At some point in your electrical pursuits, you’ll need to make a connector. Maybe you’re designing something that will connect to another device, or maybe the spaghetti mess of wires coming out of your Raspberry Pi has become a pain to deal with. Whatever the reason, a proper connector can solve a lot of headaches […]
Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond our CRT monitors and 300 baud Hayes Supermodems. Service providers varied by region, of course. The French postal and telephone service rolled […]
Aerogels have changed how a lot of high tech equipment is insulated. Resembling frozen smoke, the gel is lightweight and has extremely low thermal conductivity. However there’s always a downside, traditional aerogel material is brittle. Any attempt to compress it beyond 20% of its original size will change the material. Researchers at UCLA and eight […]
In his continuing quest to reduce the parts count of a robot as far as possible, [Carl Bugeja] has hit upon an unusual design: robots built of almost nothing but PCBs. Admittedly, calling these floppy four-legged critters robots is still a bit of a stretch at this point. The video below shows that while they […]
There are a lot of ARM microcontrollers out there, and the parts from ST are featured prominently is the high-power builds we’re seeing. The STM32F4 and ~F7 are powerhouses with great support, and the STM32F0 and the other younger children of the family make for very good, low-power microcontrollers. Now, the STM32 family is getting […]
Dial-up modems were well known for their screeching soundtrack during the connection process. Modern networking eschews audio based communication methods, so we no longer have to deal with such things. However, all is not lost. [::vtol::]’s Mayak installation brings us a new sound, all its own. The installation consists of four WiFi routers, connected to […]
Oh, what’s KiCon you say? KiCon is the first dedicated conference on our favorite libre EDA tool: KiCad, organized by friend of Hackaday Chris Gammell and scheduled for April 26 and 27th in Chicago. Having stuffed ourselves full of treats through the holidays, followed by sleeping through the calm winter months, we find ourselves once […]
Listen, it hurts to hear, but somebody needs to say it. It’s over, OK? You’ve got to admit it and move on. Sure, you could get away with it for a week or two in January, but now it’s just getting weird. No matter how hard you fight it, the facts are the facts: the […]
We like blinky things. We’re moths drawn to the flame of serially-addressable RGB LEDs. If the LEDs are smaller, we want to know. If you can drive more of them, we want to know. That said, the most interesting news out of CES last January was both right up our alley, and immensely disappointing. Corsair, […]
There was a time, not so very long ago, when simply getting a 3D printer to squirt out an object that was roughly the intended shape and size of what the user saw on their computer screen was an accomplishment. But like every other technology, the state of the art has moved forward. Today the […]