In the early days of aviation, pilots or their navigators used a plethora of tools to solve common navigation and piloting problems. There was definitely a need for some kind of computing aid that could replace slide rules, tables, and tedious dead-reckoning computations. This would become even more important during World War II, when there was a massive push to quickly train young men to be pilots.
The same, but different. A Pickett slide rule (top) and an E6B slide rule (bottom). (Own Work).
Today, we’d whip up some sort of computer device, but in the 1930s, computers weren’t anything you’d cram on a plane, even if they’d had any. For example, the Mark 1 Fire Control Computer during WW2 was 3,000 pounds of gears and motors.

The computer is made to answer flight questions like “how many pounds of fuel do I need for another hour of flying time?” or “How do I adjust my course if I have a particular crosswind?”

History

There were a rash of flight computers starting in the 1920s that were essentially specialized slide rules. The most popular one appeared in the late 1930s. Philip Dalton’s circular slide rule was cheap to produce and easy to use. As you’ll see, it is more than just an ordinary slide rule. Keep in mind, these were not computers in the sense we think of today. They were simple slide rules that easily did specialized math useful to pilots.

Dalton actually developed a number of computers. The popular Model B appeared in 1933, and there were refinements leading to additional models. The Mark VII was very popular. Even Fred Noonan, Amelia Earhart’s navigator, used a Mark VII.
A metal E6B (public domain).
Dalton thought the Mark VII was clunky and developed a way to do vector calculations using an endless belt inside the computer. This proved to expensive to make, so he created a flat wind computer and put, essentially, the Model B on the other side. While he called this the Model H, the Army called it the E6A.

In 1938, the Army Air Corps asked for a few minor changes and adopted the computer as the E6B, although pilots often call it the “whiz wheel” or the “Dalton Dead Reckoning Computer.” Oddly enough, some pilots still swear by the E6B, and flight schools sometimes make you learn them because they help you develop a feel for the math you don’t get with a calculator.

Sadly, Dalton died in a plane crash with a student pilot in 1941. P.V.H. Weems, a well-known navigator and Fred Noonan’s mentor, carried on the work of improving the E6B.

Besides, they are almost a perfect backup computer. Small, light, cheap, not prone to breaking, and they need no power. Some are made of cardboard, some of metal, and others of plastic. Wartime E6Bs were on a plastic that glowed under cockpit illumination. Later, there would be electronic or software E6Bs (see the video below), but a real whiz wheel is something you can hold in your hand, and you never have to change the battery.

youtube.com/embed/tAsOhbjDp7U?…

Not Just a Slide Rule

The front of the E6B is, essentially, a circular slide rule. What makes it unique, though, is that it has special scales and markings to deal with conversions of things like nautical miles or knots. Even the arrangement of the scales work to make a pilot’s life easier.

For example, the top of the wheel is a big mark that represents 60. Why? Because there are 60 minutes in an hour, and this makes it easy to compute things like pounds of fuel per hour.

It also lets you convert things like knots to nautical miles easily because the conversion factors are marked already.

If you know how to use a slide rule, you are almost immediately proficient on the front side of an E6B. Note that the sliding part of the computer is all about the wind computer (see below). All the calculation parts are just on the wheel, like a traditional circular slide rule.

The Back Side

The back side is a graphical vector solver for wind problems. You essentially use it to plot a wind triangle. You set the wind vector, the aircraft velocity vector, and you can read off the ground track. By moving things around, you can find your groundspeed, your wind correction angle, or your heading.On some E6Bs, you have to flip the slide to do low-speed or high-speed wind problems.

For an example wind problem, consider if you have wind at 200 degrees at 10 knots. Your true course is 150 degrees, and your true air speed is 130 knots. You would like to compute your ground speed, your true heading, and the wind correction angle.

One reason that the E6B remains useful for training is that it helps you develop intuition that is hard to get from a bunch of numbers on a calculator’s LEDs. You get a feel for how much wind will deflect your track 10 degrees, for example.

You can also use the E6B in reverse. If your groundspeed isn’t what you expect, you might set up the problem to put in your true parameters and solve for what the wind must be to make that result correct.

Sure, with GPS, you probably don’t need to figure out whether you have enough fuel to make it to another airport. But without GPS and a real computer, the E6B can do those things just fine.

