Some people may remember the joys of trying to boot Linux on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller, which was an absolute exercise in patience. In comparison [He Chunhui]’s Tiny386 emulator running on an ESP32-S3 MCU is positively zippy when it boots and runs Windows 95. The provided video (also embedded below) makes clear that while you […]
If there’s one thing [rctestflight] likes, it’s… probably radio controlled test flights. If there are two things [rctestflights] likes, the second one is probably ground-effect vehicles, AKA Ekranoplans. Tired of having them flip over and crash, he’s trying an an innovative solution: stick a planing hull on it. Ekranoplans have a stability problem because the […]
Part of the reason there are always free pianos on your digital classifieds listing of choice is that, at least economically speaking, a piano is less of a musical instrument and more of a complicated machine that can and will wear out (not to mention the physical difficulty of actually moving one). Once a piano […]
We’ve all built projects that are a rats’ nest of wiring and feature creep, but the best projects in the end are usually those that use a simple solution to elegantly solve a problem. [Kauz] had been thinking about a unique type of electric guitar pickup for a while and rather than purchase an expensive […]
Perhaps we’ve all found ourselves at one time or another with more computers in use than keyboards and other peripherals at hand to use them with. With a single user you can make do with remote terminals or by simply plugging and unplugging, but with multiple users it’s not so easy. CNX Software’s [Jean-Luc Aufranc] […]
Things are not looking good for iRobot. Although their robotic Roomba vacuums are basically a household name, the company has been faltering financially for some time now. In 2024 there was hope of a buyout by Amazon, who were presumably keen to pull the bots into their Alexa ecosystem, but that has since fallen through. […]
WiFi-enabled ‘smart’ light bulbs are everywhere these days, and each one of them has a microcontroller inside that’s capable enough to run all sorts of interesting software. For example, [vimpo] decided to get one running a minimal Minecraft server. The Bl602-equipped board inside the LED lightbulb. (Credit: vimpo, YouTube) Inside the target bulb is a […]
The human body and sharp objects don’t get along very well, especially when they are being wielded with ill-intent. Since antiquity there have been various forms of armor designed to protect the wearer, but thankfully these days random sword fights don’t often break out on the street. Still, [SCREEN TESTED] wanted to test the viability […]
Over on YouTube [Usagi Electric] shows us how he installed an 84MB hard drive into his PDP-11/44. In the beginning he purchased a bunch of RA70 and RA72 drives and board sets but none of them worked. As there are no schematics it’s very difficult to figure out how they’re broken and how to troubleshoot […]
Rust is the new hotness in programming languages because of how solid its memory protections are. Race conditions and memory leaks are hardly new issues however, and as greybeards are wont to point out, they were kind of a solved problem already: we have Ada. So if you want a memory-protected kernel but aren’t interested […]