Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Marketing and Selling Hardware Hack Chat with Shawn Hymel! It may not be every hardware hacker’s dream, but a fair number of us harbor fantasies of thinking up the Next Big Thing and kissing the day job goodbye forever. It’s an understandable dream and a laudable […]
Nintendo’s LABO piano is a strange kind of instrument. Hewn out of cardboard and used in combination with some advanced software, it’s entirely passive, with all the sound generation and smarts coming from the Switch console which slots into the body. [Simon the Magpie] decided that this simply wouldn’t do, and set about turning the […]
The tech world has a love for Messianic figures, usually high-profile CEOs of darling companies whose words are hung upon and combed through for hidden meaning, as though they had arrived from above to our venture-capital-backed prophet on tablets of stone. In the past it has been Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, now it seems […]
The invention of the blue LED was groundbreaking enough to warrant a Nobel prize. For the last decade, researchers have been trying to take the technology to the next level by controlling the color of emission while the device is in operation. In a new research paper, by the guys over Osaka University, Lehigh University, […]
When we think about hydrogen and flying machines, it’s quite common to imagine Zeppelins, weather balloons and similar uses of hydrogen in lighter-than-air craft to lift stuff of the ground. But with smaller and more efficient fuel cells, hydrogen is gaining its place in the drone field. Project RACHEL is a hydrogen powered drone project […]
We love our clocks around here and we love nixie tubes as well. The combination of the two almost seems to be a no-brainer. With the modern twist of an ESP8266, Reddit user [vladco] built a minimalist nixie tube clock. The build starts with the nixie tubes, Russian In4s, each one mounted on its own […]
If you have a modern function generator on your bench it is quite likely to contain a direct-digital synthesis circuit that creates arbitrary waveforms using a microporcessor controlled DAC. If you have a cheap function generator it’s likely to contain a one-chip solution that generates approximations to sine and triangle waveforms through modifying a square […]
Simulacra and simulation and Kickstarter videos. The Amigo Robot is a 4-wheeled omnibot robot on Kickstarter. It does STEM or STEAM or whatever. Oh neat, injection molded magnetic pogo pins, that’s cool. Watch the video for this Kickstarter, it is a work of postmodern horror. We live in a post-reality world, and this is beyond […]
NFC locks are reaching a tipping point where the technology is so inexpensive that it makes sense to use it in projects where it would have been impractical months ago. Not that practicality has any place among these pages. IKEA carries a cabinet lock for $20USD and does not need any programming but who has […]
A weather station can be anything from a fun home science exercise, all the way up to a useful tool for planning and weather prediction. [Rob Ward] is one such person who has developed their own weather station, and it recently got a wireless upgrade. We first featured [Rob]’s work back in 2018, noting that […]