Mysterious Files PH

In some parts of Canada, you’ll rarely hear someone use the phrase “whatever paddles your canoe” instead of the more usual “whatever floats your boat”– and apparently, at least for one Swede, that’s steam power. The video, linked and embedded below, is a detailed tour of a canoe equipped with a small boiler and an outboard motor that has been converted to run using steam pressure by [Kenneth Karlsson].

The canoe itself appears to be a Grumman of the “prospector” type, wide in body to hold all the gear you’d need for extended wilderness trips– or, in this case, a small boiler. Amidships is the ideal place, as it won’t affect the balance of the boat. Amidships is an odd place to put an outboard– in the North American homeland of the canoe, if you aren’t moving under your own power, it is more common to cut off the curved stern of the canoe and mount the outboard to the newly-made transom. [Karlsson]’s choice to put the outboard off one side will be less maneuverable than a stern mount, but saves the need to modify the canoe and makes for much shorter steam lines. Shorter steam lines means less hose to potentially leak and scald the occupants, as well as fewer losses, so we can’t really argue with the tradeoffs.

The engine is an old two-stroke outboard that has a single steam cylinder retrofitted to it, along with a heat exchanger to warm up lake water with exhaust steam before it heads the boiler. The water is filtered first, of course, but we do hope the new owner– who posts on YouTube with channel “Steam Canoe” is diligent about cleaning the boiler. It doesn’t look like super high pressure steam, but the vapour phase of water is always something to be respected.

If the potential of scalding steam leaks and boiler explosions put you off, but you still won’t pick up a paddle, canoes can be rigged with sails— or you can just hand the paddle to a robot arm. Though given this is Hackaday, maybe you’d rather skip the canoe and climb aboard the good ship Benchy instead.

Sold by German DIY store OBI, the OBI Energy Tracker is a €15 set of two devices, one of which you essentially stick on top of your existing electricity meter. This then allows for electricity usage to be measured and tracked, with the data sent to the second, gateway device. This latter cloud-bound device is linked to an OBI account via the heyOBI app. This correspondingly called for the gateway device to be reverse-engineered and freed from its cloud-based shackles, a task that [Aaron Christophel] happily took upon himself.

The whole process is also covered in two videos, with the first providing all the essentials on reprovisioning the original firmware for a local MQTT server in English, while the second, German-language video focuses on custom firmware for the ESP32-C3 inside of the gateway device.

Inside the reader device is a Cortex-M0+-based BAT32G135 MCU that communicates with the meter via its IR protocol. This is then communicated via 868 MHz LoRa to the gateway device that will be placed somewhere within Wi-Fi reach by the user. Inside this latter device is as mentioned the ESP32-C3, which by default runs firmware that communicates via secure MQTT with an AWS cloud instance for the typical cloud-based shenanigans.

The aforementioned reprovisioning option doesn’t require firmware flashing, just a handful of steps to follow. This involves fetching the 32-bit TEA key, generating your own PKI, running your own MQTTS-capable broker and having the provided Python script handle the rest from there.

Flashing custom firmware is the other option, with straightforward UART/JTAG reflashing sadly disabled by the manufacturer. With the effort required here you could perhaps argue that simply connecting the reader device to a custom gateway device might be a lot easier, especially if you already have a LoRa transceiver and associated hardware.

In the sweltering temperatures of an unusually hot European heatwave, I found myself having a chat with  a friend of mine from my university days. After discussing the health of his cat who had solved the problem of a fur coat on a hot day by flattening himself out on the concrete floor in the coolest place in the house, we moved on to tech matters. We’ve known each other for not far short of four decades, so this is familiar territory for us. The problems that come with taking a prototype to manufacturing, a process which even the most seasoned of engineers can slip up on.

