Over on the [Behind The Code with Gerry] YouTube channel our hacker [Gerry] shows us how to emulate a 74LS48 BCD-to-7-segment decoder/driver using an Altera CPLD Logic Chip From 1998. This is very much a das blinkenlights kind of project. The goal is to get a 7-segment display to count from 0 to 9, and […]
Ever get to the train station on time, find your platform, and then stare at the board showing your train is 20 minutes late? Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) may run like clockwork most days, but a heads-up before you leave the house is always nice. That’s exactly what [filbot] built: a real-time arrival display […]
Over on YouTube, [Ben Eater] pursues that classic 8-bit sound. In this video, [Ben] integrates the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) with his homegrown 6502. The 6581 SID was famously used in the Commodore line of computers, perhaps most notably in the Commodore 64. The 6581 SID supports three independent voices, each consisting […]
Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you. Do you think your soldering iron is after you? Well, [nanofix] asks (and answers): Is My Soldering Iron Dangerous? He has a look at his cheap FNIRSI soldering station and measures a “phantom voltage” of nearly 50 volts AC across the tip […]
Using a speaker as a microphone is a trick old enough to have become common knowledge, but how often do you see the hack reversed? As part of a larger project to measure the acoustic power of a subwoofer, [DeepSOIC] needed to characterize the phase shift of a microphone, and to do that, he needed […]
[Miroslav Hancar] wasn’t satisfied with abusing just a single component for our Component Abuse Challenge. He decided to abuse a whole assembly, in particular, some LED candles. In this project, LEDs are abused as temperature sensors. When the temperature gets hot enough for long enough, the microcontroller will turn on its LEDs. How? A diode’s […]
Anything with a laser has undeniable hacker appeal, even if the laser’s task is as pedestrian as sending data over a fiber optic cable. [Shahriar] from [The Signal Path] must agree, and you can watch as he tears down and investigates a fiber optic link made from old HP equipment in the video below. He […]
For most of us, the days of having to insert a disc to play our media are increasingly behind us. But if you’d like to provide your kids with the experience, you could use CardFlix. For the electronics, [Udi] used the readily available ESP8266 D1 Mini module connected via I2C to a PN532 NFC reader. […]
The clicking of a Geiger counter is well enough known as a signifier of radioactive materials, due to it providing the menacing sound effect any time a film or TV show deals with radiation. What we’re hearing is the electronic detection of an ionization event in a Geiger-Muller tube due to alpha or beta radiation, […]
Over on YouTube [Usagi Electric] shows us how to make RAM for the TMS9900. He starts by remarking that the TI-99/4A computer is an excellent place to start if you’re interested in getting into retro-computing. Particularly there are a lot of great resources online, including arcadeshopper.com and the AtariAge forums. The CPU in the TI-99 […]