In the comments of a recent article, the question came up as to where to find projects from the really smart kids the greybeards remember being in the 70s. In the case of [Will Dana] the answer is YouTube, where he’s done an excellent job of producing an ISS-tracking lamp, especially considering he’s younger than […]
Commercial 3D printers keep getting faster and faster, but we can confidently say that none of them is nearly as fast as [Jan]’s Minuteman printer, so named for its goal of eventually printing a 3DBenchy in less than a minute. The Minuteman uses an air bearing as its print bed, feeds four streams of filament […]
Photography is great, but sometimes it can get boring just reusing the same wavelengths over and over again. There are other options, though and when [Malcolm Wilson] decided he wanted to explore them, he decided to build a (near) IR camera. The IR images are almost ethereal.Image : Malcom Wilson. The housing is an old […]
If you have any empathy at all for those of us in the journalistic profession, have some pity for the poor editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, who let through an AI-generated summer reading list made up of novels which didn’t exist. The fake works all had real authors and thus looked plausible, thus we expect […]
Cable harness design is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of electronics design, just as essential as PCB design. While numerous software options exist for PCB design, cable harness design tools are far less common, making innovative solutions like Splice CAD particularly exciting. We’re excited to share this new tool submitted by Splice CAD. Splice […]
Anthropic has had an eventful couple weeks, and we have two separate write-ups to cover. The first is a vulnerability in the Antropic MCP Inspector, CVE-2025-49596. We’ve talked a bit about the Module Context Protocol (MCP), the framework that provides a structure for AI agents to discover and make use of software tools. MCP Inspector […]
Aside from GPUs, you don’t hear much about co-processors these days. [bitluni] perhaps missed those days, because he found a way to squeeze a 160 core RISC V supercluster onto a single m.2 board, and shared it all on GitHub. OK, sure, each core isn’t impressive– he’s using CH32V003, so each core is only running […]
X-ray crystallography, like mass spectroscopy and nuclear spectroscopy, is an extremely useful material characterization technique that is unfortunately hard for amateurs to perform. The physical operation isn’t too complicated, however, and as [Farben-X] shows, it’s entirely possible to build an X-ray diffractometer if you’re willing to deal with high voltages, ancient X-ray tubes, and soft […]
Although not nearly as intimidating as her ceiling-mounted hanging arm body, GLaDOS spent a significant portion of the Portal 2 game in a stripped-down computer powered by a potato battery. [Dave] had already made a version of her original body, but it was built around a robotic arm that was too expensive for the project […]