TVs used to be round, and the GE M935AWL is a great example of that. [bandersentv] found one of these ancient sets, but found it had a “cataract”—a large ugly discoloration on the tube. He set about repairing the tube and the set, restoring this grand old piece back to working order. The video begins […]
If you’re trying to learn a new language, there are always a lot of words to learn. A word-of-the-day calendar can help, and they’re often readily available off the shelf. Or, you can grab some hardware and build your own, as [daedal-tech] did! The project was built as a gift to help [daedal-tech]’s partner with […]
In general, the simpler a thing is, the better. That doesn’t appear to apply to engines, though, at least not how we’ve been building them. Pistons, cranks, valves, and seals, all operating in a synchronized mechanical ballet to extract useful work out of some fossilized plankton. It doesn’t have to be that way, though, if […]
Seeing a heavy load slide around on nearly frictionless air bearings is pretty cool; it’s a little like how the puck levitates on an air hockey table. Commercial air bearings are available, of course, but when you can build these open-source air bearings, why bother buying? One of the nice things about [Diffraction Limited]’s design […]
[Julian] knows that real diodes you can buy don’t work exactly like we say they do. That’s actually pretty common. We routinely ignore things like wire resistance and source resistance in batteries. Diodes have problems that are harder to ignore, such as the forward voltage drop. So, while a real diode will only pass current […]
We’ve often heard you should do everything twice. The first time is to learn what you need to do, and the second time is to do it right. We bet [Ian Carey] would agree after taking his old linear power supply PCB and changing it to a switching regulator design. You can see more about […]
RC cars used to be pretty simple. They’d go forwards, backwards, and steer if you got a full-function toy. However, with modern technology, it’s pretty trivial to make them more advanced. [Stuck at Prototype] demonstrates that nicely with his little Micro Racer Cars. Each little RC car has its own ESP32 running the show, hooked […]
When you used punch cards or tape to write a computer program, brief variable names were the norm. Your compiler or assembler probably only allowed six letters, anyway. But times change, and people who, by habit, give array indices variable names like I, J, or K get a lot of grief. But [Jack Kelly] points […]
Glass! It’s, uh, not very conductive. And sometimes we like that! But other times, we want glass to be conductive. In that case, you might want to give the glass a very fine coating of tin oxide. [Vik Olliver] has been working on just that, in hopes he can make a conductive spot on a […]
If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the […]