The world of custom mechanical keyboards is vibrant, with new designs emerging weekly. However, keyboards are just one way we interact with computers. Ploopy, an open-source hardware company, focuses on innovative user interface devices. Recently, [Colin] from Ploopy introduced their latest creation: the Ploopy Knob, a compact and thoughtfully designed control device. At first glance, […]
At one point in time mechanical seven segment displays were ubiquitous, over time many places have replaced them with other types of displays. [Sebastian] has a soft spot for these old mechanically actuated displays and has built an open-source 7-segment display with some very nice features. We’ve seen a good number of DIY 7-segment displays […]
If you work with virtual machines, perhaps to spin up a clean OS install for testing, historically you have either bitten the bullet and used one of the commercial options, or spent time getting your hands dirty with something open source. Over recent years that has changed, with the arrival of open source graphical applications […]
Our hacker [Andrew Zonenberg] reports in on his open-source high-speed Ethernet switch. He hasn’t finished yet, but progress has been made. If you were wondering what might be involved in a high-speed Ethernet switch implementation look no further. He’s been working on this project, on and off, since 2012. His design now includes a dizzying […]
Although Nintendo is mostly famous for making great games, they also have an infamous reputation for being highly litigious not only for reasonable qualms like outright piracy of their games, but additionally for more gray areas like homebrew development on their platforms or posting gameplay videos online. With that sort of reputation it’s not surprising […]
The Jye Tech DSO-150 is a capable compact scope that you can purchase as a kit. If you’re really feeling the DIY ethos, you can go even further, too, and kit your scope out with the latest open source firmware. The Open-DSO-150 firmware is a complete rewrite from the ground up, and packs the scope […]
In our wider community we are all familiar with the idea of open source software. Many of us run it as our everyday tools, a lot of us release our work under an open source licence, and we have a pretty good idea of the merits of one such document over another. A piece of […]
As consumers worldwide slowly make the switch from internal combustion vehicles to lower-carbon equivalents, a few concerns have appeared about electric vehicles. Range anxiety is ebbing away as batteries become bigger and chargers become more frequent, but a few well-publicized incidents have raised worries over fire safety. Lithium-ion batteries can ignite in the wrong circumstances, […]
Whether it’s a game of D&D or encrypting top-secret information, a wide array of methods are available for generating the needed random numbers with high enough entropy for their use case. For a tabletop game this might be a single die but for more sensitive applications a more robust method of generating random numbers is […]