As computers have gotten smaller and less expensive over the years, so have their components. While many of us got our start in the age of through-hole PCBs, this size reduction has led to more and more projects that need the use of surface-mount components and their unique set of tools. These tools tend to […]
Over the course of more than a decade, physical media has gradually vanished from public view. Once computers had an optical drive except for ultrabooks, but these days computer cases that even support an internal optical drive are rare. Rather than manuals and drivers included on a data CD you now get a QR code […]
What’s sixty feet (18.29 meters for the rest of the world) across and superconducting? The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), and probably not much else. The last parts of the central solenoid assembly have finally made their way to France from the United States, making both a milestone in the slow development of the world’s […]
Upgrading RAM on most computers is often quite a straightforward task: look up the supported modules, purchase them, push a couple of levers, remove the old, and install the new. However, this project submitted by [Mads Chr. Olesen] is anything but a simple. In this project, he sets out to double the RAM on a […]
This Short from [ProShorts 101] shows us how to make an incandescent light bulb from a jar, a pencil lead, two bolts, and a candle. Prepare the lid of the jar by melting in two holes to contain the bolts, you can do this with your soldering iron, but make sure your workspace is well […]
Recently a team at Fudan University claimed to have developed a picosecond-level Flash memory device (called ‘PoX’) that has an access time of a mere 400 picoseconds. This is significantly faster than the millisecond level access times of NAND Flash memory, and more in the ballpark of DRAM, while still being non-volatile. Details on the […]
RepRap was the origin of pushing hobby 3D printing boundaries, and here we see a RepRap scaled down to the smallest detail. [Vik Olliver] over at the RepRap blog has been working on getting a printer working printing down to the level of micron accuracy. The printer is constructed using 3D printed flexures similar to […]
A recent project over on Hackaday.io from [Michael Gardi] is Trekulator – Where No Maker Has Gone Before. This is a fun build and [Michael] has done a very good job of emulating the original device. [Michael] used the Hackaday.io logging feature to log his progress. Starting in September 2024 he modeled the case, got […]
Long before the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was said to take the world by storm, the p-System (pseudo-system, or virtual machine) developed at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) provided a cross-platform environment for the UCSD’s Pascal dialect. Later on, additional languages would also be made available for the UCSD p-System, such as Fortran […]