It was such an innocent purchase, a slightly grubby and scuffed grey plastic box with the word “P O L A R O I D” intriguingly printed along its top edge. For a little more than a tenner it was mine, and I’d just bought one of Edwin Land’s instant cameras. The film packs it […]
You’d think a paper from a science team from Carnegie Mellon would be short on fun. But the team behind LegoGPT would prove you wrong. The system allows you to enter prompt text and produce physically stable LEGO models. They’ve done more than just a paper. You can find a GitHub repo and a running […]
A terrarium is a little piece of the living world captured in a small enclosure you can pop on your desk or coffee table at home. If you want to keep it as alive as possible, though, you might like to implement some controls. That’s precisely what [yotitote] did with their smart terrarium build. At […]
Has anybody heard of the ATW800 transputer workstation? The one that used a modified Atari ST motherboard as a glorified I/O controller for a T-series transputer? No, we hadn’t either, but transputer superfan [Axel Muhr] has created the ATW800/2, an Atari Transputer card, the way it was meant to be. The transputer was a neat […]
If you talk about Starlink, you are usually talking about the satellites that orbit the Earth carrying data to and from ground stations. Why not? Space is cool. But there’s another important part of the system: the terminals themselves. Thanks to [DarkNavy], you don’t have to tear one open yourself to see what’s inside. The […]
Plywood is an interesting material: made up of many layers of thin wood plys, it can be built up into elegantly curved shapes. Do you need to limit it to just wood, though? [Zach of All Trades] has proved you do not, when he embedded a light guide, LEDs, microcontrollers and touch sensors into a […]
If you want read-only memory today, you might be tempted to use flash memory or, if you want old-school, maybe an EPROM. But there was a time when that wasn’t feasible. [Igor Brichkov] shows us how to make a core rope memory using a set of ferrite cores and wire. This was famously used in […]
Treat dispensers are old hat around here, but what if kitty doesn’t need the extra calories — and actually needs to drop some pounds? [MethodicalMaker] decided to link the treat dispenser to a cat wheel, and reward kitty for healthy behaviors. The dispenser can be programmed to make the cat run long enough to burn […]
Earlier this month we covered the brewing controversy over libogc, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much of the library was based on leaked information from Nintendo had been circulating for decades, but the more recent accusations that libogc included code from other […]
When [Kasyan] was six years old, he saw a RADUGA computer, a Russian unit from the 1990s, and it sparked his imagination. He has one now that is a little beat up, but we feel like he sees it through his six-year-old eyes as a shiny new computer. The computer, which you can see in […]