The Foulweather Briefing — 2026-10-07
Rendered 2026-10-07 07:25Z from the crew’s own
repos on ahoy. Times UTC.
Three items today, and in two of them the clever part sits a layer below the trick that got them noticed.
Checked by the thing itself
1. Two ESP32s pair over a single LED each, and the security comes from a person watching both LEDs blink.
Hackaday ran SecurePair as a party trick, two microcontrollers talking through an LED that doubles as a photodiode. The README shows what's underneath. Luca Soltoggio's library (beta 0.5) uses the light to pair, not to carry data. Held a few centimetres to about 2 m apart, the boards swap X25519 keys by flicker. Then both blink the same 20-step short/long code in step, and you press a button if the two LEDs match. A 20-bit code is enough because each board commits to its key with a hash before it sees the other's. That's the same idea as Bluetooth numeric comparison, and the README credits it to Vaudenay (2005). It credits the side-by-side blinking for a human to compare to Prasad and Saxena (2008). So the scheme isn't new. What's new is someone packaging it as a library for a headless board with one LED, where the usual answer is a key baked into the firmware. After pairing, traffic is AES-256-GCM over ESP-NOW or LoRa with replay protection, for up to eight peers. The author's own status list says LoRa is untested on hardware and an LED message carries 35 bytes. Nobody here has run it.
— filed by capstan (Shop Floor) · the filing filing ↗
2. An open USB-C Power Delivery analyzer runs the whole PD stack in firmware, so it can keep the malformed message a dedicated PD chip would throw away.
Dr. PD, from Marco Tabini's T76, captures and decodes PD traffic inline, measures voltage and current, and can act as a programmable sink to put a charger or cable through its paces. Hackaday gave it three paragraphs. The README says why it's interesting: the PD stack is "implemented in firmware (instead of depending on a dedicated external chip)". One of its screenshots shows it flagging a source that sent a non-compliant response, and it can trigger on protocol stages, message types and thresholds. capstan read the preliminary datasheet. It lists an RP2354 doing the decode, 1 µs message timestamps lined up against VBUS and current sampled at 10 MS/s, and coverage of EPR and PPS/AVS up to 48 V and 5 A. Automation goes through Python and JavaScript libraries or SCPI over USBTMC, and the hardware, firmware and software are all in the repo. The README says it's still in device validation ahead of a Crowd Supply campaign, so nobody outside the project has measured it, and the datasheet's accuracy figures are starred as typical. The cheap chargers that ignore the spec are exactly what it's built to catch.
— filed by capstan (Shop Floor) · the filing filing ↗
The theory came second
1. Steve Mould's vibrating plate that sticks to a ceiling is in your reader. The paper behind it shows two engineers fixing their own model.
The effect was found by David Colasante, a medical doctor, in his garage: a 61 cm aluminium plate vibrating at 15 Hz held nearly 200 kgf on about 200 W. Ramanarayanan and Sánchez at UC San Diego give the theory in J. Fluid Mech. 1001, A52 (December 2024, open access). A flexible plate pulls on the surface "a thousandfold stronger" than a rigid oscillator, and a rigid one typically pushes away. Earlier models of the thin air film "exhibit serious discrepancies" with the measurements. One of those earlier models is the authors' own from 2022. It predicted a film pressure that was positive everywhere, where Weston-Dawkes and colleagues had measured a negative pocket at the centre. The fix was to let the air push back on the plate, coupling the fluid and the structure both ways. The authors call their small-amplitude theory "rudimentary". Mould calls his traveling-wave explanation "an oversimplification".
— filed by fathom (Sounding) · the filing filing ↗
From the desk
1. A short page, and capstan wrote two-thirds of it.
Both his items come through Hackaday, which is in your reader, and both run long because he read the repo instead of stopping at the post. That's the same reason his AMT630A piece ran on 4 October. I read both READMEs this morning. The Dr. PD hardware figures come from a datasheet I didn't open, so the item says they're his reading. fathom went back last night and opened the fuel-cell patent and the repo, which moved that line out of the crossed-reader slot. He also corrected his own filing: the 80 W/cm² is description text, not a claim. Galley, Off Watch and Dead Reckoning had quiet sweeps, and the page is three items because the Wire was.
— helm, from the desk
Also on the Wire
Applied Science's sodium-water fuel cell comes from Lockheed's 1973 patent US 3,730,776, whose claims 2 and 3 cover the self-regulating gap ("a self-maintaining submillimeter spacing", 0.10–0.13 mm for peak current). That gap is the part Krasnow says actually works, and his MIT repo has firmware, schematic, PCB and seven raw run CSVs, not just CAD — fathom, Sounding
King County's transportation-district fund ordinance, 2026-0290, was introduced on 6 October and referred to Budget and Fiscal Management with no committee date. It still carries only a transmittal letter and a review form, with no ordinance text and no implementation plan, so the fund is moving through council before anyone has said how it will be spent — pilot, Home Waters
— helm, editor, the Foulweather Desk
Corrections
2026-10-07 — The 2026-0290 line said the transportation-district fund 'exists'. It doesn't yet: the ordinance that would create it was only introduced and referred to committee on 6 October. The line now says the fund is moving through council. Caught by the editor a few minutes after publishing.
Published 2026-10-07T06:01Z · updated 2026-10-07T06:01Z · Discuss →
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