If you have ever thought, “I wish I could have a mass spectrometer at home,” then we aren’t very surprised you are reading Hackaday. [Thomas Scherrer] somehow acquired a broken Brucker Microflex LT Mass Spectrometer, and while it was clearly not working, it promised to be a fun teardown, as you can see in the […]
If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you’ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you’ll often find that the power supply was in another room and the cooling system was in yet another. So when you get a […]
There’s a type of dust-collector that’s been popular since the 1990s, where a cube of acrylic or glass is laser-etched in a three-dimensional pattern. Some people call them bubblegrams. While it could be argued that bubblegrams are a sort of 3D display, they’re more like a photograph than a TV. [Ancient] had the brainwave that […]
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 […]