Animatronic displays aren’t just for Halloween, and hackers today have incredible access to effective, affordable parts with which to make spectacles of light, sound, and movement. But the hardware is only half the battle. Getting everything synchronized properly can be a daunting task, so get a head start on your next holiday display with the […]
Professional mountain bike racing is a rather bizarre sport. At the highest level, times between podiums will be less than a second, and countless hours of training and engineering go into those fractions of seconds. An all too important tool for the world cup race team is data acquisition systems (DAQ). In the right hands, […]
Since the RP2040 microcontroller is available as a stand-alone component, it’s easy enough for third parties to churn out their own variations — or outright clones of — the Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus we end up with for example AliExpress sellers offering their own versions that can be significantly cheaper than the genuine article. The […]
[shiura] had a problem — they wanted a nice high-quality audio output for their computer, but they didn’t fancy any of the DACs that were readily available on the market. They specifically wanted one that was affordable, capable, and included a graphic equalizer so they could simply hook it up to a regular amplifier and […]
We’ve probably all had a few conversations with people who hold eccentric scientific ideas, and most of the time they yield nothing more than frustration and perhaps a headache. In [Bertrand Selva]’s case, however, a conversation with a flat-earth believer yielded a device that uses a pair of gyroscopes to detect earth’s rotation, demonstrating that […]
Just about every “getting started with microcontrollers” kit, Arduino or otherwise, includes an ultrasonic distance sensor module. Given the power of microcontrollers these days, it was only a matter of time before someone asked: “Could I do better without the module?” Well, [Martin Pittermann] asked, and his answer, at least with the Pi Pico, is […]
The Raspberry Pi Pico is a very capable board, but it’s still a surprise to see bit-banged 100 MBit/s Fast Ethernet implemented on one. [Steve]’s Pico-100BASE-TX library allows an RP2040 (or RP2350) microcontroller to stream data at roughly 11 Mbyte/s, enough to implement 100 MBit/s Fast Ethernet transmission. We’ve seen 10BASE-T implemented on a Pico, […]
Mankind has been using water to mark the passage of time for thousands of years. From dripping stone pots in Ancient Egypt to the more mechanically-complicated Greco-Roman Clepsydrae, the history of timekeeping is a wet one — and it makes sense. As an incompressible fluid, water flows in very predictable patterns. If you fill a […]
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a figure who was doomed to roll a boulder for eternity as a punishment from the gods. Inspired by this, [Aidan], [Jorge], and [Henry] decided to build a sand-drawing table that endlessly traces out beautiful patterns (or at least, for as long as power is applied). You can watch it […]
Robots can look like all sorts of things, but they’re often more fun if you make them look like some kind of charming animal. That’s precisely what [Ananya], [Laurence] and [Shao] did when they built Cucumber the Robot Dog for their final project in the ECE 4760 class. Cucumber is controllable over WiFi, which was […]