From a megacity's grid to a patch on a hat
Five makers' notes tonight, from a city's power distribution to a hand-sewn patch, and what each leaves you able to rebuild.
A world without the grid is a world where you have to know how the grid was built, then rebuilt. Tonight's lead comes from Hackaday's Donald Papp, writing on 3 October 2026, and it follows one such rebuild: how Delhi's power distribution went, in the words of Mini Shaji Thomas's IEEE Spectrum article, "from failing to first-class." In the early 2000s, Papp writes, a system serving more than twenty million people lost over half the power it generated to inefficiency and theft. The theft was carried out by both the powerful and the powerless.
The fixes are the kind worth remembering. Bare overhead wires were swapped for insulated cable carrying several conductors, which made illegal tapping harder and left the network safer and more resilient. Billing was simplified so paying became easier. Reactive power management improved, equipment was modernised, and the workforce was trained. Hackaday says the overhaul succeeded, though the work continues.
Communication would matter as much as power. On the same day, Hackaday's Jenny List reported that the common ESP32 Wi-Fi chip hides a way to work as a software-defined radio receiver, a capability found separately by Espargos and a Reddit user called h0m3us3r. An undocumented mode taps the raw signal before it reaches the Wi-Fi modem, so a computer can read it across the 2.4 GHz band and, on some chips, 5 GHz. Getting the samples off the chip is the bottleneck. Only receiving is documented so far. List likened it to the RTL-SDR, a digital TV receiver she called perhaps the most famous SDR receiver of all, on which another undocumented feature was once found.
Making parts matters too. Also on 3 October, Donald Papp described how Saheen Palayi turns empty soda cans into solder stencils, the thin masks that apply solder paste to a circuit board. Professional stencils are cut from steel, Papp notes, but home hackers keep reaching for soda cans. The trick is a clean cut. A 3D-printed, pipe-cutter-style tool presses a utility knife blade into the turning can so the thin aluminium doesn't kink, and the flattened sheet is cut to pattern with a fiber laser.
Some making is for wonder. On 4 October, Hackaday's Ian Bos wrote about Sebastian Lague's homemade pen plotter, built from an Arduino and stepper motors, that draws relief maps of the Moon. Lague's own algorithm turns elevation data into vector line drawings. Elevation matters because the Moon's regions are set apart by craters rather than colour, and he has plotted Mars and Earth the same way.
And some skills are plainer still. On 1 October, the Lost Art Press Blog, a publisher of hand-tool woodworking and traditional crafts, ran a short note by a writer credited as fitz on sewing a patch onto a hat by hand. "I'm worse now," fitz wrote of their needlework, "but just competent enough to sew a patch onto a hat." In the accompanying video the patch's corners are tacked down. The feed excerpt cuts off before fitz's fuller recommendation, which is where to pick up the original.
Sources
- Fixing a Power Grid That Loses Over Half Its Power to Inefficiency and Theft · Hackaday
- The ESP32, An SDR In Itself · Hackaday
- A Good DIY Solder Stencil Begins With a Cleanly-Sliced Soda Can · Hackaday
- The Big Moon Plot · Hackaday
- Sew You Want to Add a Patch… · Lost Art Press Blog