Although the term ‘Iron Curtain’ from the Cold War brings to mind something like the Berlin Wall and its forbidding No Man’s Land, there was still active trade between the Soviet Union and the West. This included devices like the M4100/4 insulation tester that the [Three-phase] YouTube channel recently looked at, after previously poking at a 1967 USSR resistance bridge.

This particular unit dates to 1985, and comes in a rather nice-looking case that somewhat looks like bakelite. It’s rated for up to 1 gigaohm, putting out 1,000 V by using the crank handle. Because of the pristine condition of the entire unit, including seals, it was decided to not look at the internals but only test its functionality.

After running through the basic usage of the insulation tester it’s hooked up to a range of testing devices, which shows that it seems to be mostly still in working condition. The first issue noticed was that the crank handle-based generator was a bit tired, so that it never quite hit the maximum voltage.

With no parallax correction and no known last calibration date, it still measured to about 10% of the actual value in some tests initially, but in later tests it was significantly off from the expected value. At this point the device was suspected of being faulty, but it defied being easily opened, so any repair will have to be put off for now. That said, it being in such good condition raises the prospect of it being an easy repair, hopefully in an upcoming video.

youtube.com/embed/Z2-IIjFNaIM?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/17/testin…

Continuing the restoration of the #1 Lancashire boiler at the Claymills Pumping Station in the UK, the volunteers are putting on the final touches after previously passing the boiler inspection. Although it may seem that things are basically ready to start laying down a fire after the boiler is proven to hold 120 PSI with all safeties fully operating, they first had to reassemble the surrounding brickwork, free up a seized damper shaft and give a lot of TLC to mechanisms that were brand new in the 1930s and last operated in 1971.
Removing the ashes from a Lancashire boiler. (Credit: Claymills pumping station, YouTube)
The damper shaft is part of the damper mechanism which controls doors that affect the burn rate, acting as a kind of throttle for the boilers. Unfortunately the shaft’s bearings had seized up completely, and no amount of heat and kinetic maintenance could loosen it up again. This forced them to pull it out and manufacture a replacement, but did provide a good look at how it’s put together. The original dial indicator was salvaged, along with some other bits that were still good.

Next was to fit the cast-iron ash boxes that sit below the boiler and from where ash can be scraped out and deposited into wheelbarrows. The automatic sprinkler stokers are fitted above these, with a good look at their mechanism. The operator is given a lot of control over how much coal is being fed into the boiler, as part of the early 20th-century automation.

The missing furnace doors on the #1 boiler were replaced with replicas based on the ones from the other boilers, and some piping around the boiler was refurbished. Even after all that work, it’ll still take a few weeks and a lot more work to fully reassemble the boiler, showing just how complex these systems are. With some luck it’ll fire right back up after fifty years of slumbering and decades of suffering the elements.

youtube.com/embed/6Dviv0cIJBo?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/17/prepar…

It seems that for as long as there have been readily available 3D printers, there have been moral panics about their being used to print firearms. The latest surrounds a Washington State Legislature bill, HB2320, which criminalises the printing of unregistered guns. Perhaps most controversially, it seeks so impose a requirement on printers sold in the state to phone home and check a database of known firearms and refuse to print them when asked.

This has drawn a wave of protest from the 3D printing community, and seems from where we are sitting to be a spectacularly ill-conceived piece of legislation. It’s simply not clear how it could be implemented, given the way 3D printers and slicing software actually work.

Oddly This Isn’t About Firearms

The root of the problem with this bill and others like it lies in ignorance, and a misplaced belief in the power of legislation. Firearms are just the example here, but we can think of others and we’re sure you can too. Legislators aren’t stupid, but by and large they don’t come from technology or engineering backgrounds.

Meanwhile they have voters to keep happy, and therefore when a moral panic like this one arises their priority is to be seen to be doing something about it. They dream up a technically infeasible solution, push to get it written into law, and their job is done. Let the engineers figure out how to make it work.

How To Hack Public Scrutiny When It Matters

President Nixon addressing the White House Press Corps in 1971. White House Photo Office Collection, Public domain.
Our governments have a mechanism in place to curtail this, public scrutiny. In short, when they embark on something stupid the public is supposed to push back. It comes as in this case from the people themselves, but perhaps most effectively it comes from the press corps which surround the legislatures.