Learning the E6B

If you actually want to learn how to use the E6B, we suggest watching a YouTube video. There are some short videos, and at least one that has 14 different videos. The good news is that the E6B hasn’t changed in many years, so any video you find should be just fine.

We like [Aviation Theory’s] two videos, which are worth watching (see part 1, below).

youtube.com/embed/FxkM-z-6b5k?…

If you want to follow along and don’t have an E6B, you can try one virtually in your browser. Or, pick one up. The cardboard ones are fairly inexpensive and widely available.

The Legacy of the E6B

While the E6B isn’t the essential kit it once was, it is still a valuable aid for pilots. It is also a great example of how to turn an ordinary slide rule into something specialized.

We have a feeling Gene Roddenberry, an avid pilot, was very familiar with the E6B. He even thought they’d still use them in the 23rd century, as you can see in the video clip below.

youtube.com/embed/V1nKBrkPUeA?…

You can also catch a glimpse of these in old US Army Air Corps films like the one below (about the 14-minute mark), although we couldn’t find any training specifically for the E6-B that survived.

youtube.com/embed/tEjJIhDanEY?…

If you like old analog computers, read [Nicola Marras’] book. Maybe Spock would have preferred a Star Trekulator.

[Featured image: “E6b-slide-rule” by [Duke]

hackaday.com/2026/03/23/the-ze…

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IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and I'm not sure about you, but the concept of putting data centers in space — outlined by Elon Musk over the weekend via his so-called 'Terafab' project — doesn't feel like a top priority with all that's going on in the world.

— Europeans want to wean themselves off US tech. Many just don't think it's a realistic option, according to polling from YouGov.

— Social media is awash with AI-generated content about the US/Israeli-Iran conflict. Companies need to do better at flagging and removing these posts.

— About 20 percent of Americans have yet to make up their mind about how data centers will affect their daily lives.

Let's get started:

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH FOR EUROPE'S DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY AMBITIONS

THERE'S A NEW VIBE TAKING SHAPE IN MANY European capitals when it comes to digital sovereignty. Once it was mostly French officials that spoke of decoupling from the likes of Amazon and Google. Now, policymakers and politicians in other European Union countries openly talk about paring back dependencies on companies that are perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be leaning too much into current United States foreign policy.

That comes in the form of national governments, like the Netherland's newly-formed coalition, seeking to replace services from Silicon Valley with those from European/national competitors. It comes in the form of billions of dollars of EU taxpayers' money earmarked for Continent-wide AI infrastructure to boost economic growth — albeit almost all of this hardware is powered by US-designed chips. It comes in the form of nascent projects like the Eurosky social media network, whose tagline is "Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe."

Taken together, it represents a hardening of political resolve (though mostly in Western European countries) at a time of deteriorating transatlantic relations, an increase in geopolitical competition around artificial intelligence, and unanswered questions about who should ultimately control the digital services upon which we all now rely.

Yet is such policymaking chatter matched by what the average European believes? That's a fundamental question that often goes unanswered. So I teamed up again with YouGov, the polling company, to find out.

**A message from Meta** On 24 March, Meta, with eco and EssilorLuxottica as supporting partners, will host The Brussels AI Symposium featuring European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, US Ambassador to the European Union Andrew Puzder and some of Europe’s foremost innovators. Does Europe have what it takes to seize the AI opportunity? Learn more here. **

In early March, the firm ran a series of digital sovereignty questions across the EU's largest countries, by population. That includes Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and Poland, respectively. The survey covered just over 1,000 respondents per jurisdiction. The questions focused on 1) Which digital services these individuals currently used, and where these companies were headquartered; 2) Whether people had considered switching from US to European options; 3) If respondents thought it would be a good idea to shift toward EU alternatives; and 4) Was such a "rip-and-replace" strategy realistic?

I come bearing both good news and bad news — for either side of the digital sovereignty debate.

Let's start off with the current vibe among Europe's largest countries.

Overall, roughly 62 percent of those surveyed said it was a good idea for both European governments and businesses to replace US data storage, video conferencing and digital payment systems with those headquartered in the 27-country bloc. (See chart below). Italy had the highest level of support (67 percent), followed by Germany (65 percent); Spain (64 percent); and France (58 percent).