The Difference Between Making, And Making For Manufacture

If you’ve ever taken a project and replicated it, you will know the progression. If you’re making five or ten widgets, you can debug and rework as needed, tweak things, and get things going. If you’re making more then this, the process consumes a greater proportion of your time, until a point at which manufacture becomes impractical. Maybe that’s around fifty boards, sometimes more or less.

The skill a professional engineer picks up here is designing for manufacture. It’s something I picked only progressively over the years, and learned with a bang when I became peripherally involved in the production of electronic conference badges. You learn to be much more exact in your PCB design to avoid those reworks and bodge wires, you pick your parts with much greater care, and pay far more attention to power supplies, decoupling, thermal issues, impedances, and ground isolation. Something that works has to become something that always works, first time. You go from having several spins of the prototype PCB to having maybe a couple, and you reach a point at which you can order 5000 boards and have less than 50 of them that need attention. My friend describes himself as more of a software expert than hardware, but he’s learned this process over the decades far more than I have.

One comment he made hit the mark so well that it prompted me to start writing this: that when hiring recent graduates they would design things that could not be volume manufactured, while the new hire apprentices’ designs could. This fit so well with our common experience when we came through an engineering education that it posed the question, were we failed by it? We both attended the University of Hull, on England’s north-east coast, but this isn’t specific to Hull or even our generation as the problem of inadequate preparation applies to so many other institutions. Last year I talked about a couple of young engineers wrestling with an analagous experience here in the 2020s, and they were a long way from the Humber.

Do Universities Secretly See Their Job As Training More Academics?

My overwhelming memory of my degree course was shared by my friend, that about half of it was composed of useful stuff, and the other half of it was either trying to teach you to be an electronic engineering academic like the people delivering the lectures, or a course that seemed only to be there because they had someone who could teach it.

My Achilies’ heel was the mathematics, something I was later told improved in later years when the engineering department wrested its students away from the maths department. We had a very small amount of practical work, including simple transistor circuits, digital logic using real 74-series chips, laying out a PCB using crêpe paper tape on acetate film, and oddly considering it was outdated even in the early 1990s, wire-wrapping.

It’s easy to sit here and say that a university course teaches too much theory and not enough practice, but the fact is that universities aren’t there to teach you to solder. Indeed, while it’s a super-useful thing to be able to do and I’d urge every electronic engineer to learn it, soldering your own projects is not what makes you an engineer. Instead there has to be an exploration of where the boundary lies between the theoretical and the practical, and education should straddle that line rather than stay only on one side of it. It’s in deciding where that straddling point stops that the key lies.

There are university courses that manage that boundary by splitting it entirely. They combine time in industry with time studying, and a student on one of those courses would in theory learn the skills of a real-world engineer in their work placements. There are also industry sponsorship schemes placing students into industrial environments, but they are so few and the competition for them so fierce, that they might as well not exist for most students. Even the world of hackerspaces which gives the students a rare chance to mix with professional engineers in their off-time, is actively discouraged by universities. For a student in a full-time, study-based course, the challenge comes in how to bridge that gap into real-world manufacturing despite all these challenges, and learn something useful without the luxury of a real-world environment.

Torturing The Students With Diabolical Designs

The temptation for most courses is to start yet another group project. A team of six students are tasked with getting something working together, and learn stuff. The trouble with group projects though is that they either completely don’t work like our early 1990s assignment to make a telephone exchange from a Transputer link adapter chip, or a few participants end up doing all the hard work like my two young friends mentioned earlier. Group projects are inexpensive for an institution, but they look better than they really are.

The hardware hacker world has been marked by a series of epochs, as new technologies bring with them a flowering of creativity. There’s one of those that I think has the potential to delover something impossible back in the 1990s when I was a student, and allow individual students to learn the art of manufacture without a group project in sight. I’m talking about inexpensive PCB manufacture, which allows multiple spins of a design to be completed with a bearable wait, and for not a lot of money.

