When we first saw [DiPDoT’s] homebrew computer, we thought it was an Altair 8800. But, no. While it has a very familiar front panel, the working parts are all based on relays. While it isn’t finished, the machine can already do some simple calculations as you can see in the video below. Turns out, the […]
It’s rather amazing how many electronic components you can buy right now are not quite the genuine parts that they are sold as. Outside of dedicated platforms like Mouser, Digikey and LCSC you pretty much enter a Wild West of unverifiable claims and questionable authenticity. When it comes to sites like eBay and AliExpress, [hjf] […]
We’ve often thought that 3D printers make excellent school projects. No matter what a student’s interests are: art, software, electronics, robotics, chemistry, or physics, there’s something for everyone. A recent blog post from [Prusa Research] shows how Johannes Kepler University is using 3D printing to teach math. You can see a video with Professor [Zsolt […]
Connectors are wonderful and terrible things. Wonderful, in that splicing wires every time you need to disassemble something is really, really annoying. Terrible in that it can be just such an incredible pain-in-the-assets to find the right one if you’re stuck with just a male or a female for some unfortunate reason. We’ve all been […]
The AdaFruit ADS1115 board hooked up for testing. (Credit: James Bowman) Following up on the recent test of a set of purported ADS1115 ADCs sourced from Amazon [James Bowman] didn’t just test a genuine Ti part, but also dug into some of the questions that came up after the first article. As expected, the AdaFruit […]
Ideally, an aircraft would be made of something reasonably strong, light, and weather resistant. Cardboard, is none of those things. But that did not stop [PeterSripol] from building an ultralight wing out of cardboard. Firstly, he wanted to figure out the strongest orientation of the cardboard flutes for the wing spars. He decided on a […]
For any mission-critical computer system, it’s a good idea to think about how the system will handle power outages. At the very least it’s a good idea to give the computer enough time to gracefully shut down if the power outage will last for an indefinite time. But for extremely critical infrastructure, like our home […]
Our Hackaday colleague [Bil Herd] is known for being the mind behind the Commodore 128, a machine which famously had both a 6502 and a Z80 processor on board. The idea of a machine which could do the job of both those processors in hardware while containing neither would have blown the mind of any […]