Although Nissan has been in the doldrums ever since getting purchased by Renault in the early 2000s, it once had a reputation as a car company that was always on the cutting edge of technology. Nissan was generally well ahead of its peers when bringing technologies like variable valve timing, turbocharging, fuel injection, and adjustable […]
Before the Raspberry Pi came out, one cheap and easy way to get GPIO on a computer with a real operating system was to manipulate the pins on an old parallel port, then most commonly used for printers. Luckily, as that port became obsolete we got the Raspberry Pi, which has the GPIO and a […]
There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citing performance per line of code. But when looking at instruction sets it’s actually possible to eliminate every instruction except one and still have […]
Building a computer on a breadboard is a seminal project for many builders, but it can become complicated quite quickly, not to mention that all the parts needed for a computer are being placed on a medium which often lends itself to loose wires and other hardware bugs. [3DSage] has a working breadboard computer that […]
As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little […]
One of the practical upsides of improved computer vision systems and machine learning has been the ability of computers to translate text from one language or format to another. [Jchen] used this to develop Braille Vision which can turn inaccessible text into braille on the go. Using a headless Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 running […]
Modern computers generate a great deal of heat when under load, thus we cool them with fans and sometimes even water cooling systems. [Doug MacDowell] figured that water was alright, but why not use coffee instead? Someone tell us how [Doug] made this graph look like it’s right out of a 1970s college textbook. The […]
Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing. The casting itself was inspired on the concept of the ouroboros, the snake which eats its own […]
Long before electricity was a common household utility, humanity had been building machines to do many tasks that we’d now just strap a motor or set of batteries onto and think nothing of it. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and essentially everything had non-electric analogs, and perhaps surprisingly, there were mechanical computers as well. Electronics-based computers are […]
There are all manner of musical myths, covering tones and melodies that have effects ranging from the profound to the supernatural. The Pied Piper, for example, or the infamous “brown note.” But what about a song that could crash your laptop just by playing it? Even better, a song that could crash nearby laptops in […]