[XYZAiden]’s concept for a flexible robotic gripper might be a few years old, but if anything it’s even more accessible now than when he first prototyped it. It uses only a single motor and requires no complex mechanical assembly, and nowadays 3D printing with flexible filament has only gotten easier and more reliable. The four-armed […]
Hackers have been building their own basic oscilloscopes out of inexpensive MCUs and cheap LCD screens for some years now, but microcontrollers have recently become fast enough to actually make such ‘scopes useful. [NJJ], for example, used a pair of Raspberry Pi Picos to build Picotronix, an extensible combined oscilloscope and logic analyzer. This isn’t […]
There are a few possible ways to do a teardown of new electronics like the Apple AirTag 2 tracker, with [electronupdate] opting to go down to the silicon level, with die shots of the major ICs in a recent teardown video. Some high-resolution photos are also found on the separate blog page. First we get […]
Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new […]
Although generally described as a document format, PDFs have ballooned from a Postscript-lite format into a mutant featuring XML and JavaScript support, basically turning what once was a fairly simple format into an interactive page. Naturally, this has to be used for good, and that is why we have the Doom PDF project, as well […]
We’re used to handheld Linux devices of varying usefulness appearing on a regular basis, but there’s something about the one in a video from [Rootkit Labs] which sets it aside from the herd. It’s a fork of a conference badge. The WHY2025 badge had pretty capable hardware, with an ESP32-P4, a really nice screen, and […]
Horoscopes are a great way to pass a boring lunchbreak, and an excellent excuse for ending a ill-considered relationship. They’re also a hilarious way to handle CPU scheduling under Linux, thanks to the work of [Lucas Zampieri]. The project is called scx_horoscope, and it’s a sched_Ext scheduler that makes its CPU scheduling choices based on […]
Although not intended to be a game console, the CD-i would see a a couple of games released for it that would cement its position in gaming history as the butt of countless jokes, some of which still make Nintendo upset to this day. That aside, it’s still a fascinating glimpse at the CD-based multimedia […]
For many readers, more snow is the last thing they want to see right now…but what if it comes in the form of an online simulator in the style of an old DOS game? Created by [Potch], it works like one of those “falling sand” simulators, with sliders that let you control various elements of […]