If you ever look at projects in an old magazine and compare them to today’s electronic projects, there’s at least one thing that will stand out. Most projects in “the old days” looked like something you built in your garage. Today, if you want to make something that rivals a commercial product, it isn’t nearly […]
If you need a seven-segment display for a project, you could just grab some LED units off the shelf. Or you could build something big and electromechanical out of Lego. That’s precisely what [upir] did, with attractive results. The build relies on Lego Technic parts, with numbers displayed by pushing small black axles through a […]
As the Industrial Age took the world by storm, city centers became burgeoning hubs of commerce and activity. New offices and apartments were built higher and higher as density increased and skylines grew ever upwards. One could live and work at height, but this created a simple inconvenience—if you wanted to send any mail, you […]
Kumiko is a form of Japanese woodworking that uses small cuts of wood (probably offcuts) to produce artful designs. It’s the kind of thing that takes zen-like patience to assemble, and years to master– and who has time for that? [Paper View] likes the style of kumiko, but when all you have is a 3D […]
Can a 3D Minecraft implementation be done entirely in CSS and HTML, without a single line of JavaScript in sight? The answer is yes! True, this small clone is limited to playing with blocks in a world that measures only 9x9x9, but the fact that [Benjamin Aster] managed it at all using only CSS and […]
As cars increasingly become computers on wheels, the attack surface for digital malfeasance increases. [PCAutomotive] has shared its exploit for turning the 2020 Nissan Leaf into 1600 kg RC car. [PDF via Electrek] Starting with some scavenged infotainment systems and wiring harnesses, the group built test benches able to tear into vulnerabilities in the system. […]
Spending time as wee hackers perusing the family atlas taught us an appreciation for a good map, and [Billy Roberts], a cartographer at NREL, has served up a doozy with a map of the data center infrastructure in the United States. [via LinkedIn] Fiber optic lines, electrical transmission capacity, and the data centers themselves are […]
Leica’s film cameras were hugely popular in the 20th century, and remain so with collectors to this day. [Michael Suguitan] has previously had great success converting his classic Leica into a digital one, and now he’s taken the project even further. [Michael’s] previous work saw him create a so-called “digital back” for the Leica M2. […]
The choice between hardware and software for electronics projects is generally a straighforward one. For simple tasks we might build dedicated hardware circuits out of discrete components for reliability and low cost, but for more complex tasks it could be easier and cheaper to program a general purpose microcontroller than to build the equivalent circuit […]
If you do anything with electronics or electricity, it is a good bet you have a multimeter. Even the cheapest meter today would have been an incredible piece of lab gear not long ago and, often, meters today are lighter and have more features than the old Radio Shack meters we grew up with. But […]