Day: April 6, 2019

A breadboard is a great prototyping tool for verifying the sanity of a circuit design before taking the painstaking effort of soldering it all together permanently. After all, a mistake in this stage can cost a lot of time and possibly material, so it’s important to get it right. [daverowntree] wasn’t fully satisfied with the […]
From the title, you might think this post is going to be some lame story about someone plugging in some RAM and maybe updating a BIOS. That’s where you’d be wrong. [Downtown Doug Brown] has a much more interesting and instructive story. [Doug] found his motherboard was rated for 8 GB maximum and decided he’d […]
In the time before smartphones for on-the-go visual entertainment, there were portable TVs. You might think of a portable TV as a luggable device, but the really cool ones were pocket-sized. Perhaps if you are familiar with pocket TVs you’ll be thinking of a Citizen or a Casio with a matchbox-sized LCD, but before those […]
Dust off your rainbow tables and grab a  burner laptop, this Thursday, April 11,  Cyphercon 4.0 roars into Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s a security conference with all that entails, but there is a bit of emphasis on crypto. A founding principle of Cyphercon is to support a  “free and open discussion on strong cryptography”. You’ll find […]
One of the vast untapped potentials of medicine is the access to imaging equipment. A billion people have difficulty getting access to an x-ray, and that says nothing about access to MRIs or CAT scans. Over the past few years, [Jean Rintoul] has been working on a low-cost way to image the inside of a […]
[Michael Sobolak] has a penchant for pianos, concern for capacitive touch, and special sentiment for solid state. This alliterate recipe results in a DIY PCB piano that leaves out the levers and is barren of buttons unless you count the stock RESET button on the Teensy. A real stickler might point out that speakers have […]
Aluminium is a useful material, both for its light weight and resistance to corrosion. This resistance can be improved further with various treatments, one of the more popular being anodizing. This is the process behind the fancy colored metal bling on your cousin’s BMX bike. It’s possible to perform this in the home lab, when […]
There are few tasks quite as laborious as sanding and polishing. Any job that takes a lot of time and elbow grease is a prime candidate for mechanical help, and this one is no exception. At the suggestion of friends, [VegOilGuy] decided it was time to invest in a vibration tumbler. Naturally, building it rather […]
Depending on who you talk to, everything is either fine, or we’re living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia in which we forgot to drench everything in colored neon lighting. There’s little to be done about the digital surveillance panopticon that stalks our every move, but as far as the aesthetic goes, [abetusk] is bringing the […]