Car infotainment systems somehow have become a staple in today’s automobiles, yet when it comes down to it they have all the elegance of a locked-down Android tablet. In the case of the Honda infotainment system that [dosdude1] got from a friend’s 2016/2017-era Honda Accord, it pretty much is just that. Powered by a dual-core […]
Despite initial interest in the 1990s and early 2000s, palmtop computers never really took off. Realistically most consumers were probably satisfied enough with smartphones as they became more widely available, but those of us who would prefer a real keyboard on our mobile devices are still feeling the pain. Today there are still a few […]
Each year millions of old smartphones are either tossed as e-waste or are condemned to lie unloved in dusty drawers, despite the hardware in them usually being still perfectly fine. Reusing these little computers for another purpose once the phone’s manufacturer drops support is made hard by a range of hardware and software (driver) issues. […]
You could write your microcontroller code on your desktop PC, or you could do it on your laptop on the go. Or, if you want to get really portable about things, you could write your embedded code on your phone. Enter DroidScript. Basically, DroidScript is a JavaScript and Python IDE for Android phones and tablets. […]
Need a quick way to tell your temperature before work tomorrow? Student maker [The Marpe] recently fashioned a sleek home-use thermal camera that even looks like a point and shoot. It works as an Android hardware add-on by integrating the readings from a MLX90640 far-infrared (FIR) thermal sensor with a STM32F042F6Px microcontroller. All this connects […]
Thanks to the relatively low cost of the Raspberry Pi and high resolution LCD screens, “smart displays” have become a favorite project of those looking to clear out their parts bins. Just hook the Pi up to the screen, setup some software, and you’ve got yourself a digital bulletin board for your home that can […]
In a continuing trend of ‘but does it run Android?’, enterprising folk over at the XDA-Developers forum have found a way to get LineageOS (the successor to CyanogenMod) installed and running on the Nintendo Switch. Promising to release the necessary files to replicate this effort has obviously made other people at XDA-Developers forum as well […]
You’d be hard pressed to find a carpenter who didn’t own a hammer, or a painter that didn’t have a couple of brushes kicking around. Some tools are simply so fundamental to their respective craft that their ownership is essentially a given. The same could be said of the breadboard: if you’re working with electronics […]
As a happy side-effect of the smartphone revolution, the world is now awash with tiny computers that are incredibly cheap thanks to the nearly unfathomable volumes in which their components are manufactured. They’re wouldn’t be a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero if the billions of smartphones that were pumped out before it hadn’t dropped the cost […]
Anyone with a desktop 3D printer knows that it can be a bit nerve-wracking to leave the machine alone for any extended period of time. Unfortunately, it’s often unavoidable given how long more complicated prints can take. With big prints easily stretching beyond the 20 hour mark, at some point you’re going to need to […]