An errant wire snipping across the wrong electrical pins spells the release of your magic smoke. Even if you are lucky, stray parts are the root of boundless malfunctions from disruptive to deadly. [TheRainHarvester] shares his trick for covering an Arduino Nano with some scrap plastic most of us have sitting in the recycling bin. […]
If you want to measure resistance and you know Ohm’s law, it seems like you have an easy answer, right? Feed a known current through the thing you want to measure and read the voltage required. A little math, and that’s it. Or is it? If you are measuring reasonably large resistance and you don’t […]
If you don’t have access to a 3D scanner, you can get a lot done with photogrammetry. Basically, you take a bunch of pictures of an object from different angles, and then stitch them together with software to create a 3D model. For best results, you need consistent, diffuse lighting, an unchanging background, and a […]
Regular readers will recognise this as the third part of a series exploring blacksmithing for those who have perhaps always fancied having a go but have never quite known where to start. It’s written from a position of the unusual experience of having grown up around a working forge, my dad may now be retired […]
It has never been easier to build displays for custom data visualization than it is right now. I just finished one for my office — as a security researcher I wanted a physical map that will show me from where on the planet my server is being attacked. But the same fabrication techniques, hardware, and […]
By now most of us have used a Raspberry Pi at some level or another. As a headless server it’s a great tool because of its price point, and as an interface to the outside world the GPIO pins are incredibly easy to access with a simple Python script. For anyone looking for guidance on […]
Do you ever peer into the void…of your hardware scrap box? It may be a wonderland of parts with near-infinite potential, and they just need to be assembled and depending on what you hoard, programmed. Access to a laser engraver doesn’t hurt either. The stuff in [Mr. Sobolak]’s bin is cooler than average, at least […]
An interesting part of working on the Building Management and Control (BMaC) project – as previously covered on this site – was the reverse-engineering and ultimately the gaining of full control over the coffee machines at the office. Not the boring filter coffee machines, mind you, but the fully automatic espresso machine type that grinds […]
It’s hard to imagine a smart house without smart lighting. Maybe it’s laziness, but the ability to turn a light on or off without walking over to the switch is a must-have, particularly once the lap is occupied by a sleeping infant. It’s tempting to just stuff a relay in the electrical boxes and control […]