It’s hard to argue that Soviet-Era nuclear engineering may have some small flaws, what with the heavily-monitored exclusion zone around Chernobyl No.4. Evidently, their industrial designers were more on-the-ball, because [Alex] has crafted the absolute most stylish fallout monitor we’ve ever seen, with ESP32 and a vintage Soviet-designed plasma display to indicate radiation levels in […]
Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are extremely DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopier, some might benefit from professional production while losing none of their core appeal. However, the professional print world has a few gotchas, and in true hacker spirit […]
Few electronic ICs can claim to be as famous as the 555 timer. Maybe part of the reason is that the IC doesn’t have a specific function. It has a lot of building blocks that you can use to create timers and many other kinds of circuits. Now [Stoppi] has decided to make a 555 […]
If you are a certain age, you probably remember the ads and publicity around Chisanbop — the supposed ancient art of Korean finger math. Was it Korean? Sort of. Was it faster than a calculator? Sort of. [Chris Staecker] offers a great look at Chisanbop, not just how to do it, but also how it […]
Many people who get analog electronics still struggle a bit to design oscillators. Even common simulators often need a trick to simulate some oscillating circuits. The Barkhausen criteria state that for stable oscillation, the loop gain must be one, and the phase shift around the feedback loop must be a multiple of 360 degrees. [All […]
Like many of us of a certain vintage, [Dillan Stock] at The Stock Pot is nostalgic for VHS tapes. It’s not so much the fuzzy picture or the tracking issues we miss, but the physical experience the physical medium brought to movie night. To recreate that magic, [Dillan] made a Modern VHS with NFC and […]
When it comes to text, how small is too small? The experts say a six point font is the minimum for readability, but as [James Bowman] shows us, you can get away with half of that. The goal is to produce a 40-character display on a 24 mm x 24 mm LCD that has a […]
Composting doesn’t seem difficult: pile up organic matter, let it rot. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated– if you want that sweet, sweet soil amendment in a reasonable amount of time, and to make sure any food-born pathogens and weed seeds don’t come through, you need a “hot” compost pile. How to tell […]
Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [CircuitValley] repairs an old TDS8000 scope. The TDS8000 was manufactured by Tektronix circa 2001 and was also marketed as the CSA8000 Communications Signal Analyzer as well as the TDS8000 Digital Sampling Oscilloscope. Tektronix is no longer manufacturing and selling these scopes but the documentation is still available from […]