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Odds are, you’ve taken pills before; it’s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several this morning. Whenever you do, you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer: …read more

Thermal energy storage is pretty great, as phase-change energy storage is very consistent with its energy output over time, unlike chemical batteries. You also get your pick from a wide …read more

The 8051 was an 8-bit Harvard-architecture microcontroller first put out by Intel in 1980.  They’ve since discontinued that line, but it lives on in the low-cost STC8 family of chips, …read more

Although the RTL-SDR is cheap, accessible, and capable enough for many projects, it does have some important limitations. In particular, its bandwidth is limited to about 3.2 MHz, and the …read more

A well-known property of wall warts like power bricks and USB chargers is that they always consume some amount of power even when there’s no connected device drawing power from …read more

We have to admit, we didn’t know that we wanted a desktop electric jellyfish until seeing [likeablob]’s Denki-Kurage, but it’s one of those projects that just fills a need so …read more

Although the CRT has largely disappeared from our everyday lives, there was a decades-long timeframe when this was effectively the only display available. It’s an analog display for an analog …read more

The best part about retro computing is the idea that you’ll save some poor system from being scrapped and revive it to a working state, at which point you can …read more

We’re used to electronic parts of the same type staying predictably the same, sometimes over many years. An early Z80 from the mid 1970s can be exchanged with one from …read more

For better or worse, there are a few instruments that have been pigeonholed into specific genres of popular music. For example, banjos are often heard in bluegrass or folk, harmonicas …read more

We’re all used to it by now, but I’d just like to reflect on how insanely power-packed lithium ion batteries are, and everything that’s afforded us. I’m trying to think …read more

Nothing lasts forever, but you’d think the leaded-glass face of a CRT would not be a place you’re likely to see Father Time causing failures. Alas, the particle accelerators we …read more

The famous cuckoo clock, with its moving, chirping mechanical bird indicating various divisions of time, has been around since at least the 1600s. The most famous of them come from …read more

These days, it’s pretty easy to slap together a single-board computer and a cheap LCD screen to whip up a cool cyberdeck fast. But what if you wanna go more …read more

The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types …read more

Conway’s Game of Life excels in its simplicity, creating a cellular automaton on a 2D grid where each cell obeys a set of very simple rules that determine whether a …read more

The dream of fully powering everything from aircraft to cars on just the power generated from solar panels attached to the machine remains a tempting one, but always seems to …read more

Power banks come in many sizes, and those that target construction sites are probably among the largest. The massive four ton unit based around lead-acid batteries which the [Buy it …read more

As the sun goes down on a glorious spring evening on the western edge of Europe, Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for a look at the week in …read more

Sometimes you wanna test a piece of USB hardware, but you don’t just want to plug it into a random old phone charger. [KS-Elektronikdesign] has whipped up a useful tool …read more