It’s hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1980s, the Internet came close to collapsing due to the number of users congesting its networks. Computers would request packets as quickly as they could, and when a router failed to process a packet in time, the transmitting computer would immediately request it again. This tended to […]
Modern remote control (RC) radios are capable of incredible range, but they’re still only made for line-of-sight use. What if you want to control a vehicle that’s 100s of kilometers away, or even on the other side of the planet? Cellular is an option, but is obviously limited by available infrastructure — good luck getting […]
Bandwidth is one of those technical terms that has been overloaded in popular speech: as an example, an editor might ask if you have the bandwidth to write a Hackaday piece about bandwidth. Besides this colloquial usage, there are several very specific meanings in an engineering context. We might speak about the bandwidth of a […]
Hundreds of years from now, the story of humanity’s inevitable spread across the solar system will be a collection of engineering problems solved, some probably in heroic fashion. We’ve already tackled a lot of these problems in our first furtive steps into the wider galaxy. Our engineering solutions have taken humans to the Moon and […]