Mysterious Files PH

In the world of silicon semiconductors, the process of creating transistors and similar structures involves various rounds of modifications and additions in order to create the requisite functional layers. A less involved approach would simply create these structures in-situ, with research the past years having focused on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers to do exactly this. Recently [Seok Young Min] et al. reported (paywalled, Phys.org summary) on creating transistors in-situ in a tungsten ditelluride (WTe₂) monolayer.

By selectively changing parts of the top layer into tungsten oxide (WO_x) as an insulator and other sections into n-type WS₂ and p-type WSe₂ the researchers were able to create functional MOSFETs, without the normally requisite grafting on of different materials. An obvious advantage of this is that this can be done at an atomic scale, potentially achieving densities significantly higher than with industry standard silicon semiconductor technology.

WTe₂ is not the only TMDC that could be viable here, of course, with other researchers investigating the use of MoSe₂ for a similar purpose, as in this research by [N. Lu] et al. from 2014. This being the creation of 2D semiconductors, referring to the thin layers of these monolayer TMDCs, along with potentially other materials such as graphene.

Some disappointing, but perhaps not entirely unsurprising news this week out of Denmark — after announcing last year that they would transition away from Microsoft’s proprietary software, the realities of making it work seem to have caught the government off guard. The word is that a trial program immediately ran into problems when government employees that had been given Collabora tried to collaborate with their peers running Office, and has since been quietly abandoned.

Although there’s probably a joke to be made about different parts of the government not knowing what the other ones are talking about, the reality is that if one group of staffers can’t reliably access the data being produced by another, that’s a pretty big problem. Of course, had they simply asked us nerds, we could have advised them that these sort of issues are inevitable if you don’t fully commit to the effort.

Had the entire government moved to the Open Document Format (ODF) at once they would have avoided the issue, at least when it came to newly created documents, but obviously that’s a considerably larger undertaking than installing Collabora or OpenOffice on a few dozen machines and calling it a day. There’s no word yet on how this stumble will impact Denmark’s larger effort to free themselves of proprietary software, but we’d hazard a guess it’s not a great sign. Hopefully things go better for the Dutch.

Speaking of users trying to improve their personal software situation, The Verge has an interesting article on a recent trend of frustrated users pointing AI tools like Claude at their smart TVs, with a few success stories posted to social media showing off interfaces that have been stripped of ads or replaced with something else entirely. It’s compelling stuff for anyone who’s unhappy with their current smart TV experience, but the whole thing isn’t quite as technically impressive as it might seem on the surface.

As the TV’s in question are running Android, all the AI tools need to do is connect to them over Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and uninstall any offending packages that might be providing ads, and similarly creating a customized launcher interface is a matter of spinning up an Android app and installing it over the network. The results may look like arcane magic to the uninitiated, so we appreciate The Verge pointing out that it’s all pretty basic stuff for anyone familiar with Android development.

On the subject of extracting unwanted components, a delicate operation to remove the masts of the sunken WWII cargo ship SS Richard Montgomery was completed successfully earlier this week off the coast of Sheerness, England. To those unfamiliar with this particular vessel that might not sound like a big deal, but when you’re dealing with a wreck holding an estimated 1,400 metric tons of explosives that have been deteriorating since 1944, even approaching the area needs careful planning and coordination.

There was a concern that the masts and their supporting structures were on the verge of collapsing into the hull of the wreck, which experts warned could potentially trigger an explosion large enough to endanger life and property. Actually removing the explosives from the ship itself will be a far larger undertaking, but at least for the time being, removing the masts has helped stabilize the situation.

Finally, if you’re looking to learn about something a little more local than a potentially explosive situation in Sheerness (apologies to anyone in Sheerness), check out Local Wikipedia. Created by [Ed Jefferson], the site lets you filter Wikipedia pages by their distance from your location or whatever other landmark you wish. By default it shows results that are within 1.5 miles, but if you don’t have anything too exciting within range it will start opening up the radius to pull in more results.

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.

With the topic of marble clocks having been quite well explored at this point, it raises the question of how easy it would be to take the basic principle and create a text display using black and white marbles. As [Ivan Miranda] found out in a recent marble text scroller project, this is far from easy.