So if I wanted to teach a bunch of students about designing for manufacture, I’d give them a ready made small project in software form, as EDA files, and as a BOM with a board assembly house. Of course, the project would be fatally flawed but fixable with probably two or maybe three spins, but I wouldn’t tell them that. Instead their first task would be to send the files off and receive a ready-made PCB, or if I was feeling charitable I could give them that first spin ready-made, and tell them to get on with it.

I would throw everything I could at this unfortunate design, a wrong-but-plausible footprint, badly thought out earthing, an accidental oscillator, and all the really annoying things which we’ve all in our time found. I am sure you could think of more diabolical but superficially plausible features. Their task would involve diagnosing the board and redesigning it before sending the files off to the assembly house. A week later they’d have that next spin, they’d have to hunt down any remaining bugs and repeat it all, and so on. I learned this process with my friends in the making of an event badge for 5,000 people, and I think it’s possible that you could learn it as a single trainee engineer with a much smaller board.

It may be unfair to throw all that is wrong with engineering education at the door of universities, even though it’s certain that there are some extremely low hanging fruit. But arriving in the workplace completely lacking an essential skill is perhaps the point at which something should be said. The question is, when it comes to designing for manufacture, is anyone listening?

On the one hand, the original Apple II has been copied over and over again since at least the early 80s, so maybe this hack is old hat to the greybeards around here. On the other hand, this is the year 2026. When Apple released it back in 1977, who could have predicted people would still be building these things nearly five decades later?

In that sense, a homebrew Apple II in the current year is pretty remarkable. It’s a really well done project by [simonboak], nicely open sourced with a case to match, so is worth looking at on its own merits.

Unlike the later models, the original Apple II only used commercially available ICs, making it an easy target for recreation. No FPGAs required, just good old-fashioned DIPs. OK, these are modern CMOS versions of the chips, but other than that, the biggest concession to modernity is space on the board for a Raspberry Pi Pico to allow for connecting a USB keyboard.

The accompanying blog post lists some other differences from 1977’s favorite home computer: SRAM vs DRAM — because you know the Woz would have used it if he could — and omitting the composite video circuitry in favor a late-model VGA card. There’s no need for the composite output since he’s eschewing the period-appropriate CRT for a retro-styled LCD monitor, which is also 3D printed and available on Printables. It’s crazy to think that the Apple II family lived long enough not only to see the dawn of VGA but also well into its sunset.

If a homebuilt Apple ][ doesn’t impress, what about a PC-compatible circa 1995?

The 19th century was an absolutely electrifying era, including in a literal sense. Although the phenomenon of electricity had been known by that time for centuries, actually making it do useful work was a much taller order. Aside from big, coal-powered generators, there also was a need for a more compact electrochemical solution, such as in the form of a wet or dry cell. One of the first major commercial successes here came in the form of the Leclanché cell, such as the genuine version that [Big Clive] found in an old UK building’s attic and has now revived.

Invented in 1866 by French scientist Georges Leclanché, the Leclanché cell features an ammonium chloride electrolyte solution, carbon cathode and zinc anode. There’s also a manganese dioxide depolarizer for preventing hydrogen build-up. Here water is the solvent for the ammonium chloride (also known as sal ammoniac).

The version that [Clive] got his grubby mitts on features a glass container, an already partially consumed zinc electrode and a slightly cracked porous ceramic tub that contains the carbon electrode and the manganese dioxide. After placing the components inside the specially shaped glass jar and filling it with an electrolyte mixture of one part ammonium chloride and four parts water by weight, the cell starts generating its approximate 1.4 VDC.

This type of wet cell was very popular, being essentially ‘rechargeable’ by topping up the water and replacing the zinc electrode consumable. They did suffer from a voltage drop-off during use due to increasing internal resistance, something that got improved upon with the zinc-carbon dry cell. Itself effectively an evolution of the Leclanché wet cell.

From there zinc-carbon dry cells got replaced with alkalines, which itself got mostly replaced by NiMH and Li-ion cells. Despite more than a hundred years between the electrochemical cell that [Clive] featured in his video and today’s batteries, it’s clear that this wet cell was quite literally just the Victorian-era equivalent of an alkaline AA cell.

