It’s sometimes easy to forget that the light in the sky is an actual star. With how reliable it is and how busy we tend to be as humans, we can take that incredible fact and stow it away and largely go on with our lives unaffected. But our star is the thing that gives […]
Portal 2 is mostly known as the successful sequel to Valve’s weird physics platformer, Portal. It’s not really known for being a webserver. That might change, though, given the hard work of [PortalRunner]. Quite literally, [PortalRunner] hacked the Source engine and Portal 2 to actually run a working HTTP web server. That required setting up the code […]
Since the tail end of World War II, humanity has struggled to deal with its newfound ability to harness the tremendous energy in the nucleus of the atom. Of course there have been some positive developments like nuclear power which can produce tremendous amounts of electricity without the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels. But […]
Today we heard from [Richard James Howe] about his new CPU. This new 16-bit CPU is implemented in VHDL for an FPGA. The really cool thing about this CPU is that it eschews the typical program counter (PC) and replaces it with a linear-feedback shift register (LFSR). Apparently an LFSR can be implemented in hardware […]
What do you get when you combine an ESP32, a 16-bit DAC, an antique VFD, and an IDE CD-ROM drive? Not much, unless you put in the work, which [Akasaka Ryuunosuke] did to create ESPer-CDP, a modern addition for your hi-fi rack. It plays CDs (of course), but also can also scrobb the disks to […]
In a fusion of scrapyard elegance and Aussie ingenuity, [Mark Makies] has given a piece of old steel a steamy second life with his ‘CastAway Tub’. Call it a bush mechanic’s fever dream turned functional sculpture, starring two vintage LandCruiser leaf springs, and a rust-hugged cast iron tub dug up after 20 years in hiding. […]
Motorized faders are very cool, and you can find them in everything from expensive mixing desks to high-end video editing decks. If you want to build your own wireless motorized fader controls for your own projects, you might like this project from [Ian Peterson]. Faders are useful controls, but they’re usually very one-way devices—you set […]
It would be hard to find any electronics still in production which use CRT displays, but for some inscrutable reason it’s easy to find cheap 4-inch CRTs on AliExpress. Not that we’re complaining, of course. Especially when they get picked up for projects like this Retro CRT Weather Display from [Conrad Farnsworth], which recreates the […]
A treadmill-style bed can be a great addition to a 3D printer. It allows prints to be shifted out of the build volume as printing continues, greatly increasing the size and flexibility of what you can print. But [Ivan Miranda] and [Jón Schone] had a question. Instead of making a treadmill to suit a 3D […]