One point of caution. There was a significant difference between the four Western European countries and Poland. In the Eastern European country, only 49 percent of respondents said it was a good idea — highlighting a reticence to give up American tech services in a country whose population remains more aligned with the US compared to other EU countries. Interestingly, though, 38 percent of Poles responded "don't know" to YouGov's question. That means a sizable minority had yet to make up their mind (or weren't clued up on the issue to pass judgement.)

Source: YouGov European Political Monthly Survey

So that's the case for the prosecution. A significant percent of citizens in Europe's largest countries, by population, support digital policymaking to replace American tech with European alternatives. Job done. Case closed.

And yet.

Thanks for reading Digital Politics. If you've been forwarded this newsletter (and like what you've read), please sign up here. For those already subscribed, reach out on digitalpolitics@protonmail.com

YouGov then asked a follow-up question: how realistic was it for European governments and businesses to replace US digital services with those from Europe? This goes directly to the vibe question. People may want greater digital sovereignty. But do they think it's achievable?

That's where the pendulum shifted away from Europe's more muscular policymaking. Overall, 41 percent of respondents across all 5 countries said it would not be realistic to go "full European" when it came to digital services. That compared with 40 percent of people who said it was realistic, and a further 19 percent of poll respondents who didn't know.

Again, the country-by-country differences (see chart below) were illustrative. In Germany, Europe's largest economy, skepticism about replacing US tech ran at 51 percent. In France and Poland, that figure fell to 32 percent, respectively, while over 40 percent of respondents in each country said it would be realistic to shift from American providers to those from the bloc.

Source: YouGov European Political Monthly Survey

This skepticism — in which 41 percent of those surveyed said they didn't believe a digital replacement strategy for US tech was realistic — should raise red flags for EU leaders now openly calling for such a move. Yes, 40 percent of respondents said this US-to-Europe tech shift was possible. But when the majority (albeit only just) don't think it's achievable, you run into a perception gap that needs to be filled before pushing ahead with a potentially generational change in the types of digital services across the Continent.

Another point was important via YouGov's polling. Roughly a quarter of people in all five countries didn't know whether it was a good idea or realistic to change from US to European services. That represented a significant education gap between policymakers and citizens, about 25 percent of which were not sufficiently aware of the issues to make a judgement via the Continent-wide survey.

Let's give an example of why this is a problem.

France currently wants to replaceUS videoconferencing services like Zoom and Microsoft's Teams with local alternatives by 2027, in part for digital sovereignty reasons. Yet when asked about this policy via YouGov's survey, 89 percent of French respondents had heard little or nothing about the proposals. That's a failure on the part of Paris to communicate about why it was pursuing a "Made in France" strategy with a population, at least on paper, open to shifting toward more European tech services.

This "I don't know" minority is where the real battle around digital sovereignty resides. Yes, the most digital-literate citizens (some of whom, I'm presuming, are reading this newsletter) already know which side of the debate they are on. Those positions are entrenched. Yet the one-in-four Europeans who have yet to make up their mind are likely open to persuasion — either for/against a shift away from US tech.

That represents a policy communication challenge for European lawmakers, as well as US/EU tech firms seeking to peddle their wares across the Continent. Whoever can convince the 25 percent of the 27-country bloc's citizens that it's a good or bad idea to reduce the Continent's current dependence on US tech will likely carry the day in the battle around digital sovereignty.

Chart of the Week

IN CASE YOU HAD MISSED IT, there's a data center boom underway across the US. As tech giants vie for AI dominance, they are building out this energy-hungry infrastructure faster than you can say 'large language model.'

But a significant percentage of Americans have yet to make up their mind if these data centers are good for them, the economy, and the environment, respectively.

Across five areas that the Pew Research Center polled earlier this year, around one-in-five Americans were not sure on the impact of this fast-growing AI-enabling infrastructure.
Source: Pew Research Center

AI SLOP AND THE FOG OF WAR

ON THE EVE OF THE TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY of Hamas militants attacking Israel in 2023, I wrote this about how social media companies were not doing enough to protect users from war-related content, propaganda and illegal content. That was as true for the Israeli-Hamas conflict as it was for the more than 60 other active state-based war zones worldwide.

Fast forward five months, and this problem has been turned up to 11 in the ongoing Middle East conflict. AI-generated videos and images — either depicting attacks against Iran, Israel or other parts of the Middle East — are rife on the likes of X, Facebook, and Instagram. Some of this AI-powered content comes from official government sources (including from the White House's social media accounts.) Other material is created by click-bait merchants seeking to monetize people's views via online advertising.

