Category Archives: news

Radio MDZhB

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

If you have a shortwave receiver, tune it to 4625 kHz. You’ll hear something that on the surface sounds strange, but the reality is even stranger still. According to the BBC, the radio station broadcasts from two locations inside Russia — and has since 1982 — but no one claims ownership of the station, known as MDZhB. According to the BBC:

[For 35 years, MDZhB] has been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or

…read more

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Posted in news, numbers station, russian, spy, spy station | Leave a comment

Dedicated Button for Toggling Screens

Posted on August 5, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Anyone who regularly presents to an audience these days has known the pain of getting one’s laptop to work reliably with projection hardware. It’s all the more fraught with pain when you’re hopping around from venue to venue, trying desperately to get everything functioning on a tight schedule. [Seb] found that the magic keystrokes they used to deal with these issues no longer worked on the Macbook Pro Touchbar, and so a workaround was constructed in hardware.

The build itself is simple – an Adafruit Trinket serves as the brains, with a meaty 12mm tactile button used for input. The …read more

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Posted in Adafruit trinket, arduino, keyboard, keyboard emulation, macbook, news, presentation, screen, Trinket | Leave a comment

All the Hardware Badges of DEF CON 25

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Hardware is the future. There is no better proof of this than the hardware clans that have grown up around DEF CON, which in recent years has become known as Badgelife. I was first drawn to the custom hardware badges of the Whiskey Pirates at DC22 back in 2014. Hardware badges were being made by several groups at that time but that was mainly happening in isolation while this year the badge makers are in constant contact with each other.

A slack channel just for those working on their own DEF CON badges sprung up. This served as tech support, …read more

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Posted in badge, badge builders meetup, badgelife, DEF CON, defcon 25, hardware badge, news | Leave a comment

Arduino vs. Arduino: Musto Out, Banzi In

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Federico Musto, who until two days ago owned the largest part of Arduino AG has been bought out, having today been replaced by a combination of Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante.

This should bring to a close the saga that began with a fork where two companies called themselves “Arduino” and bizarrely continued for almost a year after the reconciliation of the two was announced. What remains today is one corporation called Arduino AG, now captained by Massimo Banzi as Chairman and CTO, and Fabio Violante as CEO.

Massimo Banzi was one of the original founders of Arduino and one …read more

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Posted in Arduino AG, Arduino Foundation, Arduino Hacks, Arduino vs arduino, Fabio Violante, federico musto, massimo banzi, news | Leave a comment

Ok Google. Navigate to the International Space Station

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

If you’d have asked most people a few decades ago if they wanted a picture of every street address in the world, they would have probably looked at you like you were crazy. But turns out that Google Street View is handy for several reasons. Sure, it is easy to check out the neighborhood around that cheap hotel before you book. But it is also a great way to visit places virtually. Now one of those places is the International Space Station (ISS).

[Thomas Pesquet] in a true hack used bungee cords and existing cameras to take panoramas of all …read more

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Posted in google, google street view, international space station, iss, nasa, news, space, street view | Leave a comment

UK To Register Multirotor fliers

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

The British government has shown a surprisingly light touch towards drone fliers in the face of the strident media demands for them to be banned following a series of reports of near-misses with other aircraft. That is about to change with reports of the announcement of a registration scheme for craft weighing over 250 g (about 9 oz). Details are still a bit sketchy, but it is reported that there will be a written test and an element of geofencing around sensitive locations.

Our friendly professional multirotor flier’s reaction is that the existing laws are clear enough, and that this …read more

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Posted in drone, drone hacks, drone registration, multirotor, news, uk | Leave a comment

RF Noise Floor Concerns From Both Sides Of The Atlantic

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Our feed is full of stories about the RF noise floor today, and with good reason. The ARRL reports on the International Amateur Radio Union Region 1 president, [Don Beattie, G3BJ] warning that in densely populated parts of Europe there is a danger that parts of the RF spectrum have become so swamped with noise as to be rendered unusable, while on the other side of the Atlantic we have RadioWorld reporting on similar problems facing AM broadcasting in the USA.

At issue are the usual suspects, interference from poorly shielded or suppressed domestic electronic devices, VDSL broadband, power-over-Ethernet, solar …read more

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Posted in emc, fcc, IARU, news, noise floor, radio hacks, rf noise | Leave a comment

London Gatwick Airport Closes Runway In Alleged Drone Strike

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

London is one of those cities with an identity problem when it comes to airports. There is no one London airport, instead a group of airports serve the city at various distances from it. London Gatwick is the second largest of these, and sits with its single runway in the Sussex countryside about 30 miles south of the city.

If you follow British news sources, you may have heard a little about Gatwick in the last couple of days. Its runway was closed for two short periods and a selection of flights were diverted, because of what is being reported …read more

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Posted in airport, drone, drone hacks, drone strike, Gatwick airport, multirotor, news | Leave a comment

Flash a Light Bulb, Win a Prize

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

How many geeks does it take to flash a lightbulb? Judging from the list of entries in the 2017 Flashing Light Prize, so far only seven. But we suspect Hackaday readers can add to that total.

The goal is almost as simple as possible: build something that can flash an incandescent light bulb for at least five minutes. The system actually has to power the bulb’s filament, so no mechanical shutters are allowed. Other than that, the sky is the limit — any voltage, any wattage, any frequency and duty cycle, and any circuit. Some of the obvious circuits, like …read more

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Posted in contests, flasher, incandescent, light bulb, multivibrator, news, oscillator | Leave a comment

A Goldmine Of Radio Shack Goodies Is Up For Auction

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Where did you buy the parts for your first electronic project? That’s a question likely to prompt a misty-eyed orgy of reminiscences from many Hackaday readers, if ever we have heard one. The chances are that if you are from North America or substantial parts of the English-speaking world, you bought them from a store that was part of the Radio Shack empire. These modestly sized stores in your local mall or shopping centre carried a unique mix of consumer electronics, CB radio, computers, and electronic components, and particularly in the days before the World Wide Web were one of …read more

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Posted in auction, misc hacks, news, radio shack, realistic, tandy, trs-80 | Leave a comment