Field News

  Kids today spend much of their time in front of a screen, be it on a phone, TV or computer.  Technology has many positive […] The post 6 Things to Consider When Monitoring Your Family’s Screen Time appeared first on Child Development Institute.
There are a handful of gadgets that do one thing so well that they become cult classics long after the company that made them has moved on or closed up shop. [This Does Not Compute] takes us through the history of the AlphaSmart word processor which started as an educational tool, but finds itself in […]
Last time, we talked about single-PCB-design panels, all the cool aspects of it, including some cost savings and handling convenience. Naturally, you might wonder, and many did – can you put multiple different PCBs on a single panel? The answer is “yes, without a doubt!” The tool we used last time, KiKit, will not be […]
For those of us who lived in the capitalist west during the Cold War, there remains a fascination to this day about the Other Side. The propaganda we were fed as kids matched theirs in describing the awful things on the other side of the wall, something that wasn’t borne out when a decade or […]
It is one of Murphy’s laws, we think, that you can’t get great things when you need them. Back in the heyday of shortwave broadcasting, any of us would have given a week’s pay for even a low-end receiver today. Digital display? Memory? Digital filtering? These days, you have radios, and they aren’t terribly expensive, […]
Recently Radxa released the X4, which is an SBC containing not only an N100 x86_64 SoC but also an RP2040  MCU connected to a Raspberry Pi-style double pin header. The Intel N100 is one of a range of Alder Lake-N SoCs which are based on a highly optimized version of the Skylake core, first released […]
The last time we checked in with [Downtown Doug Brown], he had some cheap Altera USB Blaster clones that didn’t want to work under Linux. The trick at that time was to change the device’s 24 MHz clock to 12 MHz. This month, he’s found some different ones that don’t work, but now the clock […]
The BiVACOR THA hooked up with the CTO Dianiel Timms in the background. (Credit: BiVACOR) Outside of the brain, the heart is probably the organ that you miss the most when it ceases to function correctly. Unfortunately, as we cannot grow custom replacement hearts yet, we have to keep heart patients alive long enough for […]
Computer graphics have come a long way since the days of Dire Straits and their first computer animated music video in 1985. To move the state of the art forward has taken the labor of countless artists, developers and technicians. Working in just that field, a group from UCLA have developed an advanced system for […]
[Vadim Panov]’s 3D printed solar harvester is in effect a rechargeable outdoor battery, and the real challenge he faced when designing it was having it handle the outdoors reliably. The good news is that part is solved, and his newest design is now also flexible enough to handle a variety of common and economical components […]