But beyond why people are posting such AI-generated material, the key question is how social media giants — all of which are using their own large language models to oversee what is posted on these global networks — are failing to catch what is now an avalanche of AI slop directed at the ongoing war in the Middle East.

This was not how it was supposed to be.

**A message from Meta** On 24 March, Meta with eco — the Association of the Internet Industry — and EssilorLuxottica as supporting partners, will host The Brussels AI Symposium.

The event will feature European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, Andrew Puzder,US Ambassador to the European Union and leading European innovators to discuss what it takes for Europe to seize the AI opportunity. The Symposium serves as a critical conversation about how Europe can foster innovation and build on its strengths. Learn more about the event here.

Two years ago, many of these tech firms committed themselves to (albeit voluntary) standards known as the AI Election Accords. Yes, these pledges were linked to that year's election-palooza worldwide. But companies from X and OpenAI to Anthropic to Google said they would develop/implement tech to "mitigate risks" related to deceptive AI election content; find and address such content on their platforms; and provide greater transparency to the public about how they went about those efforts.

A lot has changed between 2024 and 2026. These (again, voluntary) commitments were also specifically drafted around elections, not conflicts. But the pledges should be taken as a benchmark for company commitments to combat AI-generated harmful content — be that related to how people vote or how state-based conflicts play out worldwide.

On those markers, the companies are failing.

There are multiple reasons why, and it's not all down to a failure of social media giants to effectively police their networks.

The ability to produce lifelike AI slop is a lot better, in March 2026, than it was in February, 2024 when the AI Election Accords were signed. The use of such techniques by state-based actors also complicates responses for companies seeking to navigate the increasingly complex geopolitical world of digital policymaking. The sheer volume of AI-powered posts — which, collectively, have garnered hundreds of millions of views across all platforms related to the most-recent Middle East conflict — makes any comprehensive response a mere whack-a-mole operation.

But it's also true that tech firms are not doing enough.

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After AI-generated fake conflict videos went viral on X, for instance, the company said it would suspend any account involved in such dissemination from its creator revenue sharing program for 90 days. "This will be flagged to us by any post with a Community Note or if the content contains meta data (or other signals) from generative AI tools," Nikita Bier, the company's head of product, wrote on X. That's a slap on the wrist for content that, at its worst, can foment sectarianism and offline attacks in what is already an incredibly hostile environment.

Then there's Meta. On March 10, the Oversight Board, or group of outside experts (which, to be clear, is funded by the tech giant) posted recommendations on how the company should handle "deceptive AI during conflicts." The suggestions — which, under the Oversight Board structure, are only voluntary — were linked to a binding ruling on Meta related to an AI-generated post during last summer's 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran.

Back story on that ruling: a video posted on Facebook depicted significant damage to an Israeli city. It garnered more than 700,000 views despite a fact-checking organization debunking the content (via an identical post on TikTok) as AI-generated. Several Facebook users appealed to Meta for the post to be removed. The company, however, said the content didn't violate its policies, and it didn't require a label saying the video was AI generated.

The Oversight Board said this month that the decision was wrong.Meta said it would comply with that ruling (but only on that individual post, per the outside group's mandate) within 7 days.

"Social media platforms need to provide automated, technical and human-led solutions to limit harmful impacts of AI content intended to deceive, while upholding people’s freedom of expression," said the Oversight Board. Its recommendations included: 1) improved standards for determining how all online content was created; 2) new tools to detect AI-generated material; 3) greater human content moderation, including the use of outside fact-checkers and internal trust and safety teams.

At a time of corporate retrenchment from such activities (and not just from Meta), such recommendations will likely fall on deaf ears. Conflict-driven AI slop will continue to go viral — even as social media giants try, often with reduced resources, to combat it.

As the Middle East conflict rages on, social media increasingly is not a trusted place to understand what is going on in the world (editor's note: for that, read newspapers.) People are confused about what they see online. They often can not legitimately tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. Without a significant rethink of how that trust can be rebuilt, the utility of social media as a source for news (more than 50 percent of Americans still use it for that purpose) is now in question.

What I'm reading:

— If you're wondering about my sponsorship policy, please check out my advertising ethics statement here. Get in touch on digitalpolitics@protonmail.com if you have questions.

