Over the years we’ve seen countless ways of displaying the current time, and judging by how many new clock projects that hit the tip line, it seems as though there’s no end in sight. Not that we’re complaining, of course. The latest entry into the pantheon of unusual timepieces is this ESP32-powered desk clock from […]
Sometimes you just gotta sit down and hack something together. Forget the CAD and the cool software toys; just hammer away until you have something working. That’s how [bobricus] ended up with this cute little laser engraver anyway. For under $300 US of parts and a few nights working in his pajamas, the aptly named, […]
In the late nineteenth century, there was only one Earthly frontier left to discover: the North Pole. Many men had died or gone insane trying to reach 90°N, which, unlike the solidly continental South Pole, hides within a shifting polar sea. One of history’s most driven Pole-seekers, Robert Peary, shocked the world when he announced […]
For humans, life is in the eyes. Same deal with automatons. The more realistic the eyes, the more lifelike (and potentially disturbing) the automaton is. [lkkalebob] knows this. [lkkalebob] is so dedicated to ocular realism in his ultra-real eyeballs that he’s perfected a way to make the minuscule veins from a whisper of cotton thread. […]
Persistence of Vision (POV) is a curious part of the human visual system. It’s the effect by which the perception of an image lingers after light has stopped entering the eye. It’s why a spinning propeller appears as a disc, and why a burning sparkler appears to leave a trail in the air. It’s also […]
When YouTuber MrBeast hit 20 million subscribers, it kicked off the promise to plant 20 million new trees by 2020. While seeming rather mad for a single person to attempt such a feat, the channel has begun an organized effort under the banner of ‘Team Trees‘. With many famous and less famous YouTubers and other […]
When you think of the Unix and C revolution that grew out of Bell Labs, there are a few famous names. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan come to mind. After all, the K in both K&R C and in AWK stand for Kernighan. While Kernighan is no stranger to book authorship — he’s […]
When an earthquake strikes, it’s usually hard to miss. At least that’s the case with the big ones; the dozens or hundreds of little quakes that go largely unnoticed every day are interesting too, and make sense to track. That’s usually left to the professionals, with racks of sensitive equipment and a far-flung network of […]
Most of the time if you were to want to develop for an FPGA, you might turn to Verilog or VHDL. Both of these are quite capable, but they are also firmly rooted in languages that are old-fashioned by today’s standards. There have been quite a few attempts to treat those languages as an output […]
About a year back, [BogdanTheGeek] found himself in need of a new case for this TS100 soldering iron. Unfortunately, while the product is often billed as being open source friendly (at least in the firmware sense), he was surprised to discover that he couldn’t find the detailed dimensions required to 3D print his own replacement […]