These are tough times for American hackers, and rife with uncertainty. Trade wars are on, off, on again– who can keep track? If you’re used to getting everything from China, that can really cramp your style. [Jeremy Cook] took the time to write up his experience prototyping with American-made PCBs , just in time for […]
Here’s a clever hack. Simple, elegant, and eminently cost-effective: using an SMD capacitor to hold your flash media in place! This is a hack that can pretty much be summed up with just the image at the top of the page — a carefully placed SMD capacitor soldered to a routed tab makes for an […]
If you’re into retro CPUs and don’t shy away from wiring old-school voltages, [Mark]’s latest Intel 8080 build will surely spark your enthusiasm. [Mark] has built a full system board for the venerable 8080A-1, pushing it to run at a slick 3.125 MHz. Remarkable is that he’s done so using a modern Microchip FPGA, without vendor […]
Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out […]
We all appreciate clear easy-to-read reference materials. In that pursuit [Andreas] over at Splitbrain sent in his latest project, Pinoutleaf. This useful web app simplifies the creation of clean, professional board pinout reference images. The app uses YAML or JSON configuration files to define the board, including photos for the front and back, the number […]
Most of us learned to design circuits with schematics. But if you get to a certain level of complexity, schematics are a pain. Modern designers — especially for digital circuits — prefer to use some kind of hardware description language. There are a few options to do similar things with PCB layout, including tscircuit. There’s […]
The user interface of things we deal with often makes or breaks our enjoyment of using a device. [Janne] from Fraktal thinks so, he has an espresso machine he enjoys but the default controls were not what he was looking for and so in true hacker fashion he took what was and made it his […]
This fun PCB from [Nick Brown] features a miniature railroad implemented with 0805-sized LEDs. With an eye towards designing his own fun interactive PCB badge, the Light-Rail began its journey. He thoroughly documented his process, from shunting various late-night ideas together to tracking down discrepancies between the documentation of a part and the received part. […]
As computers age, a dedicated few work towards keeping some of the more interesting ones running. This is often a losing battle of sorts, as the relentless march of time comes for us all, human and machine alike. So as fewer and fewer of these machines remain new methods are needed to keep them running […]