While the original name of what much of the world knows as the NES was the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom for short, it was very rarely used as a family computer. Sure, there was a basic cartridge and an add-on keyboard sold in Japan, but it was always a sideshow to the games.

Nintendo recognized that when they brought their Entertainment System overseas. Most of the various famiclones — which date back to the mid-80s — are the same. BIT in Taiwan had a different idea: their Bit 79 would be a full home computer. Picture a C=64 that plays Nintendo games, and you might not be too far off. [Inkbox] tells the full story in his latest YouTube video, and it’s a must-watch for anyone interested in the history of 8-bit machines that are totally unknown in the West.

BIT were both game makers and system cloners; you may even have seen one of their NES or Atari games, as they were exported widely. By 1989 they’d already gone through a surprising number of Famicom clones, but those were pure clones and just played games. The Bit79 is obviously different — for one, it’s got a built-in keyboard in a wedge case. Apparently a pretty good one at that. For another, it starts with a bootloader that lets you choose between BASIC on ROM and loading the cartridge. For a third, it’s got a full 8K of RAM, quadrupling the Famicom’s offering– plus an additional 2K for the PPU, in what you might consider an early example of video RAM. Both CPU and PPU are knockoff chips made in Taiwan by UMC. The system even has what looks like a DB25 connect a printer. There’s also an expansion port, but no evidence that add-ons were ever sold, despite reports of a 64K memory add-on.

Back to the BASIC ROM for a moment– it’s not Famicom BASIC, as was clear in the manuals. [Inkbox] dumped the ROM to find that it is actually AppleSoft BASIC, of all things. That’s not only an odd bit of piracy, it’s also a big miss, since Apple’s BASIC doesn’t have any commands to make use of the PPU the way Famicom’s version does. POKING the registers during the vBlank integer is apparently not an easy thing to do. Perhaps that’s why we’ve never heard of this machine — well, that, and the fact we’re not located in East Asia where it was sold.

While the Bit79 didn’t sell particularly well, apparently it inspired a whole wave of “educational computer” famiclones in 1990s China that are largely unknown to the English-speaking world, making it an important part of computer history.

While BIT Corp is long gone, if you want to play around with their great experiment in turning a famiclone into a home computer, an emulator is available online, and the ROMs are preserved on the Internet Archive thanks to [InkBox].

Thanks, too, to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Pity the poor Australians. Isolated on a jagged hunk of land far from everywhere else, these industrious people have to take two-legged flights (or more) to reach a great many destinations in the northern hemisphere. It’s expensive, time consuming, and makes planning a trip a complete headache when wars break out around popular hub airports.

One airline is trying to solve this problem. The nation’s flag carrier, Qantas, has been hard at work on Project Sunrise. The goal is to run some of the longest non-stop commercial passenger flights ever, with great effort going into solving the technical and economic challenges involved.

No Stops

When travelling from Australia’s major capital cities, flights to destinations like London, the rest of Europe, or the US, all involve stopovers in intermediate airports along the way. A great many routes stop in Dubai or Qatar, while others transit through Hong Kong, Singapore, or Thailand. The need for stopovers complicates air travel for the passenger, particularly when delays cause missed connections or baggage gets lost from one flight to another. It can also just be tedious—sometimes a stopover can last 10 hours or more, which is an incredibly uncomfortable amount of time to spend in even the nicest airport. The reason behind stopovers is simple enough—the average commercial airliner just doesn’t have the fuel range to haul many hundreds of passengers from Australia to Europe in a single hop.

Qantas has been trying to improve Australia’s passenger airline links for quite some time by finding ways to eliminate these tedious stopovers entirely. Thus was born Project Sunrise, which hoped to find more direct routes between popular world cities and suitable airliners that could fly those routes without stopping.

