Sometimes you really need to know what the weather is doing, but you don’t want to look at your phone. For times like those, this neat weather display from [Jordan] might come in handy with its throwback retro vibe. The build is based around the ESP32-2432S028—also known as the CYD, or Cheap Yellow Display, for the […]
The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good […]
If you’re at all familiar with digital computing, you’ll know that computers represent everything in binary values of one and zero. Except that’s not technically the only way to do computing! You can use any numerical system you like if you build your hardware to suit, as [Jeroen Brinkman’s] ternary adder demonstrates. As you might […]
After the previous attempt of running a PC off AA cells got a lot of comments, [ScuffedBits] decided to do the scientifically responsible thing and re-ran the experiment with all the peer-reviewed commentary in mind. Although we noted with the previous experiment that only alkaline cells were used, [ScuffedBits] rectified this by stating that both […]
The early history of colour TV had several false starts, of which perhaps one of the most interesting might-have-beens was the CBS field-sequential system. This was a rival to the nascent system which would become NTSC, which instead of encoding red, green, and blue all at once for each pixel, made sequential frames carry them. […]
The rapidly-improving speed and versatility of digital computers has mostly driven analogue computers out of use in modern systems, as has the relative difficulty of programming an analogue computer. There is a kind of art, though, in weaving together a series of op-amps to perform mathematical calculations; between this, a historical interest in the machines, […]
There’s just something delightful about scaled items. Big things shrunk down, like LEGO’s teeny tiny terminal brick? Delightful. Taking that terminal brick and scaling it back to a full-sized computer? Even better. That’s what designer [Paul Staal] has done with his M2x2 project. In spite of the name, it actually has a Mac Mini M4 […]
Bottom of the cast-iron radiator gaming PC during plumbing. (Credit: Billet Labs, YouTube) Water-cooled PCs generally have in common that there’s a radiator somewhere in the loop, yet nobody said that you can’t build the PCB into the radiator. Something like a genuine Victorian-era cast-iron radiator, for example. For the folk over at [Billet Labs], […]
Everyone is probably familiar with the concept of battery-powered devices, but generally, this involves a laptop with a beefy battery pack and hardware optimized for low power draw. You could also do the complete opposite and try to run a desktop PC off alkaline AA cells, as [ScuffedBits] recently did out of morbid curiosity. Exactly […]