A politician doesn’t really care much if a bunch of 3D printer enthusiasts are angry about something, but I promise you he’s all over it if it’s lead story on the local news. This should protect us, but the flaw when it come to tech stories is that the ignorance is not confined to the legislature. You don’t get to be a political press corps journalist without being pretty good at your job, but unfortunately for us, being pretty good at that job doesn’t include knowing anything about tech. Instead they have finely tuned noses for politics, public policy, and other things that are central to that beat, so when they encounter a tech story they are more likely to follow received opinion than what’s really going on.

Over the years here at Hackaday we’ve seen it time and time again, with respect to drones, right to repair, the DMCA, and even from time to time, 3D printed fiearms. We’ve even wished for technology-aware political journalists in the past too, but inevitably they don’t read Hackaday. Perhaps we should therefore examine how our community approaches stories like this in the first place, and change what we do. We’re good at complaining using our channels, perhaps it’s time to try theirs instead.

The Press Release As A Magic Bullet

Wikipedia’s example press release template (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
There exists a tried and tested method for getting things in front of journalists, it’s called a press release. It’s a standardised form for making a point to a journalist, and when done correctly it can be very effective. How to write one is beyond the remit of Hackaday, but there are many resources online to help you. An appropriate one here is the UK Crafts Council’s one for makers. Take your concerns, distil them into a well-written and reasoned paragraph, and package it up as a press release.

Don’t send them personally, instead send them as an organisation, for example I wouldn’t write one as Jenny List. Instead I’d represent my hackerspace or my 3D printing society. As someone who’s written a few in my time as well as editing other people’s ones, I’d advise you to avoid writing either a rant or a manifesto, be factual and concise. If you appear to be a random crazy, your release will go in the round file.

When you have your press release, identify the channels where it will have the most impact. I might start with the local and regional papers and broadcasters, and find the journalists whose beat intersects with my target. The trick is writing up the technical aspects of the issue clearly enough that everyone can understand it, which is no mean feat, but it is infinitely easier when you already understand the tech than when you don’t.

This may seem like an odd departure from a 3D printing story, but perhaps like many of you I am tired of seeing badly thought out tech legislation passing without question. Perhaps it’s time our community learned some of the techniques used by the people who do mange to have influence, after all it can be easier than you think. We have the knowledge. It’s our responsibility to bring it to the people when necessary.

hackaday.com/2026/03/17/hackin…

1. Security Summit Milano
   Milano 17-19 Marzo 2026
   securitysummit.it/
2. Innovation Cybersecurity Summit
   14 – 15 aprile 2026
   cybersecitalysummit.it/
3. Cyber Crime Conference,
   6-7 maggio, Roma
   ictsecuritymagazine.com/notizi…
4. Richmond Cyber Resilience Forum
   10 – 12 maggio, Rimini
   richmonditalia.it/eventi/cyber…
5. Red Hot Cyber Conference
   18 – 19 maggio, Roma
   redhotcyber.com/red-hot-cyber-…
6. ItaliaSec Cyber Summit
   26– 27 maggio 2026, Milano
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7. Cyber Security Summit
   xxxx, Roma
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8. Cyber-expo
   9 -11 giugno, Piacenza
   cybsec-expo.it/
9. HackInBo
   20 giugno 2026, Bologna
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10. EXPO & CYBER SECURITY FORUM
    Pescara
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11. Moca 2026
    moca.camp/
12. End Summer Camp
    1 – 6 settembre, san Donà di Piave
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13. RomHack
    2 – 4 ottobre, Roma
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14. NoHat
    10 ottobre 2026, Bergamo,
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15. Cybertech Europe 2026
    13 – 14 ottobre, Roma
    italy.cybertechconference.com/
16. Cyber Act Forum
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dicorinto.it/articoli/appuntam…

Assembler syntax is a touchy subject, with many a flamewar having raged over e.g. Intel vs AT&T style syntax. Thus when [Humberto Costa] recently acquired an MSX system for some fun retro-style ASM programming, he was dismayed to see that the available Z80 assemblers did not support the syntax of his favorite ASM tool, NASM. Thus was born the HC SDK project, which seeks to bring more NASM to the Z80, 8085 and a slew of other processors.

There’s both a project site and a GitHub repository, from where both source and pre-compiled releases can be obtained. Supported host platforms are macOS, Windows, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux, with currently supported targets the 8080, 8085, 8086 and Z80. Support for the 6502 is currently in progress.

The Netwide Assembler (NASM), targets only the x86 architecture, being one of the most popular assemblers for Linux and x86. It uses a variant of the Intel ASM syntax, which contrasts it strongly with the GNU Assembler (GAS) that uses AT&T syntax. Of course, in an ironic twist of fate NASM now also supports AT&T syntax and vice versa, albeit with some subtle gotchas.

