It’s not martian regolith, bu it’s the closest chemical match available to the dirt in Gale Crater. (Image: Swinburne University) Every school child can tell you these days that Mars is red because it’s rusty. The silicate rock of the martian crust and regolith is very rich in iron oxide. Now Australian researchers at CSIRO […]
Over on YouTube our hacker [VIP Love Secretary] shows us how to make a simple MOSFET tester. This is a really neat, useful, elegant, and simple hack, but the video is kind of terrible. We found that the voice-over constantly saying “right?” and “look!” seriously drove us to distraction. But this is a circuit which […]
[darrenburns]’ Rich Pixels is a library for sending colorful images to a terminal. Give it an image, and it’ll dump it to your terminal in full color. While it also supports ASCII art, the cool part is how it makes it so easy to display an arbitrary image — a pixel-art rendition of it, anyway […]
If you haven’t heard of Minecraft, well, we hope you enjoyed your rip-van-winkle nap this past decade or so. For everyone else, you probably at least know that this is a multiplayer, open world game, you may have heard that running a Minecraft server is a good job for maxing out a spare a Raspberry […]
This should count as a hack: making music from a thing that should not sing. In this case, [SIROJU] is tickling the ivories with a Brushless DC motor, or BLDC. To listen to a performance, jump to 6:27 in the embedded video. This BLDC has a distinctly chip-tune like sound, not entirely unlike other projects […]
Over at Quanta Magazine [Shalma Wegsman] asks What Is the Fourier Transform? [Shalma] begins by telling you a little about Joseph Fourier, the French mathematician with an interest in heat propagation who founded the field of harmonic analysis in the early 1800s. Fourier’s basic insight was that you can represent everything as a sum of […]
The PAX D177 PoS terminal helpfully tells you which tamper points got triggered. (Credit: Lucas Teske) These days Points of Sale (PoS) usually include a digital payment terminal of some description, some of which are positively small, such as the Mini PoS terminals that PAX sells. Of course, since it has a CPU and a […]