Over the past 30 years the price of hardware has slowly but surely come down, and it’s now possible to buy all manner of widgets and gizmos online for less than the price of a fancy Italian dinner. By and large this is a good thing, but it’s not uncommon to find that your new […]
Security cameras used to be analog devices feeding back into a room full of tiny screens and commercial grade VCRs. As technology moved forward, IP cameras began to proliferate. Early models simply presented a video stream and configuration page to the local network. Modern models aimed at the home market differ however. More often than […]
After a youth spent playing with Amigas and getting into all sorts of trouble on the school computer network, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for hardware from the 80s and 90s. This extends beyond computers themselves, and goes so far as to include modems, photocopiers, and even the much-maligned dot matrix […]
Modern microcontroller platforms spoil us with their performance and expansive spec sheets. These days it’s not uncommon to be developing for a cheap micro that has a clock rate well in excess of 100MHz, with all manner of peripherals baked in. DACs, WiFi, you name it – it’s in there, with a bunch of libraries […]
Before there was the Internet, there were a lot of would-be Internets. Compuserve comes to mind, as do Prodigy, GEnie, Delphi, and the innumerable BBS systems that were once gateways to worlds beyond our CRT monitors and 300 baud Hayes Supermodems. Service providers varied by region, of course. The French postal and telephone service rolled […]
When you build one-off projects for yourself, if it doesn’t work right the first time, it’s a nuisance. You go back to the bench, rework it, and move on with life. The equation changes considerably when you’re building things to sell to someone. Once you take money for your thing, you have to support it, […]
When using an Arduino, at least once you’ve made it past blinking LEDs, you might start making use of the serial connection to send and receive information from the microcontroller. Communicating with the board while it’s interacting with its environment is a crucial way to get information in real-time. Usually, that’s as far as it […]