Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025

Some technology roundups feel like a carefully organized trade show. The March 23, 2025 edition of Hackaday Links felt more like opening a workshop drawer and finding a spacecraft checklist, an Atari joystick, an artificial intelligence meme generator, and a breadboard knitted from yarn.

That unusual combination is precisely why the roundup remains interesting. Its stories ranged from serious questions about spacecraft reliability and human health in microgravity to the gloriously unnecessary challenge of making soft, wearable prototyping hardware. Together, they offered a snapshot of modern maker culture: ambitious, skeptical, nostalgic, experimental, and occasionally held together with conductive thread.

Here is a deeper look at the major stories behind Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025, what they revealed about technology, and why they mattered beyond their amusing headlines.

A Short Spaceflight That Became a 286-Day Mission

The biggest story in the roundup was the return of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. They launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner on June 5, 2024, for the spacecraft’s first crewed test flight. The original plan called for a mission lasting a little more than a week. Instead, technical problems transformed the trip into a stay of roughly nine months.

Starliner experienced helium leaks and problems involving several reaction-control thrusters while approaching the International Space Station. Engineers spent weeks testing hardware, analyzing data, and debating whether the spacecraft could safely carry its crew home. NASA eventually decided that Starliner would return without Williams and Wilmore rather than expose them to a level of uncertainty the agency considered unacceptable.

That decision provides a useful lesson in engineering culture. A test vehicle does not have to explode dramatically to reveal a serious problem. Uncertainty itself can be dangerous, especially when engineers cannot confidently model how a damaged or inconsistent system will behave during a critical maneuver.

Returning With SpaceX Crew-9

Williams and Wilmore became part of the station’s long-duration crew and were assigned seats aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom. They returned on March 18, 2025, with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

The capsule splashed down safely off the coast of Florida at 5:57 p.m. Eastern time. Williams and Wilmore had spent 286 days in space, traveled more than 121 million miles, and completed 4,576 orbits around Earth. Their extended stay was not an idle waiting period, either. They participated in station maintenance, scientific research, technology demonstrations, and spacewalks.

Williams also increased her career spacewalking total to more than 62 hours, setting a record for the most cumulative spacewalking time by a woman. The American Crew-9 members collectively contributed hundreds of hours to research involving plant growth, stem cells, human health, station technology, and the survival of microorganisms outside the ISS.

The Dolphin Welcoming Committee

As if the landing needed an additional cinematic touch, a pod of dolphins appeared near the capsule and recovery teams. After months of technical reviews, schedule changes, political arguments, and breathless headlines about whether the astronauts were “stranded,” nature supplied an ending that looked suspiciously designed by a family-friendly movie studio.

The charming footage should not distract from the engineering significance of the mission. NASA’s commercial crew strategy depends on having more than one transportation system. Starliner’s problems demonstrated why redundancy matters, while the Crew Dragon return showed how an alternative system can help absorb delays and unexpected mission changes.

ESA Offered Volunteers a Very Strange Bedtime

The roundup’s second space-related story sounded like a dream job written by someone who had already hit the snooze button: remain in a water-supported bed for 10 days and receive compensation.

The reality was considerably more demanding. The European Space Agency’s Vivaldi III campaign used dry immersion to reproduce some of the physical effects of microgravity. Ten male volunteers rested in containers resembling bathtubs. A waterproof fabric kept their bodies dry while water supported them evenly, removing many of the normal pressure points created by gravity.

The volunteers remained immersed for 10 days with their heads and arms above the water. Meals were served on floating supports. Even bathroom breaks had to preserve the required body position, meaning participants were transferred to specialized trolleys rather than simply standing up and wandering off.

Suddenly, the payment sounded less like easy money and more like hazard pay for being professionally horizontal.

Why Simulate Microgravity on Earth?

Spaceflight changes the human body in ways that are difficult to reproduce in an ordinary laboratory. Without regular gravitational loading, muscles weaken and bones lose density. Fluids shift toward the head, cardiovascular function changes, and astronauts may experience effects involving vision, metabolism, immunity, balance, and the nervous system.

Sending large groups of experimental volunteers to orbit would be slightly inconvenient and catastrophically expensive. Ground-based analogs such as dry immersion and head-down bed rest give researchers a more accessible way to study similar physiological changes.

Vivaldi III compared 10 days of dry immersion with a parallel 10-day head-down bed-rest study. Researchers monitored a total of 20 participants to better understand which method most accurately reproduces specific aspects of microgravity.

The results may support future astronaut health programs, particularly for long missions to the Moon or Mars. They may also help physicians understand prolonged inactivity on Earth, including the challenges faced by older adults, patients confined to bed, and people recovering from serious injuries.

Can Artificial Intelligence Make Better Memes?

Another story in Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025 investigated a question humanity apparently could not avoid forever: Can a large language model produce a better meme than a person who has spent 14 consecutive hours scrolling online?

A research study divided participants into three groups. One group created meme captions without artificial intelligence. A second group worked with an advanced language model. A third condition used captions produced entirely by the AI system. Independent evaluators then scored the results for humor, creativity, and shareability.

On average, the AI-generated memes performed better across the three categories. That does not mean the machines achieved complete comedic domination. The funniest individual memes still came from humans, while human-AI collaborations produced some of the strongest results for creativity and shareability.

Average Competence Versus Exceptional Creativity

The findings illustrate an important distinction between consistency and brilliance. An AI system can rapidly generate dozens of acceptable ideas without getting tired, embarrassed, distracted, or emotionally wounded when nobody laughs. This makes it very effective at producing material that reaches a reliable average quality.

