If you are a nerdy kid today, you have your choice of wondrous gadgets and time wasters. When we were nerdy kids, our options were somewhat limited: there was ham radio, or you could blow things up with a chemistry set. There were also model rockets. Not only were model rockets undeniably cool, but thanks […]
Much like calling over a buddy or two to help with moving a large piece of furniture and pivot it up a narrow flight of stairs, so too can quadcopters increase their carrying capacity through the power of friendship and cooperation. However, unless you want to do a lot of yelling at your mates about […]
While there are many AI programs these days, they don’t all work in the same way. Most large language model “chatbots” generate text by taking input tokens and predicting the next token of the sequence. However, image generators like Stable Diffusion use a different approach. The method is, unsurprisingly, called diffusion. How does it work? […]
You know what’s not fun? Sorting LEGO. You know what is fun? Making a machine to sort LEGO! That’s what [LegoSpencer] did, and you can watch the machine do its thing in the video below. [Spencer] runs us through the process: first, quit your day job so you can get a job playing with LEGO; […]
Amiga and Atari fans used to lord over their Apple-eating brethren the fact that Cupertino never moved to the most advanced 68k processors — so for a while, thanks to 68060 accelerator cards, the fastest thing running Macintosh software was an Amiga (or Atari). After all these years, the Macintosh community is finally getting the […]
Changing the pads on your car’s brakes is a pretty straightforward and inexpensive process on most vehicles. However, many modern vehicles having electronic parking brakes giving manufacturers a new avenue to paywall simple DIY repairs. Most EVs will rarely, if ever, need to replace their mechanical brake pads as in most driving situations the car […]
A PCB business card is a great way for electrical engineers to impress employers with their design skills, but the software they run can be just as impressive as the card itself. As a programmer with an interest in embedded machine learning, [Dave McKinnon] wanted a card that showcased his skills, so he designed one that […]
Vintage computer hardware can fail in a variety of fascinating ways, with [Bits und Bolts] dealing with an interesting failure mode, in the form of degraded MLCC capacitors on Voodoo 2 graphics cards. These little marvels of miniaturized surface-mount technology enable the placement of ceramic capacitors with very little space required, but as they degrade […]