[VWestlife] ended up with an obscure piece of 80s satellite TV technology, shown above. The Micro-Scan is a fairly plan metal box with a single “Tune” knob on the front. At the back is a power switch and connectors for TV Antenna, TV Set, and “MW” (probably meaning microwave). There’s no other data. What was […]
The internals of a printer, whatever technology it may use, are invariably proprietary, with an abstracted more standard language being used to communicate with a host computer. Thus it’s surprisingly rare to see hacks on printers as printers, rather than printer hacks using the parts for some other purpose. This makes [Oelison]’s brain-swap of a […]
The Nintendo 64 was an amazing video game console, and alongside consoles like the Sony PlayStation, helped herald in the era of 3D games. That said, it was new hardware, with new development tools, and thus creating those early N64 games was a daunting task.In an in-depth review of Super Mario 64’s code, [Kaze Emanuar] goes […]
The JuiceBox charger in its natural environment. (Credit: Nathan Matias) Having a charger installed at home for your electric car is very convenient, not only for the obvious home charging, but also for having scheduling and other features built-in. Sadly, like with so many devices today, these tend to be tethered to a remote service […]
Ryobi is not exactly the Cadillac of cordless tools, but one still has certain expectations when buying a product. For most of us “don’t randomly stop working” is on the list. Ryobi 18-volt battery packs don’t always meet that expectation, but fortunately for the rest of us [Badar Jahangir Kayani] took matters into his own […]
The best part about post-mortem teardowns of electronics is when you discover some unusual design features, whether or not these are related to the original fault. In the case of a recent [DiodeGoneWild] video involving the teardown of an industrial DIN-rail mounted 24 V, 960 Watt power supply, the source of the reported bang was […]
To connect the miniature world of integrated circuits like a CPU with the outside world, a number of physical connections have to be made. Although this may seem straightforward, these I/O pads form a major risk to the chip’s functioning and integrity, in the form of electrostatic discharge (ESD), a type of short-circuit called a […]
At this point the question is no longer whether a new device runs DOOM, but rather how well. In the case of Anker’s Prime Charging Station it turns out that it’s actually not too terrible at controlling the game, as [Aaron Christophel] demonstrates. Unlike the similar Anker power bank product with BLE and a big […]
When is a Raspberry Pi not a Raspberry Pi? Perhaps when it’s a Pi Zero-shaped board with an RP3A0 SoC from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, made by [jonny12375]. Back in the early days of the Raspberry Pi, there was a offering from the Korean manufacturer Odroid, which wasn’t merely a similar machine with a […]
Selling power banks these days isn’t easy, as you can only stretch the reasonable limits of capacity and output wattage so far. Fortunately there is now a new game in town, with ‘smart’ power banks, like the Anker one that [Aaron Christophel] recently purchased for reverse-engineering. It features Bluetooth (BLE), a ‘smart app’ and a […]