If you’ve dealt with reactance, you surely know the two equations for computing inductive and capacitive reactance. But unless you’ve really dug into it, you may only know the formula the way a school kid knows how to find the area of a circle. You have to have a bit of higher math to figure […]
[David Bloomfield] wanted to make some tweaks to an embedded system, but didn’t quite have the requisite skills. He decided to see if vibe coding could help. [David]’s goal was simple. To take the VESC Telemetry Display created by [Lukas Janky] and add some tweaks of his own. He wanted to add more colors to […]
If you build electronics, you will eventually need a coil. If you spend any time winding one, you are almost guaranteed to think about building a coil winder. Maybe that’s why so many people do. [Jtacha] did a take on the project, and we were impressed — it looks great. The device has a keypad […]
While most hams and hackers have at least heard of Heathkit, most people don’t know the strange origin story of the legendary company. [Ham Radio Gizmos] takes us all through the story. In case you don’t remember, Heathkit produced everything from shortwave radios to color TVs to test equipment and even computers. But, for the […]
It’s human nature to look at the technological achievements of the ancients — you know, anything before the 1990s — and marvel at how they were able to achieve precision results in such benighted times. How could anyone create a complicated mechanism without the aid of CNC machining and computer-aided design tools? Clearly, it was aliens. […]
Over on his YouTube channel [Aaron Danner] explains biasing transistors with current sources in the 29th video of his Transistors Series. In this video, he shows how to replace a bias resistor (and consequently an additional capacitor) with a current source for both common-emitter and common-collector amplifiers. A current source provides electrical energy with a […]
Forth is popular on small computers because it is simple to implement, yet quite powerful. But what happens when you really need to shrink it? Well, if your target is the 6502, there’s milliForth-6502. This is a port of milliForth, which is a fork of sectorforth. The sectorforth project set the standard, implementing a Forth […]
What do you do with an unused nuclear reactor project? In Washington, one of them was hacked to remove sound, all in the name of science. In 1977, a little way outside of Seattle, Washington Nuclear Projects 3 and 5 (WNP-3 and WNP-5) were started as part of Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, pronounced […]
How would you go about determining absolute zero? Intuitively, it seems like you’d need some complicated physics setup with lasers and maybe some liquid helium. But as it turns out, all you need is some simple lab glassware and a heat gun. And a laser, of course. To be clear, the method that [Markus Bindhammer] describes […]