USB Power Delivery is widely considered to be a good thing. It’s become relatively standard, and is a popular way for makers to easily power their projects at a number of specific, useful voltages. However, what you may not know is that it’s possible to get much more variable voltages out of some USB chargers out […]
For those who’ve never bitten the Apple, the PowerMac G4 was a blue-tinted desktop Macintosh offered from 1999 to 2004. At the time, the machines were plenty fast — being advertised as the first “personal supercomputer” when they hit the market. But Father Time is particularly harsh on silicon, so they’re properly archaic by modern […]
Remember the ZEOS Pocket PC? Perhaps you knew it as the Tidalwave PS-1000. Either way, it was a small clamshell computing device that was first released all the way back in 1992, and perhaps most accurately known as a DOS-based palmtop. Over at [Robert’s Retro] on YouTube, one of these fine devices was put through […]
At this point, many of us have gone all-in on USB-C. It’s gotten to the point that when you occasionally run across a gadget that doesn’t support being powered USB-C, the whole experience seems somewhat ridiculous. If 90% of your devices using the same power supply, that last 10% starts feeling very antiquated. So why […]
Aside from their ability to operate fairly well in extreme temperatures, lead-acid batteries don’t have many benefits compared to more modern battery technology. They’re heavy, not particularly energy dense, have limited charge cycles, and often can’t be fully discharged without damage or greatly increased wear. With that in mind, one can imagine that a laptop […]
Around here, we love it when someone identifies a need and creates their own solution. In this case, [Engineer Bo] was tired of endless and imprecise scrolling with a mouse wheel. No off-the-shelf solutions were found, and other DIY projects either just used hacked mice scroll wheels, customer electronics with low-res hardware encoders, or featured […]
The moment everyone has been talking about for years has finally arrived, the European Union’s mandating of USB charging on all portable electronic devices is now in force. While it does not extend beyond Europe, it means that there is a de facto abandonment of proprietary chargers in other territories too. It applies to all […]
[CNLohr] has been tinkering with some fun parts of late. He’d found out that ordinary LCD screens could be used as simple touch sensors, and he had to try it for himself. He ended up building a little doohickey that combined USB C, an LCD display, and a touch interface, all for under a buck. […]
As we all know, when developing software for any platform or simply hacking a bit of code to probe how something works, the ability to deploy code rapidly is a huge help. [Martin Donlon], aka [wickerwaka], is well known in retro gaming and arcade hardware reverse engineering circles and had the usual issues figuring out […]
Touchpads, or trackpads, have been around since the 1980s. Today, you can often find them in laptops and notebook computers as pointing devices. With no moving parts, a trackpad are easy to integrate into the body of a portable computer. they’re much smaller than the traditional mouse. Until the advent of multitouch and gestures over […]