Hackaday Europe 2026: Half Quad, Half Blimp: Test. Fly. Survive.

July 23, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

A great many drones out there, whether homebuilt or store-bought, follow the same basic format. Four motors, some kind of controller, and a lithium-polymer battery supplying the juice to keep everything in the air. It’s a format that produces a remarkably capable air vehicle, suitable for everything from high-speed camera work to urban search and rescue.

With that said, the format does have its limitations. [Suryansh Sharma] has been working on alternative designs for fancy and interesting drones that are half quadcopter and half blimp, and he came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Half Quad, Half Blimp: Test. Fly. Survive.” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 876: There Is No Money Fairy

July 22, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Michael Meeks about Collabora! What’s the origin story in this consulting company, why do they have an outstanding office suite, and where is the world headed to accomplish digital sovereignty? Watch to find out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 876: There Is No Money Fairy” →

Compile Here, Run Everywhere: Crosstool-Ng

July 22, 2026 by Al Williams 7 Comments

In a recent post, I mentioned that I wanted to build some tools for a stripped-down Linux running on a 3D printer with a MIPS CPU. I had two options: build a toolchain to cross-compile, or use Zig, which, in theory, has built-in toolchains for MIPS. I had to jump through hoops to get Zig to work, and I did mention Crosstool-Ng, so you might wonder why I didn’t start there. Turns out, it had its own set of hoops to work through.

Continue reading “Compile Here, Run Everywhere: Crosstool-Ng” →

Giving Resin 3D Printers Another Shot After Six Years

July 21, 2026 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

My initial experience with a 3D printer came in 2020, when I got access to a buddy’s Creality LD-002R SLA printer. This was one of those awkward transition phases for SLA printers, where inefficient RGB LCDs finally got replaced by monochrome LCD panels, thus massively reducing the required exposure time and increasing the LCD panel’s lifespan.

The closely related Creality LD-002H is a monochrome SLA printer, but as this wasn’t the one that this friend opted for we had to learn the ropes on this more old-school printer. In terms of specifications this meant a build volume of 119 mm x 65 mm x 160 mm to play with and a claimed 26.1 µm resolution. Despite some struggles along the way, this machine churned out impressively high levels of detail with whatever cheap resin we threw at it, and even the post-printing processing became easy once we added a flex plate to the build plate and tweaked the cleaning and curing steps.

Despite all these positives, we both drifted away from resin printing, mostly due to the still messy and smelly printing process. FDM printers seemed like a better deal, especially after said buddy got his mittens on a used IDEX FDM printer. I would eventually go through a rather loathsome Creality Ender V2 experience before ending up with my current-day Elegoo Neptune 4, and resin printing seemed to be a thing of the past for me. Until recently, that is.

Continue reading “Giving Resin 3D Printers Another Shot After Six Years” →

Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

July 20, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 10 Comments

There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel” →

Hackaday Links: July 19, 2026

July 19, 2026 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

We’ll start this week off by giving our congratulations to Skyroot Aerospace of India for successfully launching the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket yesterday. The company’s Vikram-1 booster stands 24 m (79 ft) tall and uses a somewhat unusual four-stage arrangement, with the first three stages using solid propellant and the final liquid-fueled stage being responsible for putting the payload into a precise orbit. With this successful launch, India becomes only the third country in the world with a private company capable of performing orbital launches.

Generally, the rocket should be moving when the countdown hits zero.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have SpaceX’s prototype Starship, which elected not to leave Earth during a last-second (literally) launch termination on Thursday. Aborted launches are, of course, nothing new in the world of rocketry, especially when dealing with an in-development vehicle that has 33 engines that need to fire up at the same moment before it can leave the pad. But this dramatic abort was unique as it was the first time lift-off of the massive 124.4 meter (408 ft) rocket had been called off when the engines were already running.

Onboard systems took advantage of the very narrow window between the time the Raptor engines are switched on and the rocket actually leaves the launchpad to decide that it was not a good day to visit space after all. Word from SpaceX is that two of the Raptor engines on the first stage will be replaced and that they should be ready to make another launch attempt sometime this upcoming week.

While getting rockets off the ground is never easy, one thing that seems to have no trouble going up is the price of gasoline. Even still, Americans seem largely uninterested in electric vehicles, or at the very least, the slate of EVs that are currently available to them — especially now that the $7,500 federal tax credit has ended. Yesterday, TechCrunch ran an article about all the EVs that have exited the US market over the last year due to stagnant sales or import difficulties, and it’s quite a list.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 19, 2026” →

Simple Games From A Simpler Time

July 18, 2026 by Elliot Williams 32 Comments

Modern video games are nothing short of amazing. My son and I were playing through the one of the latest Zeldas, which involve a mix of combat and puzzle-solving that’s pretty much the hallmark of the franchise. But the most recent open-world Zelda is simply massive. Made by around 1,000 people at a development expense of $150,000,000, it takes probably 60-80 hours to play through if you’re not rushing, and more if you’re taking it easy. It has layers of game mechanics, and worlds in the sky, on land, and underground. It’s big in every way.

Contrast the games of my youth, which were a lot smaller. Written by a pair of people or maybe a handful, with playtimes in the single-digit hours, and of course fitting in the limited computing resources of the time. But the low-stakes nature of the early phases of the industry meant that software developers could take risks, and many of the games were consequently kinda idiosyncratic in this more innocent time.

I think there’s something to be said for small games. They don’t require a lifestyle commitment just to get through. They can still be fun, without taking all of your time. And honestly, when you’re done with a game quickly, you have more time for other stuff. Granted, some of this spirit lives on in the small indie games of today, but even so, game developers have the big studios’ products in the backs of their minds when they are working on their smaller oeuvres.

We were talking about preserving old games for posterity around Hackaday and on the podcast, and our conversations reminded me of a couple of educational games that, despite their rudimentary graphics, are still pretty good today. Both were electronics related, and both are still playable today thanks to efforts on emulation and software preservation. To get a feel for the 1980’s, give Rocky’s Boots a try. (I like the TRS-80 Color Computer version the best, but that may just be nostalgia.) Most of you grownups out there will get through it in an hour or so.

And if you want a challenge, try Rocky’s harder sequel: Robot Odyssey. If you already have a background in digital circuits, you’ll find it doable. Younger me hit a wall about two-thirds of the way through.

Both of these games stick with me because they taught me something, but also because they were simply quirky in a way that a game can only be when it’s written by a small team of folks who are just having fun programming it. If you pitched “a puzzle game about a raccoon who builds logic circuits to activate robot boots”, the boardroom would look at you like you’re out of your mind. But it’s just exactly the quirkiness and individuality of some of these early games that I cherish the most.

If you find yourself knee-deep in an endless modern game, take a side-quest off into a more naive time, and you’ll appreciate why people are putting efforts into archiving them.