Neon lamps are fun to play with. These old-school indicators were once heavily utilized in many types of equipment for indication purposes but now seem largely relegated to mains voltage indication duties. Here’s a fun video by [Ashish Derhgaen], discussing the photoelectric effect of neon lamps with some simple demonstrations. Orange light makes it light! […]
Magnetic levitation has not quite revolutionized the world of transit the way some of us might have hoped. It has, however, proven useful to [mrdiytechmagic], who has put the technology to grand use in making his levitating snail lamp. The build is actually relatively complicated compared to some levitating toys you might have seen before. […]
[GloriousCow] has started working on a series of investigations into the various historical floppy disk copy protection schemes used in the early days of the IBM PC and is here with the first of these results, specifically Formaster’s Copy-Lock. This is the starting sector of track 6. It looks empty, but it’s not quite. The […]
DEC’s LAN Bridge 100 was a major milestone in the history of Ethernet which made it a viable option for the ever-growing LANs of yesteryear and today. Its history is also the topic of a recent video by [The Serial Port], in which [Mark] covers the development history of this device. We previously covered the LANBridge […]
Battery management is a tedious but necessary problem that becomes more of a hassle with lithium-ion technology. As we’re all very aware, such batteries need a bit of care to be utilized safely, and as such, a huge plethora of ICs are available to perform the relevant duties. Hackaday.IO user [Erik] clearly spent some time […]
Monorails aren’t just the core reason why The Simpsons remains on air after thirty-six seasons, twenty-six of which are unredeemable garbage. They’re also an interesting example of oddball rail travel which has never really caught on beyond the odd gadgetbahn project here and there. [Hyperspace Pirate] recently decided to investigate the most interesting kind of monorail […]
One of our favorite parts of Hackaday Supercon is seeing all the incredible badge add-ons folks put together. These expansions are made all the more impressive by the fact that they had to design their hardware without any physical access to the badge, and with only a few weeks’ notice. Even under ideal conditions, that’s […]
The United States and a few other countries have an astounding array of homeowners’ associations (HOAs), local organizations that exert an inordinate influence on what homeowners can and can’t do with their properties, with enforcement mechanisms up to foreclosure. In the worst cases they can get fussy about things like the shade of brown a […]
When we think of programmable hardware, we think of FPGAs. But they’re not the only option. [Oliver Schmidt] has been exploring how the Raspberry Pi Pico can serve in such a role for the classic Apple II. The talk was presented at the KansasFest event this year, and it’s well worth diving into! [Oliver] has […]