Automating tasks with a robot sounds appealing, but not everyone has the budget for an Aismo or Kuka. [FABRI Creator] has a great tutorial on how to build your own mini robotic arm for small, repeatable tasks. Walking us through the entire build, step-by-step, [FABRI Creator] shows us how to populate the custom-designed PCB and […]
For those of us devoted to keeping an older vehicle on the road, the struggle is real. We know that at some point, a part will go bad and we’ll learn that it’s no longer available from the dealer or in the aftermarket, at least at a reasonable cost. We might get lucky and find […]
Fundamentally, an artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing more than a system that takes a series of inputs, makes some prediction, and then outputs that information. Of course, the types of AI in the news right now can handle a huge number of inputs and need server farms’ worth of compute to generate outputs of various […]
The Vectrex was a unique console from the early 1980s. Developed by a company you’ve probably never heard of—Smith Engineering—it was put into production by General Consumer Electronics, and later sold by Milton Bradley. It was an outright commercial failure, but it’s remembered for its sharp vector display and oddball form factor. The Vectrex was […]
[Sam Battle] is no stranger to these pages, nor is his Museum is not Obsolete. The museum was recently gifted an enormous Nixie tube created by Dalibor Farný, a B-grade (well, faulty) unit that could not be used in any of their commissioned works but was perfectly fine for displaying in the museum’s retro display display. […]
The software and hardware worlds have overlaps, and it’s worth looking over the fence to see if there’s anything you missed. You might’ve already noticed that we hackers use PCB modules and devboards in the same way that programmers might use libraries and frameworks. You’ll find way more parallels if you think about it. Building […]
Over at the University of Wisconsin’s Undergraduate Projects Lab (UPL) there’s been a way to check whether this room is open for general use by CS undergraduates and others practically for most of the decades that it has existed. Most recently [Andrew Moses] gave improving on the then latest, machine vision-based iteration a shot. Starting […]
What does it take to make decent tires for your projects? According to this 3D printed tire torture test, it’s actually pretty easy — it’s more a question of how well they work when you’re done. For the test, [Excessive Overkill] made four different sets of shoes for his RC test vehicle. First up was […]
[Sebastian Mihai] is a prolific programmer and hacker with a particular focus on retrocomputing and period games, and this latest hack, adding new gameplay elements to Capcom’s Street Fighter II – Champion Edition, is another great one. [Sebastian] was careful to resist changing the game physics, as that’s part of what makes this game ‘feel’ […]
The proposed AAPowerLink transmission line between Darwin (Australia) and Singapore. (Credit: Sun Cable) Recently Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) granted Sun Cable conditional approval for its transmission line with Australia. Singapore has been faced for years now with the dilemma that its population’s energy needs keep increasing year-over-year, while it has very little space to […]