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Meshtastic Sniffer for DragonOS

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Meshtastic has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years thanks to its low barrier of entry. No licenses are needed and the hardware is dirt cheap, at least when compared to a lot of ham radio gear. But while that physical barrier is low, there is a bit of a learning curve. Part of that comes from the fact that there are a lot of channels and modes that people could be communicating on, and unless the user knows that information up front it can be hard to find where the conversations are happening. [cemaxecuter] noticed this problem and built a Meshtastic sniffer into his radio-forward Linux distribution, DragonOS . The sniffing software is built in C and comes as a complete standalone binary and does not rely on GNU Radio. With DragonOS up and running and the software loaded, it can look at the entire bandwidth that Meshtastic operates on and detect any traffic and decode it (as long as the key is known). [cemaxecuter] is using a HackRF as a software-defined radio for this p...
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An Open Micro-Maniplulator Improved

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If you need a micro-manipulator, you probably already have a good idea of what it does. For example, you might be moving a probe over an IC die or wafer. You might be looking at something through a microscope. The key is moving something in very small, precise increments along three axes. An open-source design for a micro-manipulator has seen significant improvements lately. You can see several videos about the device below. The device uses stepper motors, parallel kinematics, and miniature ball joints to achieve precise motion. The recent version 4.0 update fixes a few problems. According to the GitHub page: Self-collision during homing fixed. Connection of the ball joint block with screws only was not well constrained and could be rotated a bit. No reliable way to ensure consistent linkage rod length Unnecessary ball joint friction Accurate ball position heavily dependent on print quality and corner rounding Rubber bands could not be changed or removed once glued in. We...
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Thunderbolt Strikes Windows98

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If there’s one thing everyone hated about Windows 98, was the lack of USB4.0 support. We remember vividly the cries of anguish at the launch party when we found out that 21 years in the future, the operating system wouldn’t support the then-undreamt of speeds of the thunderbolt-based fastest USB protocol. After two decades of living with this crushing disappointment, [Yeo Kheng Meng] has delivered the goods: the most modern of USB interfaces on some very much not modern versions of windows . This builds on [Yeo Kheng Meng]’s work on xHCI drivers for USB2.0 support, which we covered at the time . Like that hack, this one applies to Windows 98 through 7, and has a similar level of LLM-wrangling involved. There are actually a few parts to it– one is a USB3.0 driver, which replaces the old xHCI98 driver and is available on GitHub. On Windows98, USB3.0 speed caps out around 200 MB/s, likely restricted by Windows98’s maximum request limit of 64kB on USB transf...
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Hackaday Links: October 17, 2026

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While Hackaday doesn’t maintain a crime blotter, we couldn’t help but start this week’s post off with a bit of civil disobedience — a retired professor from the University of Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this week for standing in front of a delivery robot . Granted, she was standing there for long enough that the police were eventually called, but still. Previous reporting indicates that Carolyn Marvin has a history of blocking delivery robots as a form of protest, but this is the first time law enforcement got involved. We’re not lawyers here at Hackaday, so we can’t say for sure whether or not blocking the progress of a robot engaged in commercial operation actually violates any laws. But we do know that refusing a lawful request from a police officer will get you in trouble, and that seems to be what Marvin was actually charged with when she refused to move. From a robot stopped in its tracks to one that keeps on trucking, NASA is reporting...
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Off-Grid Refrigeration Using Fire and Salt

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Refrigeration has been a challenge for humanity since the start. Ancient civilizations in dry climates like Persia and Egypt could use evaporative cooling on a large scale with specialized architecture, and with easy access to electricity modern civilization can cool down almost anything it wants. But whether in a refrigerator or heat pump, the electricity demands can get out of hand quickly, and heat-driven systems often require dangerous or hard-to-get chemicals. But [Greenhill Forge] has crafted a system that creates effective refrigeration with only fire and salt … and a bit of electricity. Heat-driven systems are called absorption coolers. In this design, water is used as a refrigerant and forced to a very low pressure so that it can boil at a low temperature. When it boils it absorbs heat from the surrounding environment, and then that water vapor can be moved and condensed where it gives off that heat. The build has a few distinct loops to make all of this happen. The gene...
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The New Phobos Martian Moon Rover that Weighs in at Only 15 Grams

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Although for many decades the planet Mars has been prodded, poked, driven upon, flown over and especially orbited by various spacecraft, landers and rovers sent over by a certain humanoid species on Earth, the two moons that orbit Mars have featured significantly more in science-fiction and video games than in scientific literature. This is now about to change when the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission launches on October 19th, which will include a sample return from Phobos. So far these two moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos – have only received a few cursory glances by passing spacecraft, leaving many fundamental questions surrounding their formation and composition very much open. With the MMX mission this should change dramatically, with this spacecraft intended to perform detailed measurements of both moons. In addition a rover – called Idefix – will perform a landing on Phobos for observations of its surface. This will be quite a feat as despite th...
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Making a New Mechanism for a Reciprocating Pencil Sharpener

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An engineer’s greatest tool is the writing utensil. Be it pen or pencil, we use them for everything from making diagrams to marking out cuts. But as with any practitioner of an art, we can tend to become rather particular about the details. [Choronva Engineering] is not different, and to that end set out to re-invent the pencil sharpener.  In this case, [Chronova]’s ideal pencil tip shape is a concave cone. This is a shape quite trivial to make by using a knife, but rather impossible with a traditional twisting motion. But what if one automatized the knife whittling motion? This is actually a very old idea, with examples dating back to at least 1910. In this example, the blade is guided along two tracks with a particular curvature to enable the concave cone. This is driven by a cam shaft connected to a little cranking mechanism. Initial tests showed the mechanism works quite well at producing a cutoff of the desired shape, but lacks a pencil rotation mechanism. CAD mockup ...
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