Posts

Featured Post

Edison Motors Offering All-Mechanical Trucks, At Least to Start

Image
We’ve been following Canadian startup Edison Motors for some time now, but their latest offering caught us a bit off guard– their BDE-sieries truck will be offered first without the electric hybrid drive that first peaked our interest. They make a good case for why in the video embedded below , in which the production prototype tows around a junked Nikola semi as a sort of momento mori of what Edison does not want to end up as. Now, make no mistake: Edison Motors is going to be selling the series-hybrid version of these big rigs eventually. That truck will have a Scania diesel rated at 500kW driving electric motors rated at a combined 1800 kW peak power– that’s 2400 ponies. Along with the diesel generator, those ponies will be driven by a big o’le battery– but none of that is in the truck in the video. It’s the same cab, and the same frame, but in order to get some revenue in while jumping regulatory hurdles and working the kinks out of the hyb...

One Man’s Perfect Retro-Style Monitor Takes All Inputs

Image
Perfection is an inherently subjective measure, in that one must choose the criteria against which to measure. A perfect circle is an absolutely rubbish octagon, for example. So when you see that [RetroBuiltGames] declares that he has built “the perfect multi-input display for retro gaming and vintage computing” — dubbed the “PixelVision AV1000 MKII” — keep in mind that he means the perfect display for his use case. That’s who he’s building it for, after all! The degree to which you find his product perfect is going to depend by-and-large how similar his use case is to yours. In that sense detailed explanations in the design/build video embedded below may be more valuable than the STEP files and PCBs in the GitHub link above– that way if your use case isn’t identical, you can perhaps learn something on the journey to build your own perfect monitor. For [RetroBuiltGames] the aesthetic was obviously a big part of it– he...

OLEDs Have Gained Brightness, Not Burn-In Resistance

Image
OLED displays solve many of the problems suffered by LC displays, including color fidelity, dynamic range and power usage. That said, especially in the early days OLED gained a reputation for dim screens, short lifespans and burn-in. Over time better organic dyes were developed, along with burn-in prevention methods that have made OLEDs much closer to LCDs in terms of longevity. In a recent comparison between OLED TVs by RTings it’s however clear that between 2017 and 2023 there haven’t been any major advances beyond bumps in brightness. The relatively dim screens were a major problem, as they prevented OLEDs from displaying HDR content. This issue has been well and truly addressed, as confirmed by RTings’ testing, but after an over 10,000 hours stress test that simulates about 10 years of regular use at maximum SDR brightness, especially static elements like the CNN TV banner happily burned in even on the newest models with all burn-in prevention measures enabled. ...

Using Starlink’s Satellites to Study Earth’s Upper Atmosphere

Image
Aside from global access to cat videos, the presence of thousands of Starlink broadband internet access satellites in LEO has a very pleasant side effect for atmospheric researchers. Starlink publicly publishes near-real-time ephemeris data on its individual satellites. From this data you can deduce many details about the atmosphere at that altitude, including its density at specific altitudes at specific times, information which otherwise would be very hard to gather. Recently, this allowed [Mamoru Yamamoto] to determine the density of the thermosphere using tomography. In a similar 2025 paper by [Zhuoliang Ou] et al. as published in Remote Sensing , this same data source was used to investigate details of the thermosphere. With Starlink publishing this data since 2021, this provides an invaluable dataset for studying this outermost part of the atmosphere. Commencing just before the generally recognized transition into ‘space’ at 100 km altitude and below the Earth...

More On Wave Overhangs for 3D Printing

Image
We’ve heard of wave overhangs before. It is a new technique for printing horizontal overhangs with no supports. Building on some other techniques like arc overhangs. The idea is to teach the slicer not to try to draw overhangs in the middle of free space. Instead, when the slicer realizes there is a horizontal overhang, it tries to “grow” the overhang from the main part. You can see an overview in the video below. For example, imagine printing a letter ‘T’ vertically. The stem of the T is no problem, but when you try to print the arms it will normally need support. But if you could just print the arms starting at the stem with slight overlapping, the arms could grow as they hang onto either the stem or the last overhang line. That makes sense, but it only works for very simple cases. Arc overhangs can fill more complex cases, but suffer from little dimples at the center of each arc. The realization for wave overhangs is to replace the arcs with waves as ...

Using the Famicom Network System in 2026

Image
Usually, the name ‘Famicom’ and the associated Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) don’t exactly bring to mind downloadable content and online services. However, at least in Japan, a modem add-on for the Famicom offered those features. Released in 1988, the Family Computer Network System (FCNS) offered all that using its modem to dial into Nintendo’s servers. Recently, [Throaty Mumbo] got his mitts on one of these units to try and see what you can still do with it in 2026. Voiding that Nintendo warranty. (Credit: Throaty Mumbo, YouTube) Although only mildly successful in the Japanese market, Nintendo still sold 130,000 of these modem add-ons, with tens of thousands of users for the stock brokering, banking, and Super Mario Club services offered. The experiences with the FCNS would form the foundation for Nintendo’s Satellaview for the Super Famicom and from there into today’s Nintendo Online offerings. Of course, the main challenge with reviving ...

Hackaday Links: August 16, 2026

Image
We’re no strangers to unusual hardware failures around these parts, but even so, a swarm of jellyfish clogging up the works is a new one to us. That’s exactly what happened to the cooling system at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France earlier this week, resulting in three reactors having to be shut down . This isn’t even an isolated incident, as POLITICO points out that the same thing actually happened last year around this same time. So why are jellyfish staging an annual protest against nuclear power? A warming of the North Sea has extended breeding seasons and produced larger populations of the plankton that the jellyfish feed on. This is great for the gelatinous sea creatures, but not exactly ideal if you’re trying to pump the water they live in through a complex cooling system. The French installed filter screens and monitoring systems after this happened in 2025, but clearly they’re going to need to keep working on the problem. From a new p...