The reason why a scrolling text display was picked comes down to not wanting to be limited to a fixed number of digits. This resulted in a round wheel design, with inner steel ball bearings and a stepper motor on both the wheel and an inner selector mechanism. These respectively align the marble channels and pick the right color of marbles to be dropped into any of the wheel’s slots, creating the right sequence of marbles for the target text.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that it’s an absolutely massive structure, yet it’s all 3D printed and bolted together. It took a number of trial-and-error cycles, and debugging issues like the IR sensors getting confused by daylight, but it now mostly seems to work all right.

There are still some remaining issues, such as having to manually home the wheel before starting, and the ratio of black vs white marbles can cause unexpected gaps in the final text. Despite this the text is quite legible and definitely infinite.

Telephony is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, being able to talk to people in far off places is kind of neat, at least in theory. On the other hand, you’re usually reliant on a centralized network, which isn’t ideal to the mindset of most hackers.[Gautam]’s MeshLive project deals with that last one, offering a decentralized mesh network solution based on Bluetooth for Android phones that can handle both voice and video.

Rather than relying on dedicated hardware, this particular mesh piggybacks on your phone, and exists only as an Android application. Calls are end-to-end encrypted for both voice and video — though two-way video calling is still experimental. More testing has gone into video broadcasting, where a stream goes out one-way. The capability is available for voice, as well.

Each user has a unique identifier that can be scanned to create contacts, but it isn’t otherwise clearly identifiable to everybody. You’ll only appear with a random name that changes every 15 minutes to other users in range who aren’t your contacts. Range is of course the Achilles heel of this project, since it’s using the Bluetooth hardware of ordinary smartphones. It’s possible to extend the range of Bluetooth significantly with the right hardware, but we imagine most folks aren’t carrying directional antennas around with them. While every phone does forward the signal to as many others as it can, it can only do so for about 20 meters.

Of course LoRa remains the protocol of choice for mesh networking, though it’s normally used for text messages only. We have seen voice packets over LoRa, but anything LoRa requires dedicated hardware while this only requires an app.

The Nintendo DSi was released in November 2008, and boasted a new feature not formerly seen on the brand’s handhelds—it had two cameras, inside and outside. It let the console take photos, a feature rather fitting given it was an era in which phone cameras had become the norm. Only, it wasn’t so good out of the box. However, [gavff] recently found an accessory from way back when that aimed to make the DSi’s camera somewhat more capable.

For some reason, the console accessories company Nyko decided that that the Nintendo DSi deserved an 8x optical zoom lens. Never mind that the console’s cameras were limited to a resolution of just 640 x 480 pixels, it was deemed important that the handheld have the ability to capture images of things that were somewhat farther away. The lens mounted to a specially-designed case that fit around the original DSi’s shell. It’s not particularly clear what the intended use case was, but if you wanted to expand the capability of your DSi camera, this was one way to do it. You could get some pretty sharp photos if you knew what you were doing, as [gavff] demonstrates in the video.

The video then takes things farther, putting an even larger, sillier telescopic camera lens on the DSi. [gavff] used it to capture a photo of the Moon, with the benefit that unlike modern smartphones, there’s no AI faking the results. The video also touches on the goofy Mad Catz flash accessory that used the DSi’s charge port.

We love seeing silly lenses on cameras that were never supposed to host them. Also, isn’t it wonderful that our ancient “Nintendo DS Hacks” category is getting some love again after all this time? We’ve actually published a bunch of DS hacks this year.

There are two kinds of cyberdeck: the kind someone makes on a lark and operates purely on ‘rule of cool’, and the kind designed to do practical work. The Slurptop by [Slurpburgers] is decidedly in the second category — but that doesn’t mean it lacks for coolness. What’s cooler than a power-tool battery?

That last feature might make this closer to the Neuromancer definition of cyberdeck than most featured on these pages. You still can’t jack it into your cortex, but it does have the ‘assemble from off the shelf components at need’ vibe of the original concept. It also means there should be plenty of battery power to keep working with the power-hungry x86-based GMKtec MiniPC that runs this thing.

If the battery gets low, which it will after about 4 hours or so, swapping is easy — but not hot swapping. Luckily [Slurpburgers] grabbed a module meant for Uninterruptible Power Supplies to swap over to wall current, so this device can be plugged in whenever necessary. Alas, charging must be done on the factory charger, not the device, but that swapping really adds to the ‘future of the past’ cyberpunk flare of the device in our opinion.

