Rotating mechanisms can be a headache when it becomes necessary to deliver power through them. [Igor Brkic] faced just such a challenge when creating his double-pendulum build, and solved it with a little DIY. The project is known as KLAATNO, inspired by the Croatian word for pendulum, klatno. It’s a mechanical installation piece, consisting of […]
As soon as [pashiran] laid eyes on his first hand-cranked music box, he knew he was in love. Then, he started punching the holes for his first ditty. As the repetitive stress of punching heated up his arm, his love cooled a bit. Annealed by the ups and downs of this experience, he decided to […]
For smaller microcontrollers, having enough outputs for the job is sometimes a challenge. A common solution is to do some sort of multiplexing with the available outputs or perhaps something more advanced such as Charlieplexing, but another good option is to use a specialized driver board. What’s even better is if you can daisy chain […]
Two engineering students are hard at work on this air drum which they hope will help disabled people and people in nursing homes. Though, we think it just looks fun! Each board is its own module consisting of the electronics and 3D printed cases. The modules each contain an arduino mini, IR sensor, and LEDs. […]
In previous installments of DSP Spreadsheet, we’ve looked at generating signals, mixing them, and filtering them. If you start trying to work with DSP, though, you’ll find a topic that always rears its head: IQ signals. It turns out, these aren’t as hard as they appear at first and, as usual, we’ll tackle them in […]
Trying to probe a modern electronic circuit with tiny SMD components, without letting the magic smoke escape in the process, can be quite a challenge. Especially since we hackers have not yet developed the number of appendages required to hold 3 different probes in place while operating both an oscilloscope and a computer. [Giuseppe Finizia] […]
An issue was discovered in libarchive through Google’s ClusterFuzz project. Libarchive is a compression and decompression library, widely used in utilities. The issue here is how the library recovers from a malformed archive. Hitting an invalid header causes the memory in use to be freed. The problem is that it’s possible for file processing to […]
Credit cards are loaded with security features, but the game of cat and mouse goes on. Nefarious syndicates continue to develop technology to steal data in new and innovate ways. After SparkFun did a teardown on some illicit hardware, they were visited by local law enforcement, who requested their help once more. [Nick] from SparkFun […]
There’s been a spate of apocalypse related articles over the last few weeks, but when I saw an AM radio made from a hand-wound coil and an oxidized British penny, I couldn’t help but be impressed. We’ve covered foxhole radios, stereotypical radios that are cobbled together from found parts during wartime. This example uses a […]
The unarguable benefits of digital photography has rendered the analog SLR obsolete for most purposes. This means that a wide selection of cameras and lenses are available on the second hand market for pennies on the dollar, making them ripe targets for hacking. [drtonis] decided to experiment with a quick and easy digital conversion to […]