Field News

China played host to what, presumably, was the world’s first robot and human half-marathon. You can check out the action and the Tiangong Ultra robot that won in the video below. The event took place in Beijing and spanned 21.1 km. There was, however, a barrier between lanes for humans and machines. The human rules […]
We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using […]
Forth is popular on small computers because it is simple to implement, yet quite powerful. But what happens when you really need to shrink it? Well, if your target is the 6502, there’s milliForth-6502. This is a port of milliForth, which is a fork of sectorforth. The sectorforth project set the standard, implementing a Forth […]
Despite the best efforts of the RepRap community over the last twenty years, self-replicating 3D printers have remained a stubbornly elusive goal, largely due to the difficulty of printing electronics. [Brian Minnick]’s fully-printed 3D printer could eventually change that, and he’s already solved an impressive number of technical challenges in the process. [Brian]’s first step […]
Entry-level oscilloscopes are a great way to get some low-cost instrumentation on a test bench, whether it’s for a garage lab or a schoolroom. But the cheapest ones are often cheap for a reason, and even though they work well for the price they won’t stand up to more advanced equipment. But missing features don’t […]
In this series of 23 YouTube videos [Rich] puts the AMD Zynq-7000 SoC through its paces by building a development board from the ground up to host it along with its peripherals. The Zynq is part FPGA and part CPU, and while it has been around for a while, we don’t see nearly as many […]
When we say non-planar slicing is for the birds, we mean [Joshua Bird], who demonstrates the versatility of his new non-planar S4-Slicer by printing a Benchy upside down with the “Core R-Theta” printer we have featured here before. S4 slicer uses the path from any point (here, Benchy’s prow) as its basis… This non-planar slicer […]
It’s traditional to launch new software on April Fool’s Day, which is when we heard that Rockbox 4.0 has been released. But, in this case, the venerable MP3 firmware actually did update after a long absence. It’s great to see that good old Rockbox is still kicking along. We first mentioned Rockbox here at Hackaday approaching […]
The user interface of things we deal with often makes or breaks our enjoyment of using a device. [Janne] from Fraktal thinks so, he has an espresso machine he enjoys but the default controls were not what he was looking for and so in true hacker fashion he took what was and made it his […]
Although uranium-235 is the typical fuel for commercial fission reactors on account of it being fissile, it’s relatively rare relative to the fertile U-238 and thorium (Th-232). Using either of these fertile isotopes to breed new fuel from is thus an attractive proposition. Despite this, only India and China have a strong focus on using […]