Drums! You hit them, and they vibrate. It’s kind of fun. Piezoelectric elements can create electric current when they vibrate. [Will Dana] put two and two together to try and charge his phone on his YouTube channel WillsBuilds embedded below. It worked… about as well as you might expect. Which is to say: not very well. […]
The PIXO Aspire is a roughly $35 USD vape that can almost play DOOM, with [Aaron Christophel] finding that the only thing that realistically stops it from doing so is that the Cortex-M4-based Puya PY32F403XC MCU only has 64 kB of SRAM. CPU-wise it would be more than capable, with a roomy 16 MB of […]
Nautical navigation has a long history of innovation, from the compass and chronometer to today’s computer-driven autopilot systems. That said, the poor compatibility of electronics with saltwater has consequently created a need for rugged, waterproof computers, a category to which [Matti Airas] of Hat Labs has contributed with the open-source HALPI2. Powered by the Raspberry […]
Japan’s Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki was launched on May 21, 2010, and started its active mission in 2015 after an initial orbital insertion failure. Since that time, Akatsuki has continuously observed Venus from orbit until issues began to crop up in 2024 when contact was lost in April of that year due to attitude control issues. […]
We feel for [Jeff Geerling]. He spent a lot of effort building an AI cluster out of Raspberry PI boards and $3,000 later, he’s a bit regretful. As you can see in the video below, it is a neat build. As Jeff points out, it is relatively low power and dense. But dollar for dollar, […]
There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citing performance per line of code. But when looking at instruction sets it’s actually possible to eliminate every instruction except one and still have […]
Superlatives are tricky things. [mircemk]’s guide “How to make Simplest ever Oscilloscope Clock” falls into that category. It’s that word, simplest. Certainly, this is an oscilloscope clock, and a nice one. But is it simple? There’s a nice oscilloscope circuit with a cute 2″ 5LO38I CRT and EF80 tubes for horizontal and vertical deflection that […]
Fnirsi is one of those brands that seem to pop up more and more often, usually for portable oscilloscopes and kin. Their IPS3608 bench power supply is a bit of a departure from that, offering a mains-powered PSU that can deliver up to 36 VDC and 8 A in a fairly compact, metal enclosure. Recently […]
Ski goggle type laser safety lenses may look dorky, but they leave no gaps and fit around glasses. (Credit: FauxHammer, YouTube) After [Ross] from FauxHammer miniature model fame got lured into reviewing laser engravers and similar via the Bambu Lab H2D’s laser module, he found himself getting slightly nervous about the whole ‘safety’ aspect of […]
It’s been a tense few months for users of the BCacheFS filesystem, as amidst the occasional terse arguments and flowery self-praise on the Linux Kernel mailing list the future of this filesystem within the Linux kernel hung very much in the balance. After some initial confusion about what ‘externally maintained’ means in Linux parlance, it’s […]