Speaking of the past, why did we ever stop putting mechanical keyboards and trackballs onto laptops? The inputs on this thing are glorious, and this writer’s hands envy the ergonomic curve of it while typing away on an old HP Pavilion’s sad and squishy low-profile keys. The trackball itself is a minor hack, being made using the guts of an old gaming mouse. Not everyone will approve of every design choice here, but that’s the point of doing it yourself — so like [Slurpburger], you can have it your way.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen a clacky laptop but we can’t recall a cyberdeck made with tool batteries before.

Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!

These days we take high-speed networking for granted, but it can be difficult to get vintage computers talking to modern machines. To help solve this problem [jaime] came up with Meatloaf which can provide files to a Commodore regardless of their location or medium of storage.

Meatloaf is an ESP32 device at its core, which plugs in to any of several Commodore computers through their IEC serial port. Many similar systems exist to bridge the gap between the modern world and the now-retro one, but this one connects to a dedicated service which points towards files no matter where they’re stored. There is some local storage, but it can also retrieve files from any active URL, and Meatloaf retrieves the files and then sends them to the Commodore over that serial link.

Part of what makes this unique is that the user doesn’t need to configure Meatloaf in any particular way, everything is done from the Commodore as long as the URL is known to the user. The system can even parse nested files like archive file types and send them along to the computer just like it would if they were on a period-correct floppy drive. There’s a GitHub project page as well for anyone looking to get into the weeds of this serial data interface.

Even though laptops from around the early 2000s came with just about every conceivable port on them, they still would often feature a somewhat unusual combined video output port. While at its core this was just a 4-pin analog S-video output, the three additional pins on the mini-DIN connector provided some more features. Of course, as [VWestlife] found out during his archaeological research, not every manufacturer used the same pinout here.

The naming for this specific port differs, with the name ‘S-video+’ appearing regularly, yet many descriptions glossing over the additional pins and only mentioning that it can be used with a 4-pin S-video connector. As it turns out, most manufacturers used roughly the same pinout, matching the shown Dell one. This adds composite output, along with two S/PDIF digital audio pins that could be routed out with an adapter into their full-sized ports.

Of course, the Apple PowerBook G4 had to be that exception again, with it omitting the audio pins and putting the composite signal on pin 5. This left the last two pins completely unused, but serving to completely confuse anyone who thought that they could get more out of the port with an adapter for those uncouth PC systems.

As to the remark at the end about how the transition to ‘just USB ports’ has made everything better, we’d challenge the average person to look at a random USB-C port and tell based on its appearance which standards it actually supports.

The Philips CD-i is a console with many shortcomings, and those include the power supply. For whatever reason, the engineering team decided it should use an 8P8C connector just like Ethernet. Thus, just like your Ethernet cables, it has that annoying problem of the tab snapping off all the time. [MattKC] wondered if the CD-i could benefit from a USB power upgrade instead, and set about making it a reality.

The plan was simple enough—get the CD-i running off of USB-C instead of the ungainly original power supply that shipped with the unit. Given the console runs almost exclusively off of 5 V power, it should have been pretty easy. Only, the original spec adds one little detail that makes things a bit harder. The console is designed to draw up to 3 A from the 5 V line, while also having a -5 V line at 0.2 A. If not for that negative supply, it would have been easy to run the unit off any old 15 W USB-C charger spitting out 5 V. That extra negative line complicates things, because while the negative line could be created with some supporting electronics, it’s hard to find that extra watt from most chargers. While there are plenty of higher-wattage USB-C chargers, the majority tend to use higher voltages to deliver the additional power, capping the 5 V output at 3 amps.

Thus, it was necessary to work a little harder. [MattKC] decided to build a board that would negotiate with a USB-C charger for 9 V operation to get the power budget necessary. This would then be stepped down to 5 V, while there would also be an inversion step to supply the -5 V line, too. A CH221K chip does the job of negotiating a 9 V USB-C power supply, while a TPSM84538 steps the voltage down to 5 V with the capacity to supply up to 5 A. An LT3580 chip then inverts this voltage for the 5 V line. There’s also a power switching circuit on board because the CD-i included some of that functionality in the original power brick.

