IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and Happy New Year!

As I plan for the year ahead, I'm looking to arrange more in-person events — mostly because it's great to connect with people in real life. If that sounds something you'd be interested in, please fill out this survey to help my planning.

Just as the last newsletterlooked back over what happened in 2025, this first edition of the new year focuses on how global tech policy will evolve over the next 12 months. I've skipped the clichés — 'AI will consume everything,' 'Washington and Brussels won't get along' — to highlight macro trends that, imo, will underpin what will likely be a bumpy road ahead.

Some of my predictions will be wrong. That's OK — no one's perfect.

What follows is my best guess at the topics which will dominate 2026 at a time when geopolitics, technology and economic competitiveness have become intertwined like never before.

Let's get started:

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One of the perennial challenges of building robots is minimizing the size and weight of drive systems while preserving power. One established way to do this, at least on robots with joints, is to fit each joint with a quasi-direct-drive motor integrating a brushless motor and gearbox in one device. [The 5439 Workshop] wanted to take this approach with his own robot project, but since commercial drives were beyond his budget, he designed his own powerful, printable actuator.

The motor reducing mechanism was the biggest challenge: most quasi-direct drives use a planetary gearbox, but this would have been difficult to 3D-print without either serious backlash or limited torque. A cycloidal drive was an option, but previous printable cycloidal drives seemed to have low efficiency, and they didn’t want to work with a strain-wave gearing. Instead, he decided to use a rope drive (this seems to be another name for a kind of Capstan drive), which doesn’t require particularly strong materials or high precision. These normally use a rope wound around two side-by-side drums, which are difficult to integrate into a compact actuator, but he solved the issue by putting the drums in-line with the motor, with two pairs of pulleys guiding the rope between them in a “C” shaped path.

To build the actual motor, they used a hand-wound stator inside a 3D-printed rotor with magnets epoxied into it, and used Dyneema rope in the reducer for its high strength. The printed rotor proved problematic when the attraction between the rotor and magnets caused it to flex and scrape against the housing, and it eventually had to be reinforced with some thin metal sheets. After fixing this, it reached five Newton-meters of torque at one amp and nine Newton-meters at five amps. The diminishing returns seem to be because the 3D-printed pulley wheels broke under higher torque, which should be easy to fix in the future.

This looks like a promising design, but if you don’t need the output shaft inline with the motors, it’s probably easier to build a simple Capstan drive, the mathematics of which we’ve covered before. Both makers we’ve previously seen build Capstan drives used them to make robot dogs, which says something for their speed and responsiveness.

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hackaday.com/2026/01/05/tying-…

[Kerry Wong] points out that the Uni-T MSO oscilloscopes have a logic analyzer built in — that’s the MSO, or Mixed Signal Oscilloscope, part — but you have to add the probes. He shows you how it works in a recent video below.

He’s looked at the scope’s analog capabilities before and was not unimpressed. The probes aren’t inexpensive, but they do unlock the mixed signal capabilities of the instrument.

Although simple logic analyzers are very affordable today, having the capability integrated with your scope has several advantages, including integrated triggering and the simple convenience of being able to switch measurement modes with no problem.

In many cases, being able to do things like decode UART signals without dragging out a laptop and firing up software is a nice feature. If all you’ve used are the super-cheap USB logic analyzers, you may find some of the features of a more serious instrument surprising.

Is it worth the extra expense? That depends on you and what you are doing. But if you ever wondered if it was worth splurging on digital probes for a UNI-T scope, [Kerry] can help you decide.

Not that simple logic analyzers aren’t useful, and they certainly cost less. Some of them will even work as a scope, too.

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hackaday.com/2026/01/05/puttin…

The Commodore 1541 was built to do one job—to save and load data from 5.25″ diskettes. [Commodore History] decided to see whether the drive could be put to other purposes, though. Namely, operating as a standalone computer in its own right!

It might sound silly, but there’s a very obvious inspiration behind this hack. It’s all because the Commodore 1541 disk drive contains a MOS 6502 CPU, along with some RAM, ROM, and other necessary supporting hardware. As you might remember, that’s the very same CPU that powers the Commodore 64 itself, along with a wide range of other 1980s machines. With a bit of work, that CPU can indeed be made to act like a general purpose computer instead of a single-purpose disk controller.

[Commodore History] compares the 1541 to the Commodore VIC-20, noting that the disk drive has a very similar configuration, but less than half the RAM. The video then explains how the drive can be reconfigured to run like the even-simpler MOS Technology KIM-1 — a very primitive but well-known 8-bit machine. What’s wild is that this can be achieved with no hardware modifications. It’s not just a thought exercise, either. We get a full “Hello World!” example running in both BASIC and machine code to demonstrate that it really works.

Code is on GitHub for the curious. We’ve featured hacks with the chunky Commodore 1541 before, too.

