[Lonyelon] wanted to build an anniversary gift for his girlfriend. He decided to say it with e-Paper, a wise choice given its persistence and longevity. The project is an anniversary calendar. It displays a counter of the total time the couple has been together, measured in years, months, days, and hours—so it’s remarkably precise. [Lonyelon] […]
Multiplication on a common microcontroller is easy. But division is much more difficult. Even with hardware assistance, a 32-bit division on a modern 64-bit x86 CPU can run between 9 and 15 cycles. Doing array processing with SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions like AVX or NEON often don’t offer division at all (although the […]
Many of us grew up with dreams of piloting a forklift one day. Sadly, most warehouses take a dim view of horseplay with these machines, so few of us get to live out those fantasies. Playing with this desk-sized RC model from [ProfessorBoots] is probably a safer way to get those kicks instead. You can […]
Are you familiar with huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way. Shorter characters are the ones you are most likely to use. [Matheus Richard] had the same idea for optimizing your workflow in the Linux shell. The idea is to measure what commands you […]
The ESP32 is s remarkably powerful microcontroller, where its dual-core processor and relatively high clock speed can do some impressive work. But getting this microcontroller designed for embedded systems to do tasks that would generally be given to a much more powerful PC-type computer takes a little bit more willpower. Inspired by his dog, [Folkert] […]
Vintage hi-fi gear can be very attractive, particularly compared to modern stuff. However, when this stuff starts getting into its third or fourth decade after production, things start to wear out. Chief among them—the little incandescent bulbs that light up the dials with such a beautiful glow. [Piffpaffpoltrie] was suffering just this problem on an […]
While you tend to think of diamonds as ornamental gemstones, diamonds also have many important industrial uses, and many of those diamonds are now synthetic polycrystalline diamonds. How are they made? [JerryRigEverything] takes us behind the scenes at a diamond manufacturing facility, something you don’t get to see every day. Check out the giant presses […]