— Courtney Radsch explains the political pressures coming from the White House on Europe's attempts to implement its online safety regime. More here.

— The European Democracy Shield centralizes control, maintains officials' gatekeeping powers and institutionalizes a top-down approach to media literacy, according to Paul McCarthy for the Heritage Foundation.

— The level of democracy across Western Europe and North America is at its lowest level in over 50 years, primarily due to autocratic tendencies in the US, based on an annual survey from Varieties of Democracy.

— The Christchurch Call Foundation published results of a survey into how best to study social media algorithms and the dissemination of terrorist and violent extremist content. More here.

— As the United Kingdom mulls a potential kids social media ban, the country's online safety regulator reminded tech firms of their obligations to keep children under 13-years-old off their platforms. More here.

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

SUPPORTED BY

IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and I'm not sure about you, but the concept of putting data centers in space — outlined by Elon Musk over the weekend via his so-called 'Terafab' project —doesn't feel like a top priority with all that's going on in the world.

— Europeans want to wean themselves off US tech. Many just don't think it's a realistic option, according to polling from YouGov.

— Social media is awash with AI-generated content about the US/Israeli-Iran conflict. Companies need to do better at flagging and removing these posts.

— About 20 percent of Americans have yet to make up their mind about how data centers will affect their daily lives.

Let's get started:

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

Stream decks are pretty useful in all kinds of contexts, but commercial models can feel a bit pricy for what is effectively a bunch of buttons. [WhiskeyTangoHotel] has whipped up one of their own on the cheap using some readily available parts.

The build came about due to the use of Stream Decks as a common way to control the Flex-6400 software-defined radio. [WhiskeyTangoHotel] figured that using a full-priced Elgato Stream Deck was overkill for this purpose, and that a cheaper interface could be put together for less. Enter the Cheap Yellow Display—a combination of the ESP32 microcontroller with a 2.8-inch touchscreen LCD. It was simple enough to code the device such that it had four big touch buttons to control RIT-, RIT+, XIT-, and XIT+ on the Flex-6400. Plus, with the ESP32 having WiFi onboard, it’s able to control the radio wirelessly—you just need to feed the unit 5 volts, and you’re up and running.

[WhiskeyTangoHotel] set this unit up specifically to control a radio, but you don’t have to feel limited in that regard. The ESP32 is flexible enough that you could have it control just about anything with a bit of different code. We’ve featured more flexible designs along these lines before! Video after the break.

youtube.com/embed/L_q7cIw0ddQ?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/23/stream…

One of the coolest things about old hi-fi hardware is that it often came with flickety needles that danced with the audio level. You can still buy these if you want, or you can simulate the same look on a screen, as [mircemk] demonstrates.

It isn’t [mircemk]’s first rodeo in this regard. An earlier project involved creating simulated VU meters on round displays, but they were somewhat limited. Using the Adafruit GFX library on an ESP32 netted a working setup, but it was jerky and very jagged and digital-looking. It was more akin to a fake needle display running on an 8-bit computer than something that looked like a real vintage VU meter.

[mircemk] didn’t give up and figured the ESP32 microcontroller and GC9A01 round display could surely deliver better results. The trick was to leverage the LVGL graphics library instead, along with the Squarelinestudio UI editor. The library was able to display far richer graphics that look like an actual vintage VU meter, even appearing glowing and backlit like the real thing. The moving needle animates far more smoothly as well, pulsing with the music in a way that feels far more realistic compared to the earlier attempt.

It’s nice to see this simple project revisited and so boldly improved just a year later. If you’re looking to implement real-looking gauges while retaining the flexibility of a small LCD screen, you might like to try the LVGL library for yourself. With that said, sometimes you just can’t beat the real analog gauges themselves. Video after the break.

youtube.com/embed/K_c22POfwTg?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/23/better…

An MRI scan is never a pleasant occasion – even if you aren’t worried about the outcome, lying still in a confined, noisy space for long periods of time is at best an irksome experience. For hearing protection and to ameliorate boredom or claustrophobia, the patient wears headphones. Since magnets and wires can’t be used inside an MRI machine, the headphones have to literally pipe the sound in through tubes, which gives them poor sound quality and reduces the amount of noise they can block. [SomethingAboutScience], however, thinks that photoacoustic speakers could improve on these, and built some to demonstrate.

