There are no two ways about it—space will kill you if you give it half a chance. More than land, sea, or air, the space environment is entirely hostile to human existence. Precision-engineered craft are the bare minimum just to ensure human survival. Even still, between the vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, and equipment failures, there are […]
A few weeks ago we brought you news of a new palmtop computer for hackers, powered by the new Espressif ESP32-P4 application processor. The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is a compact handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display, and while it currently exists at the final prototype stage there is a […]
The Universal Serial Bus. The one bus to rule them all. It brought peace and stability to the world of computer peripherals. No more would Apple and PC users have to buy their own special keyboards, mice, and printers. No more would computers sprout different ports for different types of hardware. USB was fast enough and […]
You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes green paint. Try doing that in Photoshop, and you’ll get something altogether different—a vague, uninspiring brownish-grey. It’s the same story in […]
Bambu Labs have been in the news lately. Not because of the machines themselves, but because they are proposing a firmware change that many in our community find restricts their freedom to use their own devices. What can be done? [Joshua Wise] gave a standout talk on the Design Lab stage at the 2024 Hackaday […]
I was fascinated by the idea of jet packs when I was a kid. They were sci-fi magic, and the idea that you could strap into an oversized backpack wrapped in tinfoil and fly around was very enticing. Better still was when I learned that these things weren’t powered by complicated rockets but by plain […]
Most of us first spot them as children—the white lines in the blue sky that are the telltale sign of a flight overhead. Contrails are an instant visual reminder of air travel, and a source of much controversy in recent decades. Put aside the overblown conspiracies, though, and there are some genuine scientific concerns to […]
I was looking at the periodic table of the elements the other day, as one does, when my eye fell upon the right-hand side of the chart. Right next to the noble gases at the extreme edge of the table is a column of elements with similar and interesting properties: the halogens. Almost all of […]
With the right conditions, this tiny sensor can measure 12 meters If you need to measure a distance, it is tempting to reach for the ubiquitous ultrasonic module like an HC-SR04. These work well, and they are reasonably easy to use. However, they aren’t without their problems. So maybe try an IR time of flight […]
What’s Forgotten Internet? It is the story of parts of the Internet — or Internet precursors — that you might have forgotten about or maybe you missed out on them. This time, we’re looking at Unix-to-Unix Copy, more commonly called UUCP. Developed in the late 1970s, UUCP was a solution for sending messages between systems […]