[Hesam Moshiri] has built a variable switch-mode power supply over on hackaday.io. When prototyping a new circuit, often the goal is to get a proof-of-concept working as soon as possible to iron out all of the bugs it might have. The power supply can easily be an afterthought, and for smaller projects we might just […]
Large machine tools are often built to last a very long time, so it is not uncommon to find a lathe made in the 19th century still providing faithful service. The fundamental job of a lathe has not changed significantly in the intervening years, even though a modern lathe will have more features than its […]
Who wouldn’t want a robot that can fetch them a glass of water? [Saral Tayal] didn’t just think that, he jumped right in and built his own personal assistant robot. This isn’t just some remote-controlled rover though. The robot actually listens to his voice and recognizes his face. The body of the robot is the […]
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5 has been around since 2016 with the most recent version 5.2 published just this year. There’s not much hardware out there that’s using the new hotness. That didn’t stop [Damien Cauquil] from picking apart BLE 5’s new frequency hopping techniques and updating his BtleJack tool to allow sniffing, jamming and […]
Scarcity on the Internet is the siren song of bot writers. Maybe you’ve lost an eBay bid in the last milliseconds, or missed out on a hacker con when tickets sold out in under a minute — your corporeal self has been outperformed by a bot. But maybe you didn’t know bots are on a […]
The interface between humans and machines has been a constantly evolving field. Sure the computer mouse was a game-changer, but time moves on. We are now looking at integrating machines via soft HMIs for personal applications. A research team led by the University of California, San Diego has presented a paper interfacing a soft lens […]
We’re not going to question why [Absorber Of Light] needs to cut a bazillion little fragments of aluminum stock. We assume his reasoning is sound, so all we’re interested in is the automated chop saw he built to make the job less tedious, and potentially less finger-choppy. There are probably many ways to go about this […]
We’ve all stared at that button in the elevator with the phone icon on it, supremely confident that if the cab came to a screeching halt while rocketing up to the 42nd floor, a simple button press would be your salvation. To be fair, that’s probably true. But the entire system is not nearly as […]
Filming in slow-motion has long become a standard feature on the higher end of the smartphone spectrum, and can turn the most trivial physical activity into a majestic action shot to share on social media. It also unveils some little wonders of nature that are otherwise hidden to our eyes: the formation of a lightning […]
The SInclair ZX 8-bit computers of the early 1980s were masterpieces of economy, getting the most out of minimal hardware. The cassette tape interface was a one-bit port, the video was (on the first two models anyway) created by the processor itself rather than a CRT controller, and the keyboard? No fancy keyboard controllers here, […]