Humans are less consistent. We produce bad jokes, confusing references, and punchlines that made more sense at 2 a.m. However, people are also capable of connecting personal experience, cultural context, deliberate awkwardness, and surprise in ways that create exceptional humor.

For creators, the practical lesson is not that AI has “won” comedy. It is that artificial intelligence can function as an idea generator, variation machine, or brainstorming partner. A person still has to decide whether the result is clever, painfully obvious, socially appropriate, or likely to get an account banned before lunch.

Best Electronics Keeps Atari Hardware Alive

Retrocomputing stories often focus on museums, emulators, or collectors paying alarming sums for boxes they are afraid to open. Best Electronics represents a more practical side of preservation: keeping old Atari hardware usable through replacement parts, technical support, repairs, and newly engineered upgrades.

By March 2025, the California-based business had operated for more than four decades. It reportedly carried more than 5,000 commonly requested Atari products, while maintaining additional stock not fully listed online. Its inventory included new-old-stock components, keyboard parts, power supplies, joystick hardware, cables, custom boards, and repair materials for systems that vanished from ordinary retail shelves decades ago.

The company also claimed to have invested more than $100,000 in engineering and product development. That work included redesigned joystick circuit boards, upgraded keyboard components, improved power supplies, and replacements for parts that were either unreliable or no longer manufactured.

A Web 1.0 Store for Web 0.5 Computers

Best Electronics’ website gained attention for looking as though it had survived untouched from an earlier era of the internet. It is dense, text-heavy, unconventional, and not especially interested in modern minimalist design.

Oddly, that presentation feels appropriate. A polished storefront filled with floating animations would almost seem disrespectful when the merchandise includes replacement parts for 1980s joysticks. The website’s eccentricity reinforces the sense that customers are entering a specialist workshop rather than a generic online marketplace.

The story also highlights an overlooked part of technological preservation. Software archives and emulators are important, but physical machines eventually fail. Plastics crack, contacts corrode, capacitors age, and proprietary components disappear. Without small suppliers willing to manufacture obscure parts, functional hardware can quietly become display-only history.

The Breadboard That Was Literally Made From Threads

The final item in the roundup may have been the most perfectly Hackaday-like project of the week: a functioning breadboard made from yarn and conductive thread.

Creative technologist Alanna Okun developed the project for New York University’s ITP Stupid Hackathon, an event that encourages participants to build ideas that are absurd, unnecessary, or gloriously impractical. Her project, often called the Threadboard, translated the grid structure of an electronic breadboard into a knitted textile.

Okun knitted the body in advance and then added the functional connections during the hackathon. Conductive thread reproduced the shared electrical rows and columns normally hidden inside a plastic breadboard. The result could power simple components, including a small motor.

Debugging involved familiar electrical challenges in an unfamiliar material. Connections needed to be strong enough to conduct reliably but separated well enough to avoid accidental contact. The finished object resembled a cushion that had enrolled in an introductory electronics course.

Why Build Something Deliberately Impractical?

At first glance, a knitted breadboard solves a problem nobody has. Conventional breadboards are cheap, compact, standardized, and notably less flammable. Yet the project succeeded because practical utility was not its only purpose.

The Threadboard created a bridge between textile craft and electronics. Knitting patterns helped Okun interpret circuit patterns, turning an intimidating technical system into something connected to an existing skill. That is a valuable educational strategy: unfamiliar concepts often become easier when learners can connect them to a medium they already understand.

The project also shows why playful constraints can produce meaningful experimentation. A challenge framed around “stupid” ideas gives participants permission to ignore market demand, product strategy, efficiency, and respectability. Once those pressures disappear, people are free to investigate materials and metaphors that conventional development would reject during the first meeting.

What Connected the March 23 Hackaday Stories?

These stories appear unrelated, but they share several themes central to engineering and maker culture.

Redundancy Is More Valuable Than Optimism

The Starliner mission demonstrated why critical systems need backup options. Confidence is not a substitute for verified performance, particularly when human safety is involved.

Simulation Makes Extreme Problems Testable

Vivaldi III showed how researchers can reproduce selected aspects of spaceflight without launching every participant into orbit. A good simulation does not copy reality perfectly; it isolates the variables that researchers need to study.

AI Is Strongest When Its Role Is Clearly Defined

The meme experiment suggested that AI can generate consistently acceptable material and reduce creative effort. Humans remain essential for judgment, cultural sensitivity, editing, and the occasional genuinely brilliant joke.

Old Technology Survives Through Active Maintenance

Best Electronics illustrates that preservation is not merely storing hardware in a climate-controlled room. It involves documentation, repairs, reverse engineering, replacement manufacturing, and patient communication with people who still use the machines.

Play Is a Serious Engineering Tool

The knitted breadboard may have been deliberately silly, but it encouraged genuine learning about conductivity, circuit layout, material behavior, and debugging. Playfulness can lower the emotional cost of failure, which often makes experimentation easier.

Conclusion: A Perfectly Strange Week in Technology

Hackaday Links: March 23, 2025 captured technology at several different scales. At one end was a crewed spacecraft program dealing with risk, redundancy, and months of operational uncertainty. At the other was a handmade textile circuit built because an absurd idea deserved one enthusiastic day of experimentation.

Between those extremes were scientists simulating microgravity in water-supported beds, researchers measuring whether AI could outperform humans at memes, and a specialist company keeping Atari hardware alive one joystick board at a time.

The roundup’s enduring appeal comes from treating all these subjects as parts of the same technological culture. Engineering is not limited to enormous budgets or world-changing products. It also includes preservation, curiosity, creative misuse, careful testing, and projects whose primary purpose is making their builders laugh.

Note: This article is an original editorial synthesis based on verified reporting, official mission information, published research, and documented maker projects available around March 23, 2025.