Regardless, if ASM for these retro architectures is your thing, then the HC SDK may be worth checking out. [Humberto] also says that he’s looking at adding higher-level language support to make it a more complete development environment for these old systems and new takes on them.

Thanks to [Albert Wolf] for the tip.

hackaday.com/2026/03/17/from-8…

It is a safe bet that nearly all Hackaday readers like to at least imagine what it would be like to build and live in an orbital station, on the moon, or on another planet. Moon bases and colonies show up all the time in fictional writing and movies, too. For the Hackaday crowd, some of these are plausible, and others are — well — a bit fanciful. However, there’s one fictional moonbase that we think might have been too realistic: Moonbase 3.
View of the base from above.
If that didn’t ring a bell, we aren’t surprised. The six-episode series was a co-production between Twentieth Century Fox and the BBC that aired in 1973. To make matters worse, after the initial airings in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the video master tapes were wiped out. Until 1993, there were no known copies of the show, but then one turned up in a US television station.

The show had many links to Dr. Who and, in fact, if you think the spacesuits look familiar, they made later appearances in two Dr. Who episodes.

These spacesuits would later show up in Dr. Who.
Consider the year 1973. Four years earlier, the US went to the moon after essentially starting from scratch ten years earlier. The show was set in the far future of 2003, so it is easy to imagine that a lot would happen in the next 30 years. Sadly, that wasn’t the case, but you can hardly blame the writers.

The premise was that there were five moonbases, each with a number. The US and Russia had Moonbases 1 and 2. The Europeans had the titular Moonbase 3. China and Brazil had the final two moonbases.

The goal of the Moonbase was to conduct scientific research on materials such as foamed metals and exotic fuels. Of the six episodes, the final one is amazing and redeems the rest of the series. However, overall, the show is competent but nothing special. However, as I mentioned, it is almost too realistic.

The Realism

The show had a real science advisor, BBC science correspondent [James Burke], later of “Connections” fame, so things looked mostly good. The NASA-like chatter is realistic, and they talk about computers using nouns and verbs like the Apollo computers, but which didn’t turn out to be especially accurate in the far future of 2003. The producers’ aim was to make a realistic program and stay away from “bug-eyed monsters.” It is true, though, that one episode at least hinted at monsters, but, in the end, it turned out to be a false alarm.

The tech isn’t amazingly realistic, but none of it is just crazy fantasy either. But the true realism — and the part that might have prevented it from being a big hit like Star Trek or Dr. Who — was the story content itself.
Another day at the (lunar) office.
Most of the stories show people in slightly futuristic-looking offices talking about how to maintain their funding from Earth. If you’ve ever worked on a government project, you know this is probably the most realistic thing you could do on a show like this. It is also tedious and boring.

Sure, there are stories about psychological stress, accidents (which, of course, threaten funding), and erratic scientists. There’s a Mr. Scott-like engineer who needs rescuing by a Russian — heady stuff for 1973. But the thread through it all is worrying about budget cuts or a shutdown order.

That said, none of the episodes are especially bad, either. The first episode, “Departure and Arrival,” has the old director leaving and a new director arriving, which makes it handy to introduce everyone to the audience. The other episodes were filmed in a different order than the airing order, so it doesn’t hurt much to skip around, but we’d suggest saving the last episode for last.

We don’t write TV dramas, but we imagine the same could be said of most genres. If you made a realistic show about the police force, the fire department, and a hospital emergency room, too much realism would probably be a real drag. No one wants to see the department have mandatory safety training or check hoses for defects. There might be some excitement, but the ratio of excitement to mundanity is probably pretty lopsided toward the boring.

Some of what the show predicted came true: Russia and the US would cooperate in space. The moon did have ice. But like most shows of its era, it missed the boat on things like personal communication, flat screens, and other modern tech.

Unrealistic

Not that it is all realistic. For some reason, the low gravity on the moon is only apparent outside the Moonbase, but there doesn’t seem to be any artificial gravity. The model work leaves something to be desired, and while you can excuse it as quaint, other shows of the same time or earlier did better.

To build drama, the characters had to make mistakes. A lot of them. “Oh! I ran out of oxygen!” “Drat! My spaceship was throwing an error, but it fixed itself, and now it’s back!” Things like that. It is hard to imagine that, given the hostile environment and the cost of a base like this, the people would be so careless.

The final episode features a scientific project that’s hard to imagine, but I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil the best episode.

Of course, there are plenty of technical errors if you consider what really happened in 2003, but you can forgive those.

