When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Since this was more than a decade before the invention of the transistor, it would have been hard then to imagine the possibilities […]
A spare monitor and keyboard are handy things to have around, but they’re a bit of a hassle. They are useful for hardware development, plugging in to headless servers, or firing up a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer (SBC). If that’s something you do and portability and storage space are important to you, then […]
Over at the [Usagi Electric] farm, [David Lovett]’s custom 1-bit, vacuum tube-based computer (UEVTC for short) has been coming along well the past years, matching and exceeding the Motorola MC14500B 1-bit industrial control unit (ICU) that it is heavily inspired by. What is still missing, however, is a faster way to get data into the […]
We don’t know how you feel when designing hardware, but we get uncomfortable at the extremes. High voltage or current, low noise figures, or extreme frequencies make us nervous. [Orion Serup] from CrabLabs has been turning up a few of those variables and has created a fairly beefy 3-phase motor driver using GaN technology that can operate up […]
We love it when we find someone on the Internet who has the exact same problem we do and then solves it. [Hyperspace Pirate] starts a recent video by saying, “Oh no! I need to get rid of the algae in my pond, but I bought too much algaecide. If only there were a way […]
Diamonds are nearly perfect crystals, but not totally perfect. The defects in these crystals give the stones their characteristic colors. But one type of defect, the NV — nitrogen-vacancy — center, can hold a particular spin, and you can change that spin with the correct application of energy. [Asianometry] explains why this is important in […]
They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding […]
A decade is a long time to carry around a project idea in your head. Fortunately, the Tiny Games Contest happens to coincide with [senily64dx]’s getting back into ATMega programming, so they can finally make their zero-dimensional PONG dreams come true (and have the chance at great prizes, too, of course). If you don’t already […]
The cameras at the front of Meta’s Quest VR headsets are off-limits to developers, but developer [Michael Gschwandtner] created a workaround (Linkedin post) and shared implementation details with a VR news site. The view isn’t a pure camera feed (it includes virtual and UI elements) but it’s a clever workaround. The demo shows object detection […]
On an x86 system the BIOS is the first part of the system to become active along with the basic CPU core(s) functionality, or so things used to be until Intel introduced its Management Engine (IME) and AMD its AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). These are low-level, trusted execution environments, which in the case of AMD-SP […]