The Star Trek tricorder was a good example of a McGuffin. It did anything needed to support the plot or, in some cases, couldn’t do things also in support of the plot. We know [SirGalaxy] was thinking about the tricorder when he named the Tinycorder, but the little device has a number of well-defined features. […]
The advantage of a radio-controlled clock that receives the time signal from WWVB is that you never have to set it again. Whether it’s a little digital job on your desk, or some big analog wall clock that’s hard to access, they’ll all adjust themselves as necessary to keep perfect time. But what if the […]
Meet the little board that could: [alcor6502]’s tiny USB relay controller, now evolved into a multifunction marvel. Originally built as a simple USB relay to probe the boundaries of JLCPCB’s production chops, it has become a compact utility belt for any hacker’s desk drawer. Not only has [alcor6502] actually built the thing, he even provided […]
[Morten] works very fast. He has already designed, fabbed, populated, and tested a breakout board for the new tiniest microcontroller on the market, and he’s even made a video about it, embedded below. You might have heard about this new TI ARM Cortex MO micro on these very pages, where we asked you what you’d […]
The Pomdoro technique of time management has moved on a little from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer which gave it a name, as [Rukenshia] shows us with this nifty ESP32 and e-paper design. It’s relatively simple in hardware terms, being a collection of off-the-shelf modules in a 3D printed case, but the software has a custom […]
The cartridge based game consoles of decades ago had a relatively simple modus operandi — they would run a program stored in a ROM in the cartridge, and on the screen would be the game for the enjoyment of the owner. This made them simple in hardware terms, but for hackers in the 2020s, somewhat […]
The Cheap Yellow Display may not be the fastest of ESP32 boards with its older model chip and 4 MB of memory, but its low price and useful array of on-board peripherals has made it something of a hit in our community. Getting the most out of the hardware still presents some pitfalls though, as […]
Here at Hackaday, it’s a pretty safe bet that putting “World’s smallest” in the title of an article will instantly attract comments claiming that someone else built a far smaller version of the same thing. But that’s OK, because if there’s something smaller than this nearly microscopic LED blinky build, we definitely want to know […]