The 19th century was an absolutely electrifying era, including in a literal sense. Although the phenomenon of electricity had been known by that time for centuries, actually making it do …read more
While the original name of what much of the world knows as the NES was the Nintendo Family Computer, or Famicom for short, it was very rarely used as a …read more
Pity the poor Australians. Isolated on a jagged hunk of land far from everywhere else, these industrious people have to take two-legged flights (or more) to reach a great many …read more
Cheap vehicles are thin on the ground in 2026, but [Andy Didorosi] thinks he has the answer for low-speed applications with an open source kei truck. Still in the early …read more
Blood pressure is one of the so-called “vital signs” that medical practitioners use to determine the basic state of a patient in any given moment. It’s exactly what it sounds …read more
What do you get when you take 8,192 CH570 MCUs, put them on custom PCBs, and write firmware for this interconnected gaggle of cores? In the case of [bitluni]’s project, …read more
[BillPg] has been designing a fantasy 1980s-era home computer. As part of the exercise, he’s reevaluating all the assumptions that have grown organically over time in the small computer landscape. …read more
Nobody wants to breathe solder fumes; that’s a given. For most of us, an industrial-looking fan-and-filter made in China and picked up cheap feels like more than enough to keep …read more
People in hotter parts of the world may permit themselves a grin at this, but Europeans have recently been suffering under an unseasonal June heatwave. Most of us have been …read more
Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your …read more
Unlike almost every other kind of microscope, atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) don’t use any kind of optical beam to image their subjects. Instead, they physically detect the subject’s surface with a …read more
Generally, LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries are quite safe and stable, but it’s still possible for something to go wrong, even something catastrophic, like the battery management system (BMS) developing a direct …read more
When light reflects off a surface, not all of it reflects off at the same wavelength; some photons impart a portion of their energy to raising the vibrational energy of …read more
In theory, MIDI is an electrical and protocol standard that allows any such equipped instrument or computer to talk to any other. But as the wonderfully named [Knob Monster] will …read more
If you’re building a homelab rig, you could just use off-the-shelf hardware in standard cases and slap it all in a rack like the normies do. Or, you could follow …read more
Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface, a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as …read more
We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they’re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don’t often see some …read more
Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 …read more
Optical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and we’ve …read more
A clock is by its very nature a device for measuring time, and thus it moves forward at a constant rate. But how about in a theatrical setting, where time …read more