Few processors have found themselves in so many different devices as the venerable Z80. While it isn’t powerful by modern standards, you can still use devices like this Cidco MailStation as a terminal. The MailStation was originally designed as an email machine for people who weren’t onboard with this whole computer fad, keeping things simple […]
The world is tough and uncaring sometimes, especially if you’re at home tinkering with HP Enterprise equipment. If you’re in the same boat as [Neel Chauhan], you might have found that HPE is less than interested in interacting with small individual customers. Thus, when a cable was needed, [Neel] was out of luck. The simple […]
If there’s one thing humans love, it’s dancing with chance. To that end, [Jonathan] whipped up a fun dice box, connecting it to the Internet of Things for additional functionality. Expect dice roll stat tracking to become a big thing in the D&D community. The build is based around Pixels Dice. They’re a smart type […]
Raspberry Pi’s first foray into the world of microcontrollers, the RP2040, was a very interesting chip. Its standout features were the programmable input/output units (PIOs) which enabled all sorts of custom real-time shenanigans. And that’s not to discount the impact of the Pi Pico, the $4 dev kit built around it. Today, they’re announcing a […]
Image by [fata1err0r81] via reddit The most striking feature of the Tenshi keyboard has to be those dual track pads. But then you notice that [fata1err0r81] managed to sneak in two extra thumb keys on the left, and that those are tilted for comfort and ease of actuation. The name Tenshi means ‘angel’ in Japanese, […]
Many of us store a flashlight around the house for use in emergency situations. Usually, regular alkaline batteries are fine for this task, as they’ll last a good few years, and you remember to swap them out from time to time. Alternatively, you can make one that lasts virtually indefinitely in storage, and uses some […]
We’re not sure exactly what Tulip is, because it’s so many things all at once. It’s a music-making environment that’s programmable in Python, runs on your big computer or on an ESP32-S3, and comes complete with some nice sounding synth engines, a sequencer, and a drum machine all built in. It’s like your dream late-1980s […]
We love close-up pictures of intricate work, and [w] hits the spot with a tiny joule thief in a fuse case (social media post, embedded below) powered by an old coin cell from a watch. It’s so tiny! Ethernet transformers contain tiny coils. A joule thief is a sort of minimum-component voltage booster that can […]
Americans certainly remember Sputnik. At a time when the world was larger and scarier, the Soviets had a metal basketball flying over the United States and the rest of the world. It made people nervous, but it was also a tremendous scientific achievement. However, it wasn’t the plan to use it as the first orbiter, […]
The classic crystal radio was an oatmeal box with some wire and a few parts. [Michael Simpson] has something very different. He found an assembled Philmore “selective” radio kit. The simple kit had a coil, a germanium diode, and a crystal earphone. We were sad when [Michael] accidentally burned a part of the radio’s coil. […]