Which would you rather feel? The blast of a fire hose, or a cool, digital rain? That’s what we thought. Introducing Blue Rain — the fire hose that is the BlueSky feed, falling semi-cryptically down your screen in Matrix-style letter droplets. Ahh, isn’t that nice? Now, the rain doesn’t have to be blue. You can […]
Back in the 1980s, a viable modem cost hundreds of dollars. Even in the 1990s, you were looking at spending a a Benjamin or two to get computer squawking down the phone lines. According to [Cameron Kaiser], though, it’s possible to whip up a softmodem using a Commodore 64 for much cheaper than that. How […]
Touch screen head units are pretty much the norm these days. Many compromise with annoying on-screen volume controls or tiny buttons. If you find yourself with such a unit, you might like to hack in a real volume knob. [Daniel Ross] shows us how to do just that. The build uses an ATMega328 as the […]
You have a project that needs something to move. Should you use a stepper motor or a servo motor? [Matthias] has an opinion, and you can hear his thoughts in the video below. One tip we’ll take away from the video: when working with motors, shoot some high-frame-rate video and slow it down to see […]
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) took over from the classical BIOS some years into the new millenium. It’s typically used for running a computer at the basic pre-OS level, and most of us don’t even notice it past boot time. However, you can do some neat things in this space—you can even port over Nyan […]
[Fraens] has been re-making industrial machines in fantastic 3D-printable versions for a few years now, and we’ve loved watching his creations get progressively more intricate. But with this nearly completely 3D-printable needle loom, he’s pushing right up against the edge of the possible. The needle loom is a lot like the flying shuttle loom that […]
[Stephen Woodward] is familiar with digital potentiometers but is also familiar with their limitations. That spurred him to create the PWMPot which performs a similar function, but with better features than a traditional digital pot. Of course, he admits that this design has some limitations of its own, so — as usual — you have […]