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 […]
Breadboards are great, but as the world moves more and more to having SMD as a standard, prototyping straight PCBs is becoming more common. If you’re mailing off to China for your PCBs, it’s shockingly quick for what it is, but a one-week turnaround is not “rapid prototyping”. [Stephen Hawes] has been on a quest […]
[Brian Haidet] published on his AlphaPhoenix channel a laser beam recorded at 2 billion frames per second. Well, sort of. The catch? It’s only a one pixel by one pixel video, but he repeats it over and over to build up the full rendering. It’s a fascinating experiment and a delightful result. For this project […]
TOSLINK was developed in the early 1980s as a simple interface for sending digital audio over fiber optic cables, and despite its age, is still featured on plenty of modern home entertainment devices. As demonstrated by [DIY Perks], this old tech can even be taught some new tricks — namely, transmitting surround sound wirelessly. Often, […]
If there’s one lesson to be learned from [Aled Cuda]’s pulsed laser driver, it’s that you can treat the current limits on electronic components as a suggestion if the current duration is measured in nanoseconds. The components in question are a laser diode and an NPN transistor, the latter of which operates in avalanche mode […]
Ski goggle type laser safety lenses may look dorky, but they leave no gaps and fit around glasses. (Credit: FauxHammer, YouTube) After [Ross] from FauxHammer miniature model fame got lured into reviewing laser engravers and similar via the Bambu Lab H2D’s laser module, he found himself getting slightly nervous about the whole ‘safety’ aspect of […]
Laser-engraving a cylindrical object usually requires a rotary attachment, which is a motorized holder that rotates a cylindrical object in sync with the engraver. But [Samcraft] shows that engraving all around a mug can be done without a motorized rotary holder. Separating a design into elements thin enough to engrave individually without losing focus is […]
Over on their substack [ObsoleteSony] has a new article: The Last Disc: How Blu-ray Won the War but Lost the Future. In this article the author takes us through the history of Blu-ray media and how under Sony’s stewardship it successfully defeated the competing format of the time, HD DVD. Sony started behind the eight […]