. The hexagon shape on its north pole had been known about for a while already, so it is perhaps not too surprising to find something similar on its south pole.

These shapes are generally the result of standing waves within a polar vortex, through the interaction of waves in Saturn’s atmosphere. For the north pole hexagon, the formation is driven by an intense eastward jet, but no similar wave had been reported for the planet’s south pole.

While in this paper a decagon shape is identified based on multiple observations, they postulate that it’s due to a meandering wave in the area rather than a jet as at the other pole. This clearly doesn’t make this wave pattern as obvious as the one at the north pole, but it provides another fascinating insight into fluid dynamics scaled up to a planetary gas giant.

[Gadget Industry] bills it as “a PC inside a Mouse“, but that depends on your definition of a “PC”. This is a Personal Computer inside a mouse, yes, but there’s nothing IBM-compatible about the tiny ARM board he squeezes inside what’s normally a peripheral — it actually started life as a smartphone, which only takes this build up a notch compared to starting with a single-board computer like a Pi.

Specifically, he starts with a Galaxy S21 5G. Starting with a Samsung means he can leave the stock Android alone and just take advantage of Samsung’s DeX desktop mode, rather than layer a Linux environment on top or replace the operating system entirely with something like Postmarket OS, which are both viable options.

With the battery compartment removed, the phone guts fit with shocking ease in the once-wireless mouse. Of course that’s not a great thermal environment, but that’s what the brass is for. It acts as a heat spreader, which is about as much thermal management as the phone had from the get-go, so it should work well enough. It seems to in the video, certainly. If thermal throttling is a concern, while it’d be hard to fit in a mouse, there’s no beating liquid cooling.

With the recent release of its GPT-6 Astra model, OpenAI explicitly pushed the claim that it is capable of designing complete circuit boards in KiCad, starting from a provided schematic and outputting a fully routed PCB that theoretically could be sent off to be manufactured. This of course raises the question whether this is just a nifty party trick that works under strictly controlled conditions like most auto-routing tools, or whether there’s more to it. In a recent [EEBench] blog post, OpenAI’s claims are put to the test.

Back in 2024, we looked at how LLMs handle circuit board design, starting with the schematic. The conclusion was that you might as well just do it all by hand. Tracking progress here, [EEBench] is an electrical engineering agent benchmark that tests how effective these so-called AI agents are at performing useful hardware engineering work. As their methodology already makes clear, creating a populated and routed PCB from a schematic is just one step of many.

Consequently, GPT-6 Astra scores 69.3% (+/- 10%) on their benchmark, roughly in the same ballpark as Claude Opus 5, albeit cheaper and faster. It should be noted that [EEBench] is run by the developers behind Atopile, which is a code-based system for creating PCBs in KiCad with a strong focus on use by such AI agents.

Despite this, the blog post makes it clear that there is still a long way to go before hardware engineers can receive their pink slips and take up another profession. After all, while vibe-coding a quick prototype PCB can be a nice shortcut, for a one-off project PCB, most boards are expected to handle all the edge cases, be fully validated by multiple independent engineers, and have passed stringent testing before committing to a production run.

(Top image: from OpenAI GPT-6 Astra KiCad video)