If you’ve got a CD-i and you’re sick of fussing with the original power supply, this could be a great upgrade. We’ve also explored USB Power Delivery in detail before, if you need a primer.

If we’re honest, there aren’t a whole lot of accessories coming out for the MSX computer line this holiday period. There is, however, a new sound expansion cartridge for the diehard fans out there, thanks to [Ricardo Suzuki].

It’s called the Misato MSX, and it’s a cartridge you can build yourself to give your computer a grander set of sound capabilities than it ever had before. At the heart of the cartridge lies the Yamaha YMF288, an OPN3 chip that offered three Software Sound Generator (SSG) channels, six FM channels, and six rhythm channels. Paired with a decent DAC chip, it provides deliciously rich synthesized sound very characteristic of that 1980s/1990s FM synthesis era. The cart can be used for play of a wide variety of OPN music, or creating your own compositions with the right software tools. Audio output can be had either from the stereo line out jack on the cart itself, or mixed down to mono and passed to the MSX’s internal mixer.

If you’ve got an MSX that is a little weedy in its sound capabilities, this cart could be just the thing you’re looking for. We’ve looked at some fun MSX machines before, too. If you’re cooking up your own upgrades for retro machines, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

For as many sensors, cameras, and computers as there are on modern cars, they ought to be a dream to poke around in and customize to one’s liking. Unfortunately they’re generally plagued by the same locked-down, proprietary software that most consumer electronics ship with, making it very difficult to interact with these systems in ways the manufacturer doesn’t approve of. There are a few exceptions to this rule, though, and [Sasha] built this system which backs up the footage from their electric car’s on-board cameras automatically to a NAS.

The system is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which plugs directly into a USB port in the car’s glovebox. To set it up, the software only needs to be flashed onto the Pi and then it can be controlled from a smartphone. It can connect to any NAS over a variety of protocols and keeps track of what footage has been backed up, and can even automatically restart a backup if the car drives away before it has completed. It also automatically frees up space on the car’s internal drives by deleting any files that have already been synced to the NAS. All of the data is kept in the user’s control as well, and nothing leaves the LAN unless the user sets up backups to a cloud service on their own.

If you have the correct electric car and a Pi other than a Zero 2 W, [Sasha] also has a package for other Raspberry Pis that should work. Unfortunately this was designed for a specific electric car; other makes and models won’t work with this out of the box, but we hope that won’t stop others from checking out the GitHub page anyway trying to figure out what’s going on under the hoods of their car’s electrical and computer systems. Sometimes this leads to things you might not expect, like using the car itself as a video game controller.

If you’ve ever pulled apart a set of digital calipers, you’ve probably marvelled at the capacitive encoder that does all the measuring work. There’s nothing stopping you from using the same techniques yourself, as [Nick] demonstrates with an open-source capacitive encoder of his own design.

The sensor PCB works by by having a grid of eight transmitting antennas, etched into a PCB, beneath a larger receiving antenna. The transmitting antennas pulse out a pattern as the sensor PCB moves, with the signals bouncing back from the reflector PCB which is fixed in place. The varying capacitance caused by the position of the reflector elements relative to the sensor PCB varies the strength of the pulses hitting the receiving antenna. A microcontroller—in this case an STM32—can read those pulses to determine the displacement of the sensor PCB relative to the reflector down to a very fine degree. In this case, to an accuracy of 40 micrometers. Not bad!

If you need ultra-fine linear tracking for something you’re building, you might find this project very useful. Files are available on Github for the curious, along with a great explainer on exactly how the capacitive coupling becomes a positional reading. You can also study previous teardowns we’ve featured on cheap digital calipers, just to round out your education further. If you’re working on your own impressive workshop equipment, or subcomponents of such things therein, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

There are plenty of Wi-Fi radios out there that were built over the last two decades or so. However, many older models are now becoming less useful because many internet radio stations are switching to newer streaming formats that they don’t support. [Clifford Farrugia] has been working on a little project to save these appliances from the e-waste bin.

The HLS Radio Converter is the result of that work. It’s a small open-source tool that converts modern HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol streams into regular old HTTP MP3 streams that older internet radio appliances are built to decode. You can run the tool on something as simple as an old Raspberry Pi. To make it work, you just give the tool the URL of the stream you’re looking to convert, and it then spits out a new URL to point your radio to which has the stream in the old-school format instead.

