These days just about any battery storage solution connected to PV solar or similar uses LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries. The reason for this is obvious: they got a very practical charge and discharge curve that chargers and inverters love, along with a great round trip efficiency. Meanwhile some are claiming that sodium-ion (Na+) batteries would be […]
If you cultivate an interest in building radios it’s likely that you’ll at some point make a simple receiver. Perhaps a regenerative receiver, or maybe a direct conversion design, it’ll take a couple of transistors or maybe some simple building-block analogue ICs. More complex designs for analogue radios require far more devices; if you’re embarking […]
Over on YouTube [Usagi Electric] shows us how to make RAM for the TMS9900. He starts by remarking that the TI-99/4A computer is an excellent place to start if you’re interested in getting into retro-computing. Particularly there are a lot of great resources online, including arcadeshopper.com and the AtariAge forums. The CPU in the TI-99 […]
If there’s one constant with software developers, it is that sometimes they get bored. At these times, they tend to think dangerous thoughts, usually starting with ‘What if…’. Next you know, they have gone down a dark and winding rabbit hole and found themselves staring at something so amazing that the only natural conclusion that […]
We are absurdly spoiled these days by our microcontrollers. Take the CH32V00X family– they’ve been immortalized by meme as “the ten cent micro” but with a clock speed of 48MHz and 32-bit registers to work with, they’re astoundingly capable machines even by the standards of home computers of yore. That’s what motivated [Tim] to see […]
There are still a few days before the doors open on this year’s Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, but for the most dedicated attendees, the badge hacking has already begun…even if they don’t have a badge yet. By referencing the design files we’ve published for this year’s Communicator badge, [Thomas Flummer] was able to produce this […]
There’s a part you’ll find in almost every mains powered switch mode power supply that might at first appear to have only one application. An optocoupler sits between the low voltage and the high voltage sides, providing a safely isolated feedback. Can it be used for anything else? [b.kainka] thinks so, and has proved it […]
If I mention nuclear reactor accidents, you’d probably think of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, or maybe Chernobyl (or, now, Chornobyl). But there have been others that, for whatever reason, aren’t as well publicized. Did you know there is an International Nuclear Event Scale? Like the Richter scale, but for nuclear events. A zero on the […]
Over on YouTube [CuriousMarc] and [TubeTimeUS] team up for a multi-part series E&L MMD-1 Mini-Micro Designer Restoration. The E&L MMD-1 is a microcomputer trainer and breadboard for the Intel 8080. It’s the first ever single-board computer. What’s more, they mention in the video that E&L actually invented the breadboard with the middle trench for the […]