It’s not often you’ll see us singing the praises of Microsoft on these pages, but credit where credit is due, this first-person account of how the software giant got its foot in the proverbial door by Bill Gates himself is pretty slick. Now it’s not the story that has us excited, mind you. It’s the […]
There seems to be nothing a 555 can’t do. We’ve seen it before, but [electronzapdotcom] reminds us you can use a 555 and a few parts to make a reasonable touch switch. The circuit lives on a breadboard, as shown in the video below. The circuit uses some very large resistors so that noise from […]
Early photography lacked the convenience of the stable roll film we all know, and instead relied on a set of processes which the photographer would have to master from film to final print. Photographic chemicals could be flammable or even deadly, and results took a huge amount of work. The daguerreotype process of using mercury […]
Anyone will tell you that as hard as it is to create a working system, the real trick is making two systems talk to each other, especially if you created only one or none of them. That’s why tools that let you listen in on two systems talking are especially valuable. If you were a […]
We ran a story about a wall-mounted plotter bot this week, Mural. It’s a simple, but very well implemented, take on a theme that we’ve seen over and over again in various forms. Two lines, or in this case timing belts, hang the bot on a wall, and two motors drive it around. Maybe a […]
Tektronix must have been quite a place to work back in the 1980s. The company offered a bewildering selection of test equipment, and while the digital age was creeping in, much of their gear was still firmly rooted in the analog world. And some of the engineering tricks the Tek wizards pulled off are still […]
How do you get images downlinked from 30 km up? Hams might guess SSTV — slow scan TV — and that’s the approach [desafloinventor] took. If you haven’t seen it before (no pun intended), SSTV is a way to send images over radio at a low frame rate. Usually, you get about 30 seconds to […]
Back in the early 1900s, before calculators lived in our pockets, crunching numbers was painstaking work. Adding machines existed, but they weren’t exactly convenient nor cheap. Enter Vilin Vinson and his Maximal Multi-Divi, a massive multiplication and division table that turned math into an industrialized process. Originally published in Sweden in the 1910’s, and refined […]
Around these parts, projects needlessly using a microcontroller where a simpler design would do are often derided with the catch-all “Should have used a 555,” even if the venerable timer chip wouldn’t have been the ideal solution. But the sentiment stands that a solution more complicated than it needs to be is probably one that […]
There’s many different reasons why somebody might have to hack together their own solution to a problem. It could be to save money, or to save time. Occasionally it’s because the problem is unique enough that there might not be an accepted solution, so you’re on your own to create one. We think the situation […]