These speakers use the photoacoustic effect, which is mostly caused by surface heating when exposed to an intense light, then transferring the heat to the surrounding air, which expands. If the surface can transfer heat to the air quickly enough, and if the light source is modulated quickly, the rapid expansions and contractions in the surrounding air create sound waves. As a test, [SomethingAboutScience] shone a modulated 5-Watt laser on a piece of gold leaf, which produced recognizable music.

Gold leaf works because it absorbs blue light well and is thin enough to transfer heat to the air quickly. To cut out the absorbing surface, [SomethingAboutScience] also shone the laser directly into orange nitrogen dioxide gas, which produced a somewhat cleaner sound (in a purely auditory sense; nitrogen dioxide is quite dangerous, and calling it “a little toxic” is an understatement). Soot-coated glass also worked rather well, though a soot-coated glass smoking pipe didn’t provide the desired acoustics. He also 3D-printed an earphone shape with a gold leaf-lined cavity inside it, then used a fibre-optic cable to direct the laser light into it. We would be personally reluctant to couple a 5-Watt laser into a reflective cavity centimeters from our eardrums, but it didn’t appear to damage its surroundings.

We’ve seen the photoacoustic effect used before to perform long-range, almost silent command injection to voice assistants. It’s also possible to use lower-power lasers and beam sound directly into people’s ears.

youtube.com/embed/K4LKiJKNsZc?…

Thanks to [Marble] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/03/22/buildi…

The 3DFX Voodoo was not the first dedicated 3D graphics chipset by any means, but it became the favourite for gamers among the early mass-market GPUs. It would be found on a 3D-processing-only PCI card that sat on the feature connector of your SVGA card. The Voodoo took any game that supported its Glide API into the world of (for the time) smooth and beautiful 3D. They’re worth a bit now, but if you don’t fancy forking out for mid-’90s silicon in 2026, there’s another option. [Francisco Ayala Le Brun] has implemented the 3DFX Voodoo 1 in SpinalHDL for FPGAs.

The write-up goes into the Voodoo’s architecture. Where the parts of a modern GPU are programmable for the various functions it can do, in this part they are dedicated hardware functions for the various graphics tricks the chip can perform. Implementing such an architecture on an FPGA led to bugs and timing problems, and the write-up deals with that in detail.

The whole thing can be found in a GitHub repository if you’re curious, and is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in 1990s retrocomputing. 3DFX themselves would eventually be swallowed by Nvidia, a rival whose offerings would overtake them at the end of the ’90s, but they still represent a somewhat special moment. Don’t forget, if you have the real thing, you can probably upgrade its memory.

Header image: Konstantin Lanzet, GFDL.

hackaday.com/2026/03/22/the-3d…

On Friday, Reuters reported that Amazon is going to try to get into the smartphone game…again. The Fire Phone was perhaps Amazon’s biggest commercial misstep, and was only on the market for about a year before it was discontinued in the summer of 2015. But now industry sources are saying that a new phone code-named “Transformer” is in the works from the e-commerce giant.

At this point, there’s no word on how much the phone would cost or when it would hit the market. The only information Reuters was able to squeeze out of their contacts was that the device would feature AI heavily. Real shocker there — anyone with an Echo device in their kitchen could tell you that Amazon is desperate to get you talking to their gadgets, presumably so they can convince you to buy something. While a smartphone with even more AI features we didn’t ask for certainly won’t be on our Wish List, if history is any indicator, we might be able to pick these things up cheap on the second-hand market.

On the subject of AI screwing everything up, earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that The New York Times had started blocking the Internet Archive’s crawlers, citing concerns over their content being scraped up by bots for training data. The EFF likens this to a newspaper asking libraries to stop storing copies of their old editions, and warns that in an era where most people get their news via the Internet, not having an archived copy of sites like The Times will put holes in the digital record. They also point out that mirroring web pages for the purposes of making them more easily searchable is a widely accepted practice (ask Google) and has been legally recognized as fair use in court.

Assuming we take the NYT’s side of the story at face value, there’s a tiny part of our cold robotic heart that feels some sympathy for them. Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed some suspicious activity that we believe to be bots siphoning up content from the blog and Hackaday.io, and it’s resulted in a few technical headaches for us. On the other hand, what’s Hackaday here for if not to share information? Surely the same could be said for any newspaper, be it the local rag or The New York Times. If a chatbot learning some new phrases from us is the cost of doing business in 2026, so be it. Can’t stop the signal.