An early 2019 test flight probed the practicality of flying from New York to Sydney in a single hop. Due to the limitations of contemporary aircraft, sacrifices were made to get the flight over the line. Where the Boeing 787-9 would normally carry up to 280 passengers, the test flight would only haul 40 to save weight, and thus save fuel. No cargo was on board, and the tanks were brimmed to ensure maximum range was available. Even then, the 16,250 km route was considered to be at 115% of the plane’s normal range, and there was only 90 minutes of contingency when it came to fuel onboard if something went awry. Despite the challenges, the test was a success, and provided useful learnings on how to handle things like crew fatigue on a 19-hour continuous flight.

Qantas was also experimenting with practical revenue services at this time, too. In 2018, the airline had established a direct route from Perth to London, flying the Boeing 787-9 in a 236-seat configuration. Flying the 14,484-kilometer route was just within the practical range of the aircraft. It was a useful route that made travel easier for passengers departing Australia’s west coast, but far from the golden ideal of allowing direct flights to major international destinations from the major capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. The route has also since fell victim to geopolitical strife, as the Iran War shut down large swathes of airspace in early 2026. Qantas was forced to alter its flight paths, which added 30 to 45 minutes to the usual flight time—just enough to tip the route over the practical limitations of the aircraft’s range.

Future Goals

However, the crowing achievement of Project Sunrise is still yet to come. 39% of Australia’s population is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne alone, with both capitals situated on the country’s east coast. It would be most advantageous from a business perspective for these cities to have direct links to major world destinations, and it would benefit the broadest swathe of Qantas’s customer base. Only, the problem comes back to geography, with these two capitals being over 16,000 kilometers from popular destinations like New York and London.

Qantas has risen to the challenge, regardless. The airline challenged both Boeing and Airbus to develop aircraft intended to fly routes from Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, to destinations like New York, London, Cape Town, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. This was later whittled down to a narrower focus on the Sydney to New York and Sydney to London routes. Airbus would come out victorious, with Qantas ordering twelve examples of the Airbus A350-1000ULR. The specially-configured model features an additional rear centre fuel tank and a higher maximum take-off weight in order to fly routes up to 22 hours non-stop, along with a reduced seat configuration serving just 238 passengers. The extra range makes for a huge difference compared to more conventional routes out of Australia, which often pair two flights up to 14 hours each. The extra range of the new aircraft saves passengers both hours of flight time, along with the hours normally spent sitting around on layover in a hub airport along the way.

A typical flight from Sydney to New York or Sydney to London is expected to take 19 to 22 hours. The no-stop nature of the route will enable 99% of Australians to access either destination either direct, or with one-stop—such as by flying in from another major capital on a domestic flight. The flights are expected to run with a higher-than-usual ratio of premium seats, based on the expected demand for these services.

The main thing holding back the new service is aircraft delivery. Production is underway in earnest, with the first A350-1000ULR to be delivered in April 2027. Daily non-stop flights between Sydney and London will begin from October 2027, with tickets to be on sale from February.

Aircraft cabins will be optimized to have more space and amenity to keep passengers comfortable on ultra-long-range routes. Key to this is a “Wellbeing Zone” for passengers to stretch their legs and move around more than is practical on a more typical 10- to 14- hour international flight. 

The new Project Sunrise services will be a gamechanger for many people travelling to and from Sydney, and other Australian capitals. It will relieve a major pain point—layovers—that have become a dreaded fact of life for Australians headed far abroad. It will still perhaps be some time before Australians get more direct services to a wider range of destinations, because these new services will have to prove themselves. If the passenger numbers aren’t there, the services won’t make money, and it may not prove worth the hassle to operate these ultra-long-range routes. If, however, convenience truly is king, then there may be much greater investment in this area to link Sydney and Melbourne with more cities directly. The only losers in this case will be the hub airports across the world, which will grow just a little quieter for the loss of Aussie accents in the terminal.