At 5:20 PM on November 9, 1965, the Tuesday rush hour was in full bloom outside the studios of WABC in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The drive-time DJ was Big Dan Ingram, who had just dropped the needle on Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon.” To Dan’s trained ear, something was off about the […]
Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from […]
Radio waves travel fast, and they can bounce, too. If you are able to operate a 25-meter dish, a transmitter, a solid software-defined radio, and an atomic clock, the answer is: yes, they can go all the way to Venus and back. On March 22, 2025, the Dwingeloo telescope in the Netherlands successfully pulled off […]
While high-voltage transmission lines are probably the most visible components of the electrical grid, they’re certainly among the least appreciated. They go largely unnoticed by the general public — quick, name the power line closest to you right now — at least until a new one is proposed, causing the NIMBYs and BANANAs to come […]
What do you do if you want a robot with great mobility? Walking is hard, and wheels are good enough, especially if you use the ‘wheels within wheels’ Mecanum setup. But you need torque, too. That’s what makes this entry into the Hackaday Prize so fantastic. It’s a Mecanum wheel of sorts, with an integrated […]