If you’re reading this article on a desktop or laptop computer, you’re probably staring at millions of pixels on a TFT LCD display. TFT became a dominant technology due to its picture quality and fast response times, but it’s not the only way to build an LCD. There are cheaper technologies, such as STN and […]
Hackers absolutely love building clocks. Seriously, there are few other devices for which we’ve seen such an incredible number of variations. But while the clocks that hackers build might blink out the time in binary, or write it out in words, they generally don’t feature hands. Apparently in 2019 it’s more reasonable to read binary […]
It turns out that Shanghai is a very long way from my home in Wisconsin. I’ve traveled here for Electronica China, and although it made for an incredibly long travel “day”, it turned out to be quite enjoyable. I hacked some hardware on the plane ride, I took a maglev to my hotel, met up […]
The last few years have seen a rise of artistic PCBs. Whether these are one-off projects with a little graphic on the silkscreen or the art of manufacturing and supply chains, these fancy PCBs are here to stay. Nowhere is this more apparent than the loose confederation of Badgelife enthusiasts, a hardware collective dedicated to […]
There was a time when owning a home computer was kind of a big deal. In the days before the popularization of the Internet, so-called “computer shows” were the best way to meet with others to swap advice, information, and hardware. Of course today, things are very different. The kind of people who are building […]
What if there were something like a KVM switch for your micro programmer, logic analyzer, and other various tools? There was a time when KVM switches (keyboard, video, and mouse, by the way) were metal enclosures surrounding an absurdly complicated rotary switch. This fact has a few applications if you ever want to switch a […]
Historically, microcontrollers’ limited computing power and storage space meant software had to be written in low-level languages out of necessity. In recent years small affordable chips grew powerful enough that they could theoretically run higher level languages, sparking numerous efforts to turn that theory into reality. MicroPython delivered on this promise in a big way […]
The Arduino Uno is an incredibly popular microcontroller platform. By virtue of being simple to understand, and having just enough processing power to be dangerous, it’s won fans the world over. In recent times, there have been efforts to replace it with something more powerful. The Arduino Zero is just one such device attempting to […]
The Fallout series of video games provide a wonderful alternative history that answers the question of what might have happened had the microchip never been invented. Yes, most things run on tubes, and apparently you can implement an AI that passes a Turing test in tubes (does the Turing test apply if you’re comparing it […]