Although not the first video game ever produced, Pong was the first to achieve commercial success and has had a tremendous influence on our culture as a whole. In Pong’s time, its popularity ushered in the arcade era that would last for more than two decades. Today, it retains a similar popularity partially for approachability: […]
In the beginning was the MOS6502, an 8-bit microprocessor that found its way into many famous machines. Some of you will know that a CMOS 6502 was created by the Western Design Center, and in turn, WDC produced the 65C816, a 16-bit version that was used in the Apple IIgs as well as the Super […]
[Thomas] comes up with some unusual gear. In his latest teardown and repair video, he has a vintage 1943 Danish oscilloscope, a Radiometer OSG32 on the bench. It isn’t lightweight, and it certainly looks its age with a vintage cracked finish on the case. You can check out the tubes and high-voltage circuitry in the […]
It could be argued that erasable programmable ROMs (EPROMs) with their quaint UV-transparent windows are firmly obsolete today in an era of various flavors of EEPROMs. Yet many of these EPROMs are still around, and people want to program them. Unfortunately, the earliest EPROMs were made during a time when JEDEC standardization hadn’t taken root […]
We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But [Asianmoetry] taught us a new one: Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don […]
Robotic arms have a lot in common with CNC machines in that they are usually driven by a fixed script of specific positions to move to, and actions to perform. Autonomous behavior isn’t the norm, especially not for hobby-level robotics. That’s changing rapidly with LeRobot, an open-source machine learning framework from the Hugging Face community. […]
E-paper screens have opened up a wide variety of novel use cases that just wouldn’t work with the higher power draw of an LCD. [gokux] thought it would be perfect for a digital sticky note. Using a Waveshare 2.9″ e-paper display hooked up to a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3, a battery, and a switch all […]
Here at Hackaday HQ, we all have opinions about the way we like to do things. And no surprise, this extends to the way we like to lay out circuits in schematics. So when we were discussing our own takes on this piece on suggested schematic standards, it was maybe more surprising how much we […]
As the timebase for a clock, almost anything with a periodic oscillation can be used. Traditionally, that meant a pendulum, but in our time, we’ve seen plenty of others. Perhaps none as unusual as [Tim]’s candle flicker clock, though. Candles are known for their flickering, a property of the wick and the fuel supply that […]
[naturejab] shows off his solar powered pyrolysis machine which can convert scrap plastic into fuel. According to the video, this is the world’s most complex hand-made pyrolysis reactor ever made. We will give him some wiggle room there around “complex” and “hand-made”, because whatever else you have to say about it this machine is incredibly […]