Hackaday Links: November 16, 2025

November 16, 2025 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

We make no claims to be an expert on anything, but we do know that rule number one of working with big, expensive, mission-critical equipment is: Don’t break the big, expensive, mission-critical equipment. Unfortunately, though, that’s just what happened to the Deep Space Network’s 70-meter dish antenna at Goldstone, California. NASA announced the outage this week, but the accident that damaged the dish occurred much earlier, in mid-September. DSS-14, as the antenna is known, is a vital part of the Deep Space Network, which uses huge antennas at three sites (Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra) to stay in touch with satellites and probes from the Moon to the edge of the solar system. The three sites are located roughly 120 degrees apart on the globe, which gives the network full coverage of the sky regardless of the local time.

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Where There Is No Down: Measuring Liquid Levels In Space

August 26, 2025 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

As you can probably imagine, we get tips on a lot of really interesting projects here at Hackaday. Most are pretty serious, at least insofar as they aim to solve a specific problem in some new and clever way. Some, though, are a little more lighthearted, such as a fun project that came across the tips line back in May. Charmingly dubbed “pISSStream,” the project taps into NASA’s official public telemetry stream for the International Space Station to display the current level of the urine tank on the Space Station.

Now, there are a couple of reactions to a project like this when it comes across your desk. First and foremost is bemusement that someone would spend time and effort on a project like this — not that we don’t appreciate it; the icons alone are worth the price of admission. Next is sheer amazement that NASA provides access to a parameter like this in its public API, with a close second being the temptation to look at what other cool endpoints they expose.

But for my part, the first thing I thought of when I saw that project was, “How do they even measure liquid levels in space?” In a place where up and down don’t really have any practical meaning, the engineering challenges of liquid measurement must be pretty interesting. That led me down the rabbit hole of low-gravity process engineering, a field that takes everything you know about how fluids behave and flushes it into the space toilet.

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Using Forward- And Reverse-Osmosis To Let Astronaut EVA Suits Produce Fresh Water From Urine

July 14, 2024 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

An uncomfortable reality with the spacesuits used for extravehicular activities (EVA) – commonly referred to as spacewalks – is that the astronaut spends hours in them, during which normal bodily functions like urinating and defecating continue. The current EVA record at the ISS is currently a hair under nine hours, necessitating a new approach. A team of researchers have now pitched the idea of an in-suit water recovery system with an article by [Sofia Etlin] and colleagues as published in Frontiers in Space Technologies.

For the current Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) EVA spacesuit the current solution is what is called the MAG: the Maximum Absorbency Garment, which is effectively a fancy adult diaper with sodium polyacrylate as absorbent for up to 2 L of fluids. It replaced the urine collection device (UCD) that was used until female astronauts joined the astronaut corps in the 1970s. Generally astronauts aim to not defecate until they finish their EVA, which leaves urinating and the related activity of rehydrating as the spacesuits only have 0.95 L of water that has to last the duration of the spacewalk. Continue reading “Using Forward- And Reverse-Osmosis To Let Astronaut EVA Suits Produce Fresh Water From Urine” →

picture showing the re-built scale with an extra blue box with electronics on the bottom of it. on the scale, there's a transparent food-grade plastic glass with measurement marks on the side.

Urine Flow Measurement Made Accessible With UroFlow

September 29, 2022 by Arya Voronova 21 Comments

If you’re dealing with a chronic illness, the ability to continuously monitor your symptoms is indispensable, helping you gain valuable insights into what makes your body tick – or, rather, mis-tick. However, for many illnesses, you need specialized equipment to monitor them, and it tends to be that you can only visit your doctor every so often. Thankfully, we hackers can figure out ways to monitor our conditions on our own. With a condition called BPH (Benign Prostate Hyperplasia), one of the ways to monitor it is taking measurements of urinary flow rate. Being able to take these measurements at home provides better insights, and, having found flow rate measurement devices to be prohibitively expensive to even rent, [Jerry Smith] set out to build his own.

This build is truly designed to be reproducible for anyone who needs such a device. Jerry has intricately documented the project and its inner workings – the 31-page document contains full build instructions, BOM for ordering, PCB description and pinout diagrams, calibration and validation instructions, and even software flowcharts; the GitHub repo has everything else you might need. We’re pleasantly surprised – this amount of documentation isn’t typically seen in hacker projects, and is even more valuable considering that this is a medical device that other hackers in need will want to reproduce.