Using computers that feature a high-resolution, full-color graphical interface is commonplace today, but it took a lot of effort and ingenuity to get to this point. This long history is the topic of [Dr. Jon Peddie]’s article series called The Graphics Chip Chronicles. In the first of eight volumes, the early days of the NEC µPD7220 and […]
Some kind of continuity beeper has been a standard piece of gear since the dawn of electronics. Sure, you probably have an ohm meter, but sometimes you don’t care about the actual resistance. You just want to know whether something connects or doesn’t, especially with a PCB trace or a cable. But what if your […]
The invention of sprites triggered a major shift in video game design, enabling games with independent moving objects and richer graphics despite the limitations of early video gaming hardware. As a result, hardware design was specifically built to manipulate sprites, and generally as new generations of hardware were produced the number of sprites a system […]
We’ve seen a few H-bridge circuits around these parts before, and here’s another application. This time we have an Old Train Station Clock which has been refurbished after being picked up for cheap at the flea market. These are big analog clocks which used to be common at railway stations around the world. This build […]
If you’re a regular reader of Hackaday, you may have noticed a certain fondness for Meshtastic devices, and the LoRa protocol more generally. LoRa is a great, low-power radio communications standards, but sometimes the antennas you get with the modules can leave you wanting more. That’s why [Chris Prioli] at the Gloucester County Amateur Radio […]
Courtesy of the complex routing and network configurations that Cloudflare uses, their engineers like to push the Linux network stack to its limits and ideally beyond. In a blog article [Chris Branch] details how they ran into limitations while expanding their use of soft-unicast functionality that fits with their extensive use of anycast to push […]
Humans have lots of basic requirements that need to be met in order to stay alive. Food is a necessary one, though it’s possible to go without for great stretches of time. Water is more important, with survival becoming difficult beyond a few days in its absence. Most of all, though, we crave oxygen. Without […]
By far, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world is caffeine. It’s farmed around the world in virtually every place that it has cropped up, most commonly on coffee plants, tea plants, and cocoa plants. But is also found in other less common plants like the yaupon holly in the southeastern United States […]
A friend of mine and I both have a similar project in mind, the manufacture of custom footwear with our hackerspace’s shiny new multi-material 3D printer. It seems like a match made in heaven, a machine that can seamlessly integrate components made with widely differing materials into a complex three-dimensional structure. As is so often […]