What color do you like your microcontroller boards? Blue? Red? Maybe white or black? Sadly, all of those are about to look old hat. Why? Well, as shared by [JLCPCB], this transparent Arduino looks amazing. The board house produced this marvel using its transparent flexible printed circuit (FPC) material. Basically, the stuff they use for […]
Reachy Mini is a kit for a compact, open-source robot designed explicitly for AI experimentation and human interaction. The kit is available from Hugging Face, which is itself a repository and hosting service for machine learning models. Reachy seems to be one of their efforts at branching out from pure software. Our guess is that […]
When you think of a tape recorder, you might think of a cassette tape. However, [Michael Simpson] has an old Star-Lite small reel-to-reel tape machine. It isn’t a repair so much as a rework to make it work better. These cheap machines were never the best, although a $19 tape player back then was a […]
The switch from analog telephone exchanges to a purely digital network meant a revolution in just about any way imaginable. Gone were the bulky physical switches and associated system limitations. In the UK this change happened in the early 1980s, with what the Post Office Telecommunications (later British Telecom) and associated companies called System X. Along […]
Remember the 80286? It was the sequel to the 8086, the chip that started it all, and it powered a great number of machines in the early years of the personal computing revolution. It might not be as relevant today, but regardless, [Daniel Balsom] has now released a comprehensive test suite for the ancient chip. (via […]
Most research on electroplating tries to find ways to make it plate parts more uniformly. [Ajc150] took the opposite direction, though, with his selective electroplating project, which uses an electrode mounted on a CNC motion system to electrochemically print images onto a metal sheet (GitHub repository). Normally, selective electroplating would use a mask, but masks […]
One of the categories we chose for the One Hertz Challenge is “Could Have Used a 555.” What about when you couldn’t have, but did anyway? The 555 is famously easy to use, but not exactly the most accurate timer out there — one “ticking” at 1 Hz will pulse just about once per second […]
Computers and cellphones can do so many things, but sometimes if you want to doodle or take a note, pencil and paper is the superior technology. You could carry a device and a pocket notebook, or you could combine the best of analog and digital with the KeyMo. [NuMellow] wanted a touchpad in addition to […]
After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans […]
There are a ton of Bluetooth speakers on the market. Just about none of them have any user-serviceable components or replacement parts available. When they break, they’re dead and gone, and you buy a new one. [Jonathan Mueller-Boruttau] wrote in to tell us about the latest speaker from Teufel Audio, which aims to break this cycle. […]