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Thanks to [Bruce] and [Stephen] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2026/01/05/commod…

We are all familiar enough by now with the succession of boards that have come from Raspberry Pi in Cambridge over the years, and when a new one comes out we’ve got a pretty good idea what to expect. The “classic” Pi model B+ form factor has been copied widely by other manufacturers as has their current Compute Module. If you buy the real Raspberry Pi you know you’ll get a solid board with exceptionally good software support.

Every now and then though, they surprise us, with a board that follows a completely different path, which brings us to the one on our bench today. The Compute Module Zero packs the same quad-core RP3 system-on-chip (SoC) and Wi-Fi module as the Pi Zero 2 W with 512 MB of SDRAM onto a tiny 39 mm by 33 mm postage-stamp module. It’s a Pi, but not as you know it, so what is it useful for?

A Pi Zero 2 As You Haven’t Seen It Before

If you don’t mint the wait for shipping from China, LCSC have stock.

The first clue as to where this module sits in the Pi range comes from how it came to me. I have a bare module and the dev kit on loan from a friend who’s evaluating them with the idea of incorporating into a product. Instead of buying it from a store here in Europe he had to have it shipped from LCSC in China. It’s Chinese-made and distributed, and it’s not a consumer part in the way your Pi 5 is. Instead it’s an OEM part, and one which appears from where we’re sitting to be tailored specifically to the needs of OEMs manufacturing in China. Would you like a Linux computer with useful software updates and support built into your product? Look no further.

I put up a quick video showing it in detail which you can see at the bottom of the page. Physically it appears to carry the same parts we’re used to from the Zero 2, with the addition of an eMMC storage chip and with an antenna socket in place of the PCB antenna on the Zero. All the available interfaces are brought out to the edge of the board including some not seen on the Zero. The module is available with a variety of different storage options, including the version with no eMMC which my friend has. He’s also bought one with the storage on the dev board, so you can see both types.

The bottom-end CM0 has no onboard eMMC.

The dev board is similar to a Pi model A+ in size, with a bit of extra PCB at the bottom for the USB and HDMI connectors. Like the Zero it has Micro-USB connectors for power and USB, but it carries a full-size HDMI socket. There are connectors for an LCD display, a camera, a micro SD card if you’re using the version without eMMC, and 40-pin GPIO header.

In addition, there’s an extrnal stick-on antenna in the box. Electrically it’s nothing you won’t have seen before, after all it’s little more than a Pi Zero 2 on a different board, and with less memory. This one is fresh from the box and doesn’t have an OS installed, but since we all already know how well a Pi Zero 2 runs and the likely implications of 512 MB of memory I’ve left it that way for my friend.

What Can This Board Do For Us?

The idea of a bottom-end Raspberry Pi as a component module for your Chinese assembly house is a good one. It has to be the RP3 on board, because as we’ve noted, the earlier Pi architecture is heading into the sunset and that is now their lowest-power 64-bit silicon. It could use more memory, but 512 MB is enough for many undemanding Linux applications and more than appears on many SoCs.

For tiny little computer applications, it’s an attractive component, but it’s a little bit expensive. Depending on the version, and whether it comes with the dev board, it ranges from about $25 to $38, and we can imagine that even with a quantity price break that may be too much for many manufacturers. A Chinese SoC, albeit with worse long-term Linux support, can be had for much less. If this SBC form factor catches on, we’d expect to see knockoff boards appear for a more reasonable price in due course.

Perhaps as the price of memory eventually comes down they will increase the spec a little, but we’d hazard a guess that a lower price would mean more success. A low power, plug-innable computer for $20 would be interesting for a number of projects where size really matters. Only time will tell, but meanwhile if you’re designing a product you have a new Linux option for it, and for the rest of us it’s time to look out for these modules appearing in things we buy.

Would you use one of these, and for what?

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hackaday.com/2026/01/05/hands-…

Check one, two; check one, two; is this thing on? Over on The Public Domain Review [Lucas Thompson] takes us for a spin through sound, as it was in Britain around and through the 1800s.

The article begins by introducing the Father of Acoustics, German physicist Ernst Chladni. After placing grains of sand on a thin metal plate and drawing a violin bow along one edge Chladni figures appear, making manifest that which previously could only be heard, that is, sound waves.

It’s fun to think that it wasn’t so long ago that the physics of sound was avant-garde. Middle class Victorian society was encouraged to reproduce cutting edge experiments with equipment in their own homes, participating in a popular science which was at the same time part entertainment and part instruction, for young and old alike. Throughout the rest of his article [Lucas] lists a number of popular science books from the period and talks a little about what was to be found within.

See the video below the break for a demonstration of Chladni figures from The Royal Institution. Of course the present state of the art regarding sonics is well advanced as compared with that of the 19th century. If you’re interested to know more check out Building A Wall-Mounted Sound Visualizer and Seeing Sound For Under $200.

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hackaday.com/2026/01/05/popula…