Repairing radios was easier when radios were simple. There were typically two strategies. You could use a signal tracer (an amplifier) to listen at the volume control. If you heard something, the problem was after the volume control. If you didn’t, then the problem was something earlier in the signal path. Then you find a […]
Adding a camera to a project used to be a chore, but modern camera modules make it simple. But what if you want to read QR codes? [James Bowman] noticed a $7 module that claims to read QR codes so he decided to try one out. The module seems well thought out. There’s a camera, […]
Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about listening to Ethernet signals, though? Well, you totally could, with the NSA selector from [wenzellabs]. The NSA selector is a Eurorack module, designed for use as part of a larger modular […]
Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time […]
Last year, [Deep Tronix] wished to teach colors to his nephew. Thus, he built a toy to help educate a child about colors by pairing them with sounds, and Color Player was born. The build is based around the TCS34725, an off-the-shelf color sensor. It’s paired with an ESP32, which senses colors and then plays […]
Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are extremely DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopier, some might benefit from professional production while losing none of their core appeal. However, the professional print world has a few gotchas, and in true hacker spirit […]
Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing. The casting itself was inspired on the concept of the ouroboros, the snake which eats its own […]
Most of us know that a quartz clock uses a higher frequency crystal oscillator and a chain of divider circuits to generate a 1 Hz pulse train. It’s usual to have a 32.768 kHz crystal and a 15-stage divider chain, which in turn normally sits inside an integrated circuit. Not so for [Bobricius], who’s created […]