Representatives from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance participated in a forum last week held by NASA to determine the future of humans on the moon. This isn’t just how they will live, how long they will stay, or what they will do; no, this is far more interesting: this was how humans will […]
Back To The Future Part II, released in 1989, told us the far-off future of 2015 would have flying cars, drones working for national newspapers, and self-lacing sneakers. Our best hope for flying cars is Uber, and that’s going to be hilarious when it fails. (Note to Uber: buy KSMO, Santa Monica airport, as an […]
Firmware and software are both just code, right? How different could the code that runs Internet-scale distributed web stuff be from the code that runs a tiny microcontroller brain inside a personal hydroponics device? Night and day! Ruth Grace Wong works in the former world, but moonlights as a manufacturing engineer with some friends. Their […]
Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys look at all that’s happening in hackerdom. This week we dive deep into super-accurate clock chips, SPI and microcontroller trickery, a new (and cheap) part on the microcontroller block, touch-sensitive cloth, and taking a home X-ray to the third dimension. We’re saying our goodbyes to the magnificent A380, looking with […]
It’s no secret that I rather enjoy connecting things to the Internet for fun and profit. One of the tricks I’ve learned along the way is to spin up simple APIs that can be used when prototyping a project. It’s easy to do, and simple to understand so I’m happy to share what has worked […]
Consider the plight of a mid-career or even freshly minted electrical engineer in 1960. He or she was perched precariously between two worlds – the proven, practical, and well-supported world of vacuum tube electronics, and the exciting, new but as yet unproven world of the transistor. The solid-state devices had only started making inroads into […]
Electronic conference badges are now an accepted part of the lifeblood of our community, with even the simplest of events now sporting a fully functional computer as an eye-catching PCB on a lanyard. Event schedules and applications are shipped on them, and the more sophisticated ones have app libraries and support development communities of their […]
Electron microscopes were once the turf of research laboratories that could foot the hefty bill of procuring and maintaining such equipment. But old models have been finding their way into the hands of eager individuals who are giving us an inside look at the rare equipment. Before you start scouring Craigslist, go on a crash […]
Join us on Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the X-rays and high-voltage Hack Chat! Fran Piernas likes to push the envelope a bit with projects that others might shy away from. A quick glance at his Hackday.io profile reveals a few of the exciting projects he’s been working on recently, including a DIY X-ray machine and the high-voltage driver needed […]