Sometimes you need random numbers — and properly random ones, at that. [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that, tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT. [Sean] tells us he’s been “designing various quantum TRNGs for nearly 15 years as part of an elaborate practical joke” without further explanation. We won’t […]
It was probably Montesquieu who coined the proto-hacker motto “the best is the mortal enemy of the good”. He was talking about compromises in drafting national constitutions for nascent democracies, of course, but I’ll admit that I do hear his voice when I’m in get-it-done mode and start cutting corners on a project. A working […]
In the 90s, a video game craze took over the youth of the world — but unlike today’s games that rely on powerful PCs or consoles, these were simple, standalone devices with monochrome screens, each home to a digital pet. Often clipped to a keychain, they could travel everywhere with their owner, which was ideal […]
Classic demos from the demoscene are all about showing off one’s technical prowess, with a common side order of a slick banging soundtrack. That’s precisely what [BUS ERROR Collective] members [DJ_Level_3] and [Marv1994] delivered with their prize-winning Primer demo this week. This demo is a grand example of so-called “oscilloscope music”—where two channels of audio […]
Sometimes, a flat display just won’t cut it. If you’re looking for something a little rounder, perhaps your vision could persist in in looking at [lhm0]’s rotating LED sphere RP2040 POV display. As you might have guessed from that title, this persistence-of-vision display uses an RP2040 microcontroller as its beating (or spinning, rather) heart. An […]
In the realm of computer science, it’s hard to go too far without encountering hashing or hash functions. The concept appears throughout security, from encryption to password storage to crypto, and more generally whenever large or complex data must be efficiently mapped to a smaller, fixed-size set. Hashing makes the process of looking for data […]
[IMSAI Guy] grabbed an obsolete XOR gate and tried a classic circuit to turn it into a frequency doubler. Of course, being an old part, it won’t work at very high frequencies, but the circuit is super simple, just using the gate and an RC network. You can see a video of his exploration below. […]
[Tazer] built a small desktop-sized robotic arm, and it was more or less functional. However, he wanted to improve its ability to pick things up, and attaching a pneumatic gripper seemed like the perfect way to achieve that. Thus began the build! The concept of [Tazer]’s pneumatic gripper is simple enough. When the pliable silicone […]