Your Favorite

I don’t mean to pan the show. You should hang in there for episode six. I don’t recommend skipping right to it, either. It may not become your favorite moonbase, but the show is highly watchable. You can find a few copies of the entire series on YouTube. There are also a few copies on Archive.org.

What’s your favorite fictional moonbase? We wish some of the planned moonbases had become real, but alas, they, too, were fictions. While not a moonbase, the Great Moon Hoax was fictional, even though it claimed to be factual.

hackaday.com/2026/03/17/fictio…

Full-color 3D printing is something of a holy grail, if nothing else just because of how much it impresses the normies. We’ve seen a lot of multi-material units the past few years, and with Snapmaker’s U1 and the Prusa XL it looks like tool changers are coming back into vogue. Just in time, [Radoux] has a fork of OrcaSlicer called FullSpectrum that brings HueForge-like color mixing to tool changing printers.

The hook behind FullSpectrum is very simple: stacking thin layers of colors, preferably with semi-translucent filament, allows for a surprising degree of mixing. The towers in the image above have only three colors: red, blue, and yellow. It’s not literally full-spectrum, but you can generate surprisingly large palettes this way. You aren’t limited to single-layer mixes, either: A-A-B repeats and even arbitrary patterns of four colors are possible, assuming you have a four-head tool changing printer like the Snapmaker U1 this is being developed for.

FullSpectrum is in fact a fork of Snapmaker’s fork of OrcaSlicer, which is itself forked from Bambu Slicer, which forked off of PrusaSlicer, which originated as a fork of Slic3r. Some complain about the open-source chaos of endless forking, but you can see in that chain how much innovation it gets us — including this technique of color mixing by alternating layers.

[Wombly Wonders] shows the limits of this in his video: you really want layer heights of 0.8 mm to 0.12 mm, as the standard 0.2 mm height introduces striping, particularly with opaque filaments. Depending on the colors and the overhang, you might get away with it, but thinner layers generally going to be a safer bet. Fully translucent filaments can blend a little too well at the edges, but the HueForge community — that we’ve covered previously — has already got a good handle on characterizing translucency and we’ll likely see a lot of that knowledge applied to FullSpectrum OrcaSlicer as time goes on.

Now, you could probably use this technique with an multi-material unit (MMU), but the tool-changing printers are where it is going to shine because they’re so much faster at it. With the right tool-changer, it’s actually faster to run off a model mixing colors from the cyan-yellow-magenta color space that it is to print the same model with the exact colors needed loaded on an MMU. That’s unexpected, but [Wombly] does demonstrate in his video with a chicken that’s listed as taking nineteen hours on Bambu’s MakerWorld as taking under seven hours.

Could this be the killer app that pushes tool-change printers into the spotlight? Maybe! Tool changing printers are nothing new, after all. We’ve even seen it done with a delta, and lots of other DIY options if you don’t fancy buying the big Prusa. If you’ve been lusting after such a beast, though, you might finally have your excuse.

youtube.com/embed/uE1Su-FUvls?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/17/fullsp…

If you’re a diehard fan of the chiptune scene, you’ve probably heard endless beautiful compositions on the Nintendo Game Boy, Commodore 64, and a few phat FM tracks from Segas of years later. What the scene is yet to see is a breakout artist ripping hot tracks on the Sharp PC-E500. If you wanted to, though, you’d probably find use in this 3-voice music driver for the ancient 1993 mini-PC.

This comes to us from [gikonekos], who dug up the “PLAY3” code from the Japanese magazine “Pocket Computer Journal” published in November 1993. Over on GitHub, the original articles have been scanned, and the assembly source code for the PLAY3 driver has been reconstructed. There’s also documentation of how the driver actually works, along with verification against RAM dumps from actual Sharp PC-E500 hardware. The driver itself runs as a machine code extension to the BASIC interpreter on the machine. The “PLAY” command can then be used to specify a string of notes to play at a given tempo and octave. Polyphony is simulated using time-division sound generation, with output via the device’s rather pathetic single piezo buzzer.

It’s very cool to see this code preserved for the future. That said, don’t expect to see it on stage at the next Boston Bitdown or anything—as this example video shows, it’s not exactly the punchiest chiptune monster out there. We’ll probably stick to our luscious fake-bit creations for now, while Nintendo hardware will still remain the bedrock of the movement.

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hackaday.com/2026/03/17/polyph…

Did you ever wonder how the mechanical voltage regulator — that big black box wired up to the generator on a car from the ’60s or before — worked? [Jonelsonster] has some answers.

