We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers […]
After some water intrusion apparently killed one of [electronupdate]’s Amazon Blink Gen 3 cameras he took this opportunity to do a full teardown and analysis of all the major components. Spread across its three PCBs there are no fewer than two wireless ICs and a custom ASIC for all the major processing. There’s also a […]
At this point, we’ll assume you already know that four humans took a sightseeing trip around the Moon and made their triumphant return to Earth on Friday. Even if you somehow avoided hearing about it through mainstream channels, we kept a running account of the mission’s highlights stuck to the front page of the site […]
On Friday, Reuters reported that Amazon is going to try to get into the smartphone game…again. The Fire Phone was perhaps Amazon’s biggest commercial misstep, and was only on the market for about a year before it was discontinued in the summer of 2015. But now industry sources are saying that a new phone code-named […]
With the news that Amazon will no longer be allowing users to download their Kindle books after February 26th, many are scrambling to download their books before it’s too late. The most up-to-date project for automating this process appears to be Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader. As the company that famously removed 1984 from thousands of […]
On the bench where this is being written, there’s a Mitutoyo vernier caliper. It’s the base model with a proper vernier scale, but it’s beautifully made, and it’s enjoyable to see younger hardware hackers puzzle over how to use it. It cost about thirty British pounds a few years ago, but when it comes to […]
It’s been about a decade since Amazon began to fly its delivery drones, aiming to revolutionize the online shopping experience with rapid delivery of certain items. Most recently Amazon got permission from the FAA to not only start flying from its new Arizona-based location, but also to fly beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) missions with the new MK30 […]
If you upgraded to Amazon’s latest Echo Dot, you might have been surprised to find that the diminutive voice assistant had shed its USB port. Earlier models of the Dot used a garden variety micro USB port for power, which hackers eventually figured out also provided a helpful way to snoop around inside the device’s […]