[Adam Haile] has been spending some time improving his CNC router and his latest change is a custom wasteboard with improved bed support. Not only does the MDF wasteboard have plenty of threaded inserts to make for easy clamping solutions, but [Adam] replaced the frame underneath the board with a new set of aluminum extrusions […]
The keyboard and mouse are great, we’re big fans. But for some tasks, such as seeking around in audio and video files, a rotary encoder is a more intuitive way to get the job done. [VincentMakes] liked the idea of having a knob he could turn to adjust his system volume or move forward and […]
It’s wasn’t so long ago that RC transmitters, at least ones worth owning, were expensive pieces of gear. Even more recently than that, the idea of an RC transmitter running an open source firmware would have been considered a pipe dream. Yet today buying cheap imported transmitters and flashing a community developed firmware (if it […]
The lingua franca of electronic design is the schematic. I can pick up a datasheet written in Chinese (a language I do not read or speak) and usually get a half-decent idea of what the part is all about from the drawings. Unfortunately, even as my design experience has grown over the years, I haven’t […]
The most iconic parts of computer history come alive next weekend in Seattle during the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest. It’s all happening March 23rd and 24th at the Living Computers Museum+Labs. VCF celebrates the great hardware that has sprung up during the technological march of the last fifty years. The VCF series has been […]
If you code or write a lot, you live or die with your keyboard. The Venabili web site calls Venabili “the delightful keyboard” which begs the question: what makes a keyboard delightful. The site continues: “Venabili is a 40% mechanical, programmable, ergonomic and hackable computer keyboard. Being a fully programmable keyboard, it gives you the ability […]
The Compact Disc is 40 years old, and for those of us who remember its introduction it still has that sparkle of a high-tech item even as it slides into oblivion at the hands of streaming music services. There was a time when a rainbow motif was extremely futuristic. Bill Bertram (CC BY-SA 2.5) If […]
[Adam Zeloof] (legally) obtained a retired electric scooter and documented how it worked and how he got it working again. The scooter had a past life as a pay-to-ride electric vehicle and “$1 TO START” is still visible on the grip tape. It could be paid for and unlocked with a smartphone app, but [Adam] […]
Bitcoin’s great, if you sold at the end of 2017. If you’re still holding, your opinion might be a little more sour. The cost to compete in the great hashing race continues to rise while cryptocurrency values remain underwhelming. While getting involved at the top end is prohibitively expensive, you can still have some fun […]
FPGAs are wonderful things, packed with logic cells that can be reconfigured as your heart desires. They excel at signal processing, anything requiring speed, and recreating vintage hardware. In that vein, [Jon Thomasson] decided to bring back the original Nintendo Entertainment System, in perfboard form. The build uses a Spartan 6 from Xilinx, which [Jon] […]