It can be difficult to resist the impulse buy. You see something interesting, the price is right, and even though you know you should do your research first, you end up putting it in your cart anyway. That’s how [Tobias Girstmair] ended up being the not-so proud owner of a LEDBERG RGB LED strip from […]
Carburettors were king for decades, until the onward march of technology brought electronic fuel injection to the fore. During their final years, a handful of automakers experimented with computer control of the humble carb, trying to squeeze out every last bit of efficiency and reduce pollution as much as possible. [NeXT] happened to own a […]
Since the beginnings of the Raspberry Pi, [Tibbbbz] has wanted to build a DIY guitar effects board and amp simulator. A device like this, and similar ones sold by Boss and Kemper, put a bunch of processing power inside a metal enclosure with some footswitches and a pair of quarter inch jacks for input and […]
Join us on Wednesday 29 May 2019 at noon Pacific for the Retrocomputing for the Masses Hack Chat! Of the early crop of personal computers that made their way to market before IBM and Apple came to dominate it, few machines achieved the iconic status that the Sinclair ZX80 did. Perhaps it was its unusual […]
We take the everyday materials of engineering for granted, as ubiquitous components rather than as complex items in their own right. Sure, we know that an integrated circuit represents the pinnacle of a hundred years’ development in the field of electronics, but to us it’s simply a black box with some wires. Even with more […]
You’d be hard pressed to find a carpenter who didn’t own a hammer, or a painter that didn’t have a couple of brushes kicking around. Some tools are simply so fundamental to their respective craft that their ownership is essentially a given. The same could be said of the breadboard: if you’re working with electronics […]
You’d think that something called “white fuming nitric acid” would be more than corrosive enough to dissolve just about anything. Heck, it’s rocket fuel – OK, rocket fuel oxidizer – and even so it still it wasn’t enough to pop the top on this vintage Fairchild μL914 integrated circuit, at least not without special measures. […]
When working on a project, it’s incredibly helpful to be able to visualize the various signals in play. This is important when attempting to determine if what is supposed to be happening is actually happening. However, logic analyzers can be expensive, so a group from [Bruce Land]’s ECE5760 class developed their own hardware solution instead. […]
Leather hardening has been around for such a long time that one might think that there was little left to discover, but [Jason F. Timmermans] certainly showed that is not the case. Right around the end of 2018 he set up experiments to compare different techniques for hardening leather, and empirically determine the best options. […]
Thinkpads are great, especially the old ones. You find a T420, and you can have a battery hanging off the back, a battery in the optical drive bay, and for some old Thinkpads, there’s a gigantic ‘slice’ battery that doubles the thickness of your laptop. Here’s the most batteries in a Thinkpad ever, with the […]