Discord had a data breach back on September 20th, via an outsourced support contractor. It seems it was a Zendesk instance that was accessed for 58 hours through a compromised contractor user account. There have been numbers thrown around from groups claiming to be behind the breach, like 1.6 Terabytes of data downloaded, 5.5 million […]
USB power has become ubiquitous — everything from phones to laptops all use it — so why not your lab bench? This is what [EEEngineer4Ever] set out to do with the BenchVolt PD USB adjustable bench power supply. This is more than just a simple breakout for standard USB PD voltages, mind you; with adjustable […]
The first transistors were point contact devices, not far from the cats-whiskers of early radio receivers. They were fragile and expensive, and their performance was not very high. The transistor which brought the devices to a mass audience through the 1950s and 1960s was the one which followed, the alloy diffusion type. [Play With Junk] […]
Our hacker [Piers Finlayson] is at it again, and this time he has added USB support to One ROM. With this new connectivity you can attach your One ROM to your computer with a USB cable and then in a matter of seconds upload new firmware from your Chrome (or Chromium) web browser. This new […]
The geometric waveguide glass of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. (Credit iFixit) Recently the avid teardown folk over at iFixit got their paws on Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, for a literal in-depth look at these smart glasses. Along the way they came across the fascinating geometric waveguide technology that makes the floating display feature work […]
The worst thing about a volume knob is that, having connected it to a computer, it might be wrong: if you’ve manually altered the volume settings somewhere else, the knob’s reading won’t be correct. [I Got Distracted] has a quick tutorial on YouTube showing how to use a BLDC, a hall effect sensor, Pi Pico […]
The Component Abuse Challenge is dragging all sorts of old, half-forgotten hacks out of the woodwork, but this has got to be the most vintage: [KenS] started using a transformer as a variable choke on his speakers 55 years ago. The hack is pretty bone-dead simple. A choke is an inductor in an audio (or […]
When you think anemometer, you probably don’t think “load cell” — but (statistically speaking) you probably don’t live in Hurricane Country, which is hard on wind-speed-measuring-whirligigs. When [BLANCHARD Jordan] got tired of replacing professionally-made meteorological eggbeaters, he decided he needed something without moving parts. Whatever he came up with would probably qualify for the Component […]
If you have a fear of heights and find yourself falling out of an airplane, you probably don’t want to look up to find your parachute full of holes. However, if the designer took inspiration from kirigami in the same way researchers have, you may be in better shape than you would think. This is […]
If I’m honest with myself, I don’t really need access to an off-grid, fault-tolerant, mesh network like Meshtastic. The weather here in New Jersey isn’t quite so dynamic that there’s any great chance the local infrastructure will be knocked offline, and while I do value my privacy as much as any other self-respecting hacker, there’s […]