When you think of tiny microcontroller boards, you probably think of a modern surface mount processor. Not [Andreas Jakob]. His 5×5 cm keychain computer rocks a 6809 CPU at a …read more
One of the core principles of the open-source movement is that anyone who wants to build on a piece of work, in whatever way they want, is easily able to. …read more
Mobile phones in schools. If you’re a teacher, school staffer, or a parent, you’ve likely got six hundred opinions about this very topic, and you will have had six hundred …read more
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Contributor Emeritus Kristina Panos chewed the fat about the coolest hacks of the previous week. But first, a bit of news — our Low …read more
You have to be pretty ambitious to modify a clock to run for 50 years on a single battery. You also should probably be pretty young if you think you’re …read more
We’ve covered a lot of sketchy USB devices over the years. And surely you know by now, if you find a USB drive, don’t plug it in to your computer. …read more
The world of desktop computing has coalesced into what is essentially a duopoly, with Windows machines making up the bulk of the market share and Apple carving out a dedicated …read more
Intaglio is an ancient carving technique for adding details to a workpiece, by manually removing material from a surface with only basic hand tools. If enough material depth is removed, …read more
Those who have worked with high voltage know well enough that anything can be a conductor at high enough voltages. Similarly, amateur radio operators will jump at any chance to …read more
Bioelectronics has been making great strides in recent years, but interfacing rigid electrical components with biological systems that are anything but can prove tricky. Researchers at the Laboratory for Organic …read more
One of the many aspects of the modern world we often take for granted is the very technology that keeps our accommodation at a habitable temperature. Examples of this include …read more
Sometimes you really want to use your legacy SoundBlaster instead of emulating it for classic games. While modern PCs don’t have ISA slots, [TheRasteri] is fixing this shortcoming with his …read more
Some things remain classics, even after centuries, and chess and watches have certainly stood the test of time. [W&M Levsha] decided to combine them both in this “Chess Club” watch …read more
Last time, we looked over diffpairs, their basics, routing rules and the notorious tolerances of PCIe when it comes to diffpairs. Now, let’s take a look at the exact signals …read more
YouTuber and serial debunker [Thunderf00t] was thinking about the use of sodium to counteract global warming. The theory is that sodium can be used as a fuel when combusted with …read more
In our previous article on Ball Grid Arrays (BGAs), we explored how to design circuit boards and how to route the signals coming out of a BGA package. But designing …read more
There are very few legal ways of obtaining ROM files for video games, and Nintendo’s lawyers are extremely keen on at least reminding you of the fact that you need …read more
In the last few decades, building engineers and architects have made tremendous strides in improving the efficiency of various buildings and the devices that keep them safe and comfortable to …read more
In the late 80s and into the 90s, [Cameron Kaiser] aka [ClassicHasClass] was an aspiring journalist, first becoming interested in the career in elementary school and then working on various …read more
Rapidly analyzing samples for the presence of bacteria and similar organic structures is generally quite a time-intensive process, with often the requirement of a cell culture being developed. Proposed by …read more