Switching gears to the world of aerospace, NASA’s X-59 supersonic research aircraft had to abort a test flight on Friday after just nine minutes in the air. The plane is designed to demonstrate techniques which promise to reduce or eliminate the sonic booms heard on the ground during supersonic flight, and is currently being put through its paces at Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
NASA’s very pointy X-59 aims to make supersonic flight more commercially viable.
The space agency hasn’t clarified exactly what the issue was, but after the pilot saw a warning indicator in the cockpit, the decision was made to end the flight early so engineers could take a look at the problem. Given that the X-59 went on to make an uneventful landing, it sounds like things weren’t too dire. Hopefully, that means it won’t be long before the sleek experimental aircraft is back in the air.

Friday also saw the towering Space Launch System rocket return to the launch pad ahead of a potential April 1st (no, really) liftoff for Artemis II. There are about a million things that could further delay the mission, from technical issues to suspicious looking cloud formations over Cape Canaveral, but we’re certainly in the final stretch now. The 10-day mission will see four astronauts run through a packed schedule of experiments and demonstrations as they become the first humans to swing by the Moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

Finally, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force has released a video taken by a drone flying around their collection of Cold War era aircraft. Seasoned FPV pilots will probably notice it’s not the most technically impressive flight out there, but it does provide some viewpoints that simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise. It’s also a bit surreal to see these aircraft, once the absolute state-of-the-art and developed at an unimaginable cost, collecting dust while a $300 drone that packs in higher resolution optics and far more processing power literally flies circles around them.

youtube.com/embed/rXvVzocq358?…

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.

hackaday.com/2026/03/22/hackad…

Odds are, you’ve taken pills before; it’s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several this morning. Whenever you do, you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer: you’re trusting that they’ve put in the specific active ingredients in the dosage listed on the package. Alas, given the world we live in, that doesn’t always happen. Double-checking actual concentrations requires expensive lab equipment like gas chromatography. It turns out checking for counterfeit pills is easier than you’d think, thanks to a technique called Disintegration Fingerprinting.

The raw voltage signal from the sensor is stored as a “disintegration fingerprint” of particles detected per minute.
It’s delightfully simple: all you need is a clear plastic cup, a stir plate, and a handful of electronic components — namely, a microcontroller, a servo, and an IR line-following sensor. You’ve probably played with just such a sensor: the cheap ones that are a matched pair of LED and photodetector. It works like this: the plastic cup, filled with water, sits upon the stir plate. To start the device, you turn on the stir plate and actuate the servo to drop the pill in the water. The microcontroller then begins recording the signal from the photo-diode. As the pill breaks up and/or dissolves in the water, the swirling bits are going to reflect light from the IR LED. That reflectance signal over time is the Disintegration Fingerprint (DF), and it’s surprisingly effective at catching fakes according to the authors of the paper linked above. Out of 32 different drug products, the technique worked on 90% of them, and was even able to distinguish between generic and brand-name versions of the same drug.

Of course, you do need a known-good sample to generate a trustworthy fingerprint, and there’s that pesky 10% of products the technique doesn’t work on, but this seems like a great way to add some last-mile QA/QC to the drug distribution chain, particularly in low and middle-income countries where counterfeit drugs are a big problem.

We’ve featured pill-identifiers before, but machine vision is going to be much more easily fooled by counterfeits than this method. If your problem isn’t worrying that your pills are fake, but forgetting to take them, we’ve had projects to help with that, too.

Thanks to [Zorch] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/03/22/iding-…

Thermal energy storage is pretty great, as phase-change energy storage is very consistent with its energy output over time, unlike chemical batteries. You also get your pick from a wide range of materials that you can either heat up or cool down to store energy. Here, the selection is mostly dependent on how you wish to use that energy at a later date. [Hyperspace Pirate] is mostly interested in cooling down a house, on account of living in Florida.

As can be seen in the top image, the basic setup is pretty straightforward. PV solar power charges a battery until it’s fully charged. Then an MCU triggers a relay on the AC inverter, which then starts the cooling compressor on the water reservoir. This proceeds to phase change the water from a liquid into ice. The process can later be reversed, which will draw thermal energy out of the surrounding air and thus provide cooling.

