In this series of 23 YouTube videos [Rich] puts the AMD Zynq-7000 SoC through its paces by building a development board from the ground up to host it along with its peripherals. The Zynq is part FPGA and part CPU, and while it has been around for a while, we don’t see nearly as many […]
If you had to guess, what do you think it would take to build an ocean-going buoy that could not only survive on its own without human intervention for more than two years, but return useful data the whole time? You’d probably assume such a feat would require beefy hardware, riding inside an expensive and […]
Amazing as volumetric displays are, they have one major drawback: interacting with them is complicated. A 3D mouse is nice, but unless you’ve done a lot of CAD work, it’s a bit unintuitive. Researchers from the Public University of Navarra, however, have developed a touchable volumetric display, bringing touchscreen-like interactions to the third dimension (preprint […]
Spade is an open-source hardware description language (HDL) developed at Linköping University, Sweden. Other HDLs you might have heard of include Verilog and VHDL. Hardware engineers use HDLs to define hardware which can be rendered in silicon. Hardware defined in HDLs might look like software, but actually it’s not software, it’s hardware description. This hardware […]
If you’re living your life right, you probably know what as MOSFET is. But do you know the MESFET? They are like the faster, uninsulated, Schottky version of a MOSFET, and they used to rule the roost in radio-frequency (RF) silicon. But if you’re like us, and you have never heard of a MESFET, then […]
Everyone knows that ultrasonic cleaners are great, but not every device that’s marketed as an ultrasonic cleaner is necessarily such a device. In a recent video on the Cheap & Cheerful YouTube channel the difference is explored, starting with a teardown of a fake one. The first hint comes with the use of the description ‘Multifunction […]
It’s official, we’re living in the future. Certainly that’s the only explanation for how [wrongbaud] was able to write a three-part series of posts on hacking a cheap electric toothbrush off of AliExpress. As you might have guessed, this isn’t exactly a hack out of necessity. With a flair for explaining hardware hacking, [wrongbaud] has […]
Prototyping is a personal affair, with approaches ranging from dead-bug parts on tinplate through stripboard and protoboard, to solderless breadboards and more. Whichever you prefer, a common problem is that they don’t offer much in the way of solid connections to the outside world. You could use break-out boards, or you could do like [Pakequis] […]
In theory, any piece of software could be built out of discrete pieces of hardware, provided there are enough transistors, passive components, and time available. In general, though, we’re much more likely to reach for a programmable computer or microcontroller for all but the simplest tasks for several reasons: cost, effort, complexity, economics, and sanity. […]
An Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) defines the software interface through which for example a central processor unit (CPU) is controlled. Unlike early computer systems which didn’t define a standard ISA as such, over time the compatibility and portability benefits of having a standard ISA became obvious. But of course the best part about standards is […]