Field News

If we’re talking about oxidized iron… probably nobody. If we’re talking about Rust the programming language, well, that might be a different story. Google agrees, and is working on bringing the language into Android. That’s not enough for [Paul Sanja], who has the first Redox OS smartphone. It’s alive! Redox OS is a Unix-like operating […]
For the past two-and-half years Canadian consumer testing outfit RTINGS has been running an accelerated aging experiment across a large number of TVs available to a North-American audience. In their most recent update, we not only  find out about the latest casualties, but also the impending end of the experiment after 18,000 hours — as […]
Once upon a time, many radios and TVs only came with a single (mono) speaker. Then someone decided all audio hardware should have as many speakers as we have ears. That was until [Olivia] came along, and whipped up a dodecahedron speaker as an educational piece for workshops. Really, it shows us that twelve speakers […]
The video cassette tape was really the first successful home video format; discs just couldn’t compete back in the early days. That’s not to say nobody tried, however, with RCA’s VideoDisc a valiant effort that ultimately fell flat on its face. However, the forgotten format did have one benefit, in that it led to the […]
[Curious Scientist] has been working with some image sensors. The latest project around it is a 6K camera. Of course, the sensor gives you a lot of it, but it also requires some off-the-shelf parts and, of course, some 3D printed components. An off-the-shelf part of a case provides a reliable C mount. There’s also […]
Disposable batteries seem so 1990s. Sure, it’s nice to be able to spend a couple of bucks at the drugstore and get a flashlight or TV remote back in the game, but when the device is a daily driver, rechargeable batteries sure seem to make more financial sense. Unfortunately, what makes sense to the end […]
[Noisy Electrons] is a maker who also likes to keep fish. He sometimes needs to travel and keep his fish fed in the meantime, so he created an automated solution to handle that for him. The build is based around an STM32 microcontroller, paired with a MCP7940N real-time clock to keep time. The microcontroller is […]
Can you feel the nip of fall in the air? That can only mean one thing: Supercon is just around the corner. The next few weeks are going to bring a blitz of Supercon-related reveals, and we’re starting off with a big one: the workshops. Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference, and you need to […]
[Jaryd] from Core Electronics shows us human-like computer vision with Moondream on the Pi 5. Using the Moondream visual language model, which runs directly on your Raspberry Pi, and not in the cloud, you can answer questions such as “are the clothes on the line?”, “is there a package on the porch?”, “did I leave […]
Until the 2000s vacuum tubes practically ruled the roost. Even if they had surrendered practically fully to semiconductor technology like integrated circuits, there was no escaping them in everything from displays to video cameras. Until CMOS sensor technology became practical, proper video cameras used video camera tubes and well into the 2000s you’d generally scoff […]