If you’re looking for a hackerspace while on your travels, there is more than one website which shows them on a map, and even tells you whether or not they are open. This last feature is powered by SpaceAPI, a standard way for hackerspaces to publish information about themselves, including whether or not they are […]
Electrostatic motors are now common in MEMS applications, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin and spinoff C-Motive Technologies have brought macroscale electrostatic motors back. [via MSN/WSJ] While the first real application of an electric motor was Ben Franklin’s electrostatically-driven turkey rotisserie, electromagnetic type motors largely supplanted the technology due to the types of materials […]
Checking the voltages on a dead LED lightbulb. Best done by a professional, obviously. (Credit: The Doubtful Technician, YouTube) We have probably all seen the marketing blurbs on packaging and elsewhere promoting the amazing lifespan of LED lighting solutions. Theoretically you should be able to install a LED bulb in a fixture that used to […]
Most of us using desktop computers, and plenty of us on laptops, have some sort of fan or pump installed in our computer to remove heat and keep our machines running at the most optimum temperature. That’s generally a good thing for performance, but comes with a noise pollution cost. It’s possible to build fanless […]
The story of Commodore computers is one of some truly great machines for their time, and of the truly woeful marketing that arguably spelled their doom. But there’s another Commodore computing story, that of the machines we never received, many of which came close enough to production that they might have made it. [Old VCR] […]
So far in this series, we’ve talked about man-made byproducts — Fordite, which is built-up layers of cured car enamel, and Trinitite, which was created during the first nuclear bomb test. A lovely fulgurite pendant. Image via Etsy But not all byproducts are man-made, and not all of them are basically untouchable. Some are created […]
Dealing with all the wiring can quickly become a challenge on robots, especially the walking variety which have actuators everywhere. [Eric Yufeng Wu] sidestepped the wiring issue by creating Q8bot, a little quadruped where all the components, including the actuators, are mounted directly on the PCB. [Eric] uses a custom PCB as the spine of […]
If you’re hear a rushing noise, don’t be alarmed — that’s just the rapidly approaching 2024 Hackaday Supercon. As hard as it is to believe, a whole year has gone by, and we’re now just a few days away from kicking off our annual hardware hacking extravaganza in Pasadena. Tickets just sold out over the […]
For those of you longing for better gaming on an Apple Silicon device, Asahi Linux is here to help. While Apple’s own line of CPUs are relatively new kids on the block, they’ve still been around for four years now, giving hackers ample time to dissect their innards. The team behind Asahi Linux has now […]
Your phone or laptop will give you access to the vast majority of news in the world, in languages you can read and a few hundred you can’t. Maybe you only like one news source, though, and that news source happens to be Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If that’s the case, you might like to […]