There’s perhaps no sound more recognizable than the frantic clicking of a Geiger counter. Not because this is some post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is personally acquainted with the operation of said devices, but because it’s such a common effect used in many movies, TV shows, and video games. If somebody hears that noise, even […]
Source control is often the first step when starting a new project (or it should be, we’d hope!). Breaking changes down into smaller chunks and managing the changes between them makes it easier to share work between developers and to catch and revert mistakes after they happen. As project complexity increases it’s often desirable to […]
They say that necessity is the “Mother of Invention”, but over the years we’ve started to suspect that her cousin might be an underutilized microcontroller. How else can you explain projects like the latest from [MN Maker], which takes the relatively simple concept of a contact lens holder and manages to turn it into an […]
The ESP8266 and its heavyweight sibling the ESP32 are fantastic boards to develop with as they allow you to quickly and easily get a project online. Just tack a few sensors and some LEDs on them, and you’re well on the way to producing your own “Internet of Things”. The real challenge is utilizing the […]
When designing a mains power supply for a small load DC circuit, there are plenty of considerations. Small size, efficiency, and cost of materials all spring to mind. Potential lethality seems like it would be a bad thing to design in, but that didn’t stop [Great Scott!] from exploring capacitive drop power supplies. You know, […]
I couldn’t decide between normal and decaffeinated coffee. So to eliminate delays in my morning routine, and decision fatigue, I’ve designed the Schrödinger Quantum Percolator — making the state of my coffee formally undecidable until I drink it. At its core, the Quantum Percolator contains a novel quantum event detector that uses electron tunneling to […]
After a youth spent playing with Amigas and getting into all sorts of trouble on the school computer network, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for hardware from the 80s and 90s. This extends beyond computers themselves, and goes so far as to include modems, photocopiers, and even the much-maligned dot matrix […]
Figuring out the maximum number of peripherals which can be sensed or controlled with a minimum number of IOs is a classic optimization trap with a lot of viable solutions. The easiest might be something like an i2c IO expander, which would give you N outputs for 4 wires (SDA, SCL, Power, Ground). IO expanders […]
Hackers absolutely love building clocks. Seriously, there are few other devices for which we’ve seen such an incredible number of variations. But while the clocks that hackers build might blink out the time in binary, or write it out in words, they generally don’t feature hands. Apparently in 2019 it’s more reasonable to read binary […]
Historically, microcontrollers’ limited computing power and storage space meant software had to be written in low-level languages out of necessity. In recent years small affordable chips grew powerful enough that they could theoretically run higher level languages, sparking numerous efforts to turn that theory into reality. MicroPython delivered on this promise in a big way […]