For most people in 2026 an old car perhaps means one from the 20th century, now that vehicles from the 1990s and 2000s have become the beloved jalopies of sallow youths with a liking for older cars and a low budget. But even a 1990s vehicle is modern in terms of its technology, because a computer controls the show. It has electronic fuel injection (EFI), anti-lock braking system (ABS), closed loop emissions control, and the like.

Go back in time to the 1970s, and you’ll find minimal electronics in the average car. The ABS is gone, and the closest thing you might find to EFI is an electronic ignition where the points in the distributor have been replaced with a simple transistor. Perhaps an electronic voltage regulator on the alternator. Much earlier than that and everything was mechanical, be that the ignition, or that regulator.

The video below the break has a pair of units, it seems from 1940s tractors. They would have had a DC generator, a spinning coil with a commutator and brushes, in a magnetic field provided by another coil. These things weren’t particularly powerful by today’s standards and sometimes their charging could be a little lackluster, but they did work. We get to see how, as he lifts the lid off to reveal what look like a set of relays.

We’re shown the functions of each of the three coils with the aid of a lab power supply; we have a reverse current relay that disconnects the generator if the battery tries to power it, an over-current relay that disconnects the field coil if the current is too high, and an over-voltage relay that does the same for voltage. The regulating comes down to the magnetic characteristics, and while it’s crude, it does the job.

We remember European devices with two coils and no field terminal, but the principle is the same. There is never a dull moment when you own an all mechanical car.

youtube.com/embed/nRtqdTp6CFY?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/16/a-volt…

You would be very hard pressed to find any sort of CPU or microcontroller in a commercial product that uses anything but binary to do its work. And yet, other options exist! Ternary computing involves using trits with three states instead of bits with two. It’s not popular, but there is now a design available for a ternary processor that you could potentially get your hands on.

The device in question is called the 5500FP, as outlined in a research paper from [Claudio Lorenzo La Rosa.] Very few ternary processors exist, and little effort has ever been made to fabricate such a device in real silicon. However, [Claudio] explains that it’s entirely possible to implement a ternary logic processor based on RISC principles by using modern FPGA hardware. The impetus to do so is because of the perceived benefits of ternary computing—notably, that with three states, each “trit” can store more information than regular old binary “bits.” Beyond that, the use of a “balanced ternary” system, based on logical values of -1, 0 , and 1, allows storing both negative and positive numbers without a wasted sign bit, and allows numbers to be negated trivially simply by inverting all trits together.

The research paper does a good job of outlining the basis of this method of computing, as well as the mode of operation of the 5500FP processor. For now, it’s a 24-trit device operating at a frequency of 20MHz, but the hope is that in future it would be possible to move to custom silicon to improve performance and capability. The hope is that further development of ternary computing hardware could lead to parts capable of higher information density and lower power consumption, both highly useful in this day and age where improvements to conventional processor designs are ever hard to find.

Head over to the Ternary Computing website if you’re intrigued by the Ways of Three and want to learn more. We perhaps don’t expect ternary computing to take over any time soon, given the Soviets didn’t get far with it in the 1950s. Still, the concept exists and is fun to contemplate if you like the mental challenge. Maybe you can even start a rumor that the next iPhone is using an all-ternary processor and spread it across a few tech blogs before the week is out. Let us know how you get on.

hackaday.com/2026/03/16/ternar…

Recycling plastic at home using 3D printed molds is relatively accessible these days, but if you do not wish to invest a lot of money into specialized equipment, what’s the most minimal setup that you can get away with? In a recent [future things] video DIY plastic recycling is explored using only equipment that the average home is likely to have around.

Lest anyone complain, you should always wear PPE such as gloves and a suitable respirator whenever you’re dealing with hot plastic in this manner, just to avoid a trip to the emergency room. Once taken care of that issue, there are a few ways of doing molding, with compression molding being one of the most straightforward types.

With compression molding you got two halves of a mold, of which one compresses the material inside the other half. This means that you do not require any complex devices like with injection molding, just a toaster oven or equivalent to melt the plastic, which is LDPE in this example. The scrap plastic is placed in a silicone cup before it’s heated so that it doesn’t stick to the container.

The wad of goopy plastic is then put inside the bottom part of the mold before the top part is put in place and squeezed by hand until molten plastic comes out of the overflow opening(s). After letting it fully cool down, the mold is opened and the part released. Although the demonstrated process can be improved upon, it seems to work well enough if you are aware of the limitations. In terms of costs and parts required it’s definitely hard to come up with a cheaper way to do plastic molding.

youtube.com/embed/CWjjZHdZ4WQ?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/16/recycl…