Although water is not the most interesting substance to pick for the
The cool side of the thermal storage system, chilling a car. (Credit: Hyperspace Pirate, YouTube)
thermal energy storage, it can provide 1 kWh of cooling power in 10.8 kg, or 92.8 kWh in a mere m³. This makes it much more compact as well as cheaper than chemical storage using batteries.

After charging the main compressor loop with R600 (N-butane), the system is trialed with a small PV solar array that manages to freeze the entire bucket of water. Courtesy of insulation, it’s kept that way for a few days, giving plenty of time for the separate glycol-filled loop to dump thermal energy into it and push cold air into the surrounding environment. This prototype managed to cool down [Hyperspace Pirate]’s car in just two hours, which is good enough for a proof-of-concept.

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hackaday.com/2026/03/22/storin…

The 8051 was an 8-bit Harvard-architecture microcontroller first put out by Intel in 1980. They’ve since discontinued that line, but it lives on in the low-cost STC8 family of chips, which is especially popular in Asia. They’re cheap as, well, chips — under 1$ — but lack compatibility with modern toolchains. If you’re happy with C, then you’re fine, but if you want to plus-plus it up and use all those handy-dandy shortcuts provided by the Arduino ecosystem, you’re out of luck. Or rather, you were, until [Bùi Trịnh Thế Viên] aka [thevien257] came up with a workaround.

The workaround is delightfully Hack-y. One could, conceivably, port a compiler for Arduino’s Wiring to the 8051, but that’s not what [Viên] did, probably because that would be a lot of work. There isn’t even a truly modern toolchain to put plain C on this chip. Instead, [Viên] started with rv51, a RISC-V emulator written in 8051 assembly language by [cryozap]. RISC-V is a lot easier to work with and, frankly, a more useful skill to build up.

Now emulation does come with a cost: 8kB of flash memory and a 100x to 1000x slowdown in the emulated application code. For that reason, anything timing critical, like interrupts, should probably be handled the old-fashioned way. He’s targeting the STC8H8K64U specifically, so if you happen to have other STC8-based dev boards lying around, you’ll have some extra work ahead of you.

Of course, you can get ultra-cheap microcontrollers that are natively RISC V already– and they’re good enough to act as microcomputers of the era the 8051 hails from, so this hack is likely going to stay fairly niche. Still, if you’re in that niche, teaching an 8051 to speak RISC might be a handy trick to have in your back pocket.

hackaday.com/2026/03/22/arduin…

Although the RTL-SDR is cheap, accessible, and capable enough for many projects, it does have some important limitations. In particular, its bandwidth is limited to about 3.2 MHz, and the price of SDRs tends to scale rapidly with bandwidth. [Anders Nielsen], however, is building a modular SDR with a target price of $50 USD, and has already reached a bandwidth of almost 20 MHz.

If this project looks familiar, it’s because we’ve covered an earlier iteration. At the time, [Anders] had built the PhaseLoom, which filters an incoming signal, mixes it down to baseband, and converts it to I/Q signals. The next stage is the PhaseLatch, a board housing a 20-MHz, 10-bit ADC, which samples the in-phase and quadrature signals and passes them on to a Cypress FX2LP microcontroller development board. [Anders] had previously connected the ADC to a 6502 microprocessor instead of the FX2LP, but this makes it a practical SDR. The FX2LP was a particularly good choice for this project because of its USB 2.0 interface, large buffers for streaming data, and parallel interface. It simply reads the data from the SDR and dumps it to the computer.

The FX2LP didn’t support the ADC’s clock rate, and overclocking the ADC led to issues, so [Anders] connected the ADC to an independent 20 MHz oscillator. The frequency spectrum of the SDR was oddly bell-shaped, which turned out to be due to the limited analogue bandwidth of the PhaseLoom (about 650 kHz) falling behind the digital bandwidth of 20 MHz. The PhaseLoom’s bandwidth seemed to be limited mostly by an amplifier, and decreasing its gain greatly improved matters. The SDR doesn’t yet have a 20 MHz bandwidth according to the normal definition, but it’s close enough to be practical, and further improvements will have to wait on an updated PhaseLoom board.

The Cypress development board used here is surprisingly capable – we’ve previously seen it used to build an SDR GPS decoder. Most of the custom-built SDRs we see don’t focus on technical performance, but do use such interesting components as a tube-based receiver or a custom silicon chip.

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