Category: Posts

Interested in playing with ultra-wideband (UWB)? [Jaryd] recently put together a fairly comprehensive getting started guide featuring the AI Thinker BU03 that looks like a great place to start. These modules can be used to determine distance between two of them to an accuracy in the order of 10 centimeters, and they can do so in […]
As one of the oldest programming languages still in common use today, and essential for the first wave of Artificial Intelligence research during the 1950s and 60s, Lisp is often the focus of interpreters that can run on very low-powered systems. Such is the case with [Robert van Engelen]’s TinyLisp, which only takes 99 lines […]
Anyone who’s spent significant amounts of time salvaging old electronics has probably wished there were a way to take apart a circuit board without desoldering it. [Zeyu Yan] et al seem to have had the same thought, and so designed circuit boards that can be dissolved and recycled when they become obsolete. The researchers printed […]
[Paul Maine] was experimenting with GNU Radio and an RTL-SDR dongle. He created an SSB receiver and, lucky for us, he documented it all in a video you can see below. He walks through how to generate SSB, too. If videos aren’t your thing, you can go back to the blog post from [Gary Schafer] […]
At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They generally all work under the same physical principle though — a radio signal stimulates a gas at a specific frequency, and the response […]
Radiation is a bad thing that we don’t want to be exposed to, or so the conventional wisdom goes. We’re most familiar with it in the context of industrial risks and the stories of nuclear disasters that threaten entire cities and contaminate local food chains. It’s certainly not something you’d want anywhere near your dinner, […]
People have long been interested in very low frequency (VLF) radio signals. But it used to be you pretty much had to build your own receiver which, luckily, wasn’t as hard as building your own VHF or UHF gear. But there is a problem. These low frequencies have a very long wavelength and, thus, need […]
When we last brought you word of the SS United States, the future of the storied vessel was unclear. Since 1996, the 990 foot (302 meter) ship — the largest ocean liner ever to be constructed in the United States — had been wasting away at Pier 82 in Philadelphia. While the SS United States […]
More and more car manufacturers these days are becoming interested in the recurring revenue model, with Volkswagen’s ID.3 BEV being the latest to have an optional ‘motor power upgrade’ that you can pay for either monthly or with a ‘lifetime’ payment. As the BBC reports, this option is now available in the UK, with customers […]
In what sounds like the plot from a sci-fi movie, scientists have isolated an incredibly rare immune mutation to create a universal antiviral treatment. Only present in a few dozen people worldwide, ISG15 immunodeficiency causes people to be more susceptible to certain bacterial illnesses, but it also grants the people with this condition immunity to […]