It’s a simple tool, but one that should prove very useful if you have a beloved old internet radio that can’t handle modern streams. We’ve featured lots of fun projects in this vein before, too, like this ultra-tiny internet radio build. If you’re working on your own projects in this space, be sure to let us know via the tipsline.

KiCad is a useful tool for designing printed circuit boards, but it’s of no use to you if you can’t install it on the computer you’re on. To get around that, [Akshay Rukade] has whipped up a browser-based alternative to help keep you working in less permissive environments. It’s called ZiroEDA.

Quite simply, ZiroEDA is a TypeScript port of KiCad 10.0.6’s C++ source code. You get the schematic editor, the PCB editor, the interactive router, and the electrical and design rule checkers all running in a browser. It can open .kicad_pro files as you’d expect, and you can edit and save them as you would if you were working in standard KiCad directly.

[Akshay] reports that KiCad’s own kicad-cli was used for compatibility testing, and that zone fills came out vertex-identical from ZiroEDA versus using KiCad itself. With that said, the project is still a work in progress, and some dialogs from the original software are still missing. Projects are said to be end-to-end encrypted, but you’ll hopefully lose your job quickly if you try and put anything important to national security through a tool like this. You can always try it, just to give your higher-ups a heart attack.

Source is available on GitHub if you want to see how it all ticks. We’ve featured other great KiCad hacks before, too, like this GPU-accelerated autorouter. If you’re working on PCB tools of your own, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

Measuring electric currents is an essential element of many electrical systems, but doing so in a way that is as nonintrusive as possible is not an easy problem to solve. Due to this we got a wide variety of current sensors to choose from for any given application, with [ElectrArc240] running us through these variants in a recent video.

The fairly low-tech, cheap and quite reliable method of using a shunt resistor is first demonstrated. This sees a lot of use in fairly low-voltage and low-current applications, with for example videocards using it to limit the amount of power the GPU can use, a feature that modders will happily bypass. Here simply the voltage drop across a known resistance value is measured, from which the current can be derived.

Of course, you got higher voltage and higher current applications too, as well as direct- and alternating current, with the latter especially allowing for easy current measurements simply from the electromagnetic field, or flux. Anyone who has used a clamp meter can attest to that such contact-free current sensing works, even for DC applications.

Beyond the basic transformer type you got many variants including Hall-Effect, TMR and fluxgate sensors, as well as the fiber-optic current sensor that uses an interferometer to measure the phase-change induced by the magnetic field – the Faraday effect – to the transmitted electromagnetic radiation. These more exotic types will improve resolution, at the cost of a rapidly increasing void in your project budget.

These various sensor types and their construction are demonstrated and discussed in the video, including when you’d want to use a specific type, and what the potential gotchas are with each type. Even if for many applications a simple shunt resistor suffices, it’s a good idea to know these different types, as well as their underlying theory of operation.

The Philips CD-i was not popular upon its launch in 1991, and is barely acknowledged today. In the opinion of [MattKC], it had a particularly poor selection of controllers, too, and it’s often hard to find used examples anyway. To rectify this situation, he whipped up an adapter to let him use Sega Genesis controllers instead.

The benefit of the Genesis controller is that it uses DB-9 connectors that are readily available, and it’s got a simple pinout that is compatible with the Atari joystick port, too. It makes interfacing the controllers supremely easy. Converting the controllers required using a Arduino Pro Micro to read the Genesis pad and translate it into something suitable for the CD-i.

On the Sega controller side, the microcontroller just has to strobe one pin while reading the state of others to determine what all the buttons are doing. The CD-i, however, expects a serial data stream from the original Philips controllers. Thus, the microcontroller is set up to poll the Genesis controller, and then translate this into the serial commands for the CD-i. It gets a little complicated, because the CD-i wasn’t really built for game controllers, but mouse-like inputs instead. But it’s not too hard to get things working once you understand what the weird Philips console is looking for.

There aren’t really any good games on the CD-i, so this isn’t a project that the retro gaming masses will be flocking to. Still, if you have a CD-i and you want to hook up some controllers on the cheap, this might come in handy. Alternatively, you could also try the BlueRetro project.

