Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was originally developed in 1969 as a lighter weight timesharing system for a DEC minicomputer at Bell Labs has exerted a huge influence over […]
Taking a page out of the Xzibit Engineering Handbook, [Geeksmithing] recently decided that the gutted carcass of an original Nintendo Entertainment System would make a perfect home for…a smaller NES. Well, that and two wireless controllers. Plus a projector. Oh, and batteries so it can be used on the go. Because really, at that point, […]
Some people love fan noise, using it to help get to sleep or just create some ambience in a room. Others hate it, like [Dmitri], and will take severe measures to eliminate it where possible. When his Razer Blade laptop was incessantly whirring away, it was time to get to work. The Razer laptop uses […]
Retroreflectors are interesting materials, so known for their nature of reflecting light back to its source. Examples include street signs, bicycle reflectors, and cat’s eyes, which so hauntingly pierce the night. They’re also used in the Tilt Five tabletop AR system, for holographic gaming. [Adam McCombs] got his hands on a Tilt Five gameboard, and […]
Woodworking is messy business, especially the sanding part. But even if you don’t care what happens to your shop floor, you don’t want dead tree particulate matter in your lungs. Wearing a mask or even a respirator is a good start, but a dust collection system is better. Someday, [XYZ Create] might have a shop-wide […]
A bench power supply is one of those things that every hacker needs, and as the name implies, it’s intended to occupy a place of honor on your workbench. But with the addition of USB-C support to his DPH5005 bench supply, [Dennis Schneider] is ready to take his on the road should the need ever […]
We’ve seen a lot of motor driver boards for robots and the odd electric skateboard. What we haven’t see a lot of is one big enough to drop into an electric vehicle. The Axiom motor controller was a winner of the bootstrap contest and is a Finalist in the 2019 Hackaday Prize. The driver aims […]
Look upon this conference badge and kiss your free time goodbye. The 2019 Hackaday Superconference badge is an ECP5 FPGA running a RISC-V core in a Game Boy form factor complete with cartridge slot that is more open than anything we’ve ever seen before: multiple open-source CPU designs were embedded in an open system, developed […]
Join us on Wednesday, November 6 at noon Pacific for the Circuit Sculpture Hack Chat with Mohit Bhoite! For all the effort engineers put into electronic design, very few people ever get to appreciate it. All the hard work that goes into laying out a good PCB and carefully selecting just the right components is […]