This Short from [ProShorts 101] shows us how to make an incandescent light bulb from a jar, a pencil lead, two bolts, and a candle. Prepare the lid of the jar by melting in two holes to contain the bolts, you can do this with your soldering iron, but make sure your workspace is well […]
Although the video game crash of the mid-80s caused a major decline in arcades from their peak popularity, the industry didn’t completely die off. In fact, there was a revival that lasted until the 90s with plenty of companies like Capcom, Midway, SEGA, and Konami all competing to get quarters, francs, loonies, yen, and other […]
Over on his YouTube channel [Aaron Danner] explains biasing transistors with current sources in the 29th video of his Transistors Series. In this video, he shows how to replace a bias resistor (and consequently an additional capacitor) with a current source for both common-emitter and common-collector amplifiers. A current source provides electrical energy with a […]
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 […]