We don’t generally think of 3D printing and knitting in the same sentence. One uses threads and fine motor control, while the other requires great knowledge of pressing buttons and plastics. That said, they both entail stacking material over and over until a finished product emerges. So why not blend the two crafts together? [Joram de Haas] decided to work on just that in the form of FilaLoom.

This isn’t the first time we have seen additional elements embedded into 3D printed parts here on Hackaday. However, this particular implementation has some extra features which allow the embedded structures to grow larger than most examples prior. Instead of placing any implements directly into a structure by hand, all thread is placed by a tool head not so different from tool-changer printers. Using both the 3D printing tool head and the thread tool, some truly interesting properties can emerge from the finished product. If you aren’t interested in the weird webbing properties themselves, you surely could appreciate the possibilities demonstrated by the 3D knits.

You might not have a specific use case for thread printing, but why not check out some other fancy 3D printing techniques? Here’s a group of various design techniques that will certainly make you think twice in your next design!

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Thanks [Sam Smith] for the tip!

Broadcast radio isn’t as popular as it once was, its popularity suffering in turn due to technologies like MP3 players and music streaming services. If you don’t fancy either of those, you might like to listen to some internet radio stations, using a rig like the one [CodersCafeTech] built.

It’s a simple desktop radio set, but instead of tuning in to AM or FM broadcast bands, it has an antenna for 2.4 GHz instead. That’s because inside this radio is an ESP32-S3 development board, which is equipped with onboard WiFi hardware that lets it connect to the internet. It’s hooked up to a 1.3-inch OLED display over I2C, which acts as a user interface in concert with a rotary encoder. Sound is handled with a MAX98357 I2S audio amplifier, hooked up to a small 3 W speaker. Once programmed appropriately, all the unit needs is a WiFi SSID and password, and the URL for the internet radio station you’d like to listen to.

We’ve featured a few internet radio builds over the years, as well as a rather fun build that saw a Macintosh SE/30 hooked up to Spotify. If you’re tinkering with something along those lines, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

If you have developed in Pascal or Delphi in the past decades, you’re probably familiar with the Lazarus IDE that provides an interface to the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC), much like Delphi’s IDE. For users of Lazarus IDE there’s now an exciting new development, with the announcement that FPC and Lazarus now support dynamic packages.

The upshot of this is that you no longer need to rebuild the IDE if you want to add components, controls and Lazarus extensions. In addition you can use this same dynamic package feature in your own Pascal applications this way.

Naturally this is a great improvement, and it’s good to see more improvements to such a venerable programming language. Not only is it still being used today for just about anything, including web development, but there is a good case to be made for using Pascal today as it’s no longer the language it was half a decade ago.

We’d also be remiss to not mention the legacy of [Niklaus Wirth], who not only created Pascal, but was also instrumental in the development of Object Pascal together with Apple. This effort ultimately led to everything from Turbo Pascal to Delphi, FPC and so much more, making it a heartening sight to see this legacy being kept alive today.

When most radio enthusiasts start trying to pick up signals from satellites, they might put together a quick-and-dirty Yagi antenna and try to catch a repeater as is passes overhead, or they might grab a small unused dish from a satellite TV service and point it up at a weather satellite by hand to try to decode some of the data coming down. But [Cranktown City] had a different approach. He found an eight-foot dish online and built a massive articulating base station out of it as his first exploration into the world of satellites.

The first problem that needs to be solved with a dish of this size is its mounting location. This installation uses a large post and concrete foundation with a custom-fabricated metal base at the bottom. The metal base houses all of the electronics not just for receiving signals from the dish, but also for orienting it properly. That includes a large metal gear driven by a wheelchair motor to control its azimuth and a linear actuator to take care of its elevation. Getting the large dish onto the frame was its own ordeal, complicated by the fact that it’s not uniform in its shape and has to be mounted in a specific orientation.

With everything assembled, the circularly-polarized antenna installed, and the computers up and running, the dish is able to track satellites across the sky and download data from things like GOES weather satellites. [Cranktown City] also built in a system that detects wind and points the dish vertically when it goes above a certain speed. This level of effort is impressive, and absolutely not required to listen in on plenty of sattelite activity out in the sky, but this installation will certainly give [Cranktown City] a lot of mileage and possibly even work for some radio astronomy.