Field News

When it comes to amateur radio, one size definitely does not fit all. That’s especially true with antennas, which need to be just the right size for the band you’re working, lest Very Bad Things happen to your expensive radio. That presents a problem for the ham who wants the option to work whichever band […]
High-speed bench equipment has become so much more affordable in the last decade that naturally one wonders what has made that possible. A great source of answers is a teardown by users like [kerry wong] who are kind enough to take apart their MSO2304X 300MHz osilloscope for our viewing pleasure. The posted teardown video shows […]
A simple yet intriguing idea is worth sharing, even if it wasn’t a flawless success: it can inspire others. [Richard]’s experiment with a motion-powered AirTag fits this bill. Starting with our call for simple projects, [Richard] came up with a circuit that selectively powers an AirTag based on movement. His concept was to use an […]
The RP2040 has quickly become a hot favorite with tinkerers and makers since its release in early 2021. This is largely attributed to the low cost, fast GPIOs, and plethora of bus peripherals. [xyphro] has written the I3C Blaster firmware that helps turn the Raspberry Pi Pico into a USB to I3C converter. The firmware […]
Recently a video surfaced from someone claiming that certain USB-to-Ethernet dongles contained ‘malware’ among other big claims. Basically these dongles were said to be designed by China (and Russia) to spy on users and so on, but how much of this is actually grounded in reality? When [lcamtuf] dove into the topic, what he found […]
With so much data being thrown at our eyeballs these days, it’s worryingly easy for the actually important stuff to slip by occasionally. So when [Liam Jackson] wanted a way to visualize the number of test failures popping up in the continuous integration system at work, he went with a novel but effective solution — […]
Buried in a talk on AI from an artist who is doing cutting-edge video work was the following nugget that entirely sums up the zeitgeist: “The tools are changing so fast that artists can’t keep up with them, let alone master them, before everyone is on to the next.” And while you might think that […]
[Surya Chilukuri] writes in to share JTAGprobe — a fork of the official Raspberry Pi debugprobe firmware that lets you use the low-cost microcontroller development board for JTAG and SWD debugging just by flashing the provided firmware image. We’ve seen similar projects in the past, but they’ve required some additional code running on the computer […]
The ESP32 series of microcontrollers have been with us for quite a few years now and appeared in both Tensilica and RISC-V variants, both of which deliver an inexpensive and powerful device. It’s thus shown up in quite a few handheld computers, whether they be conference badges or standalone devices, and this is definitely a […]
If you needed to weld something in a pinch, what’s the minimum complement of equipment you could get away with? In [Professor Bardal]’s case, it’s a couple of motorcycle batteries and a roll of flux-core wire, and not much else. We suspect this one is going to elicit quite a few comments, not least by […]