The radio frequency world is full of mysteries, some of which seem to take a lifetime to master. And even then, it seems like there’s always something more to learn, …read more
CATS is a new communication and telemetry standard intended to surpass the current Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) standard by leveraging modern, super-cheap Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) transceivers rather than …read more
It might not count as “DC to daylight,” but an electromechanical attenuator that covers up to 70 GHz is pretty close, and getting a guided tour of its insides is …read more
Nerf blasters are fun toys, to be sure. However, they’re limited by factors like price and safety and what Hasbro thinks parents will put up with. Few caregivers would ever …read more
An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of …read more
For the last few years, [Cristiano Monteiro] has marked March 14th by building a device to calculate Pi. This year, he’s combined an RP2040 development board and a beam-splitting prism …read more
Lawn tractors are a great way to mow a large yard or small paddock. They save you the effort of pushing a mower around and they’re fun to drive, to …read more
Recently [nibbler]’s Evakool 55L vehicle fridge started to act strangely, reporting crazy temperature errors and had no chance of regulating. The determination was that the NTC thermistor was toast, and …read more
Today, if you want to send a message to a distant location, you’ll probably send an e-mail or a text message. But it hasn’t always been that easy. Military commanders, …read more
Building your own watch or clock is kind of a maker’s rite of passage. Once upon a time, if you went with a wrist watch, you’d typically work on producing …read more
It used to be that nearly every home had at least one decent high-voltage power supply. Of course, it was dedicated to accelerating electrons and slamming them into phosphors so …read more
If you’re unfamiliar with SCARA robots, the acronym stands for Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm. This refers to the fact that the arms are rigid in the Z axis but …read more
During the 1970s many different computer architectures were being developed, many of them focused on making computer systems easier and more effective to use. The Flex Machine developed at the …read more
White light interferometry (WLI) is a contact-free optical method for measuring surface height. It uses the phase difference between the light reflected off a reference mirror and the target sample …read more
This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Herbert Wolverson about Rust! Is it really worth the hype? Should you have written that in Rust? What’s up with “if let some” anyways? …read more
If you ask us, morning is the only excuse we need for a hot caffeinated beverage — weather be damned. Wherever [gokux] is, they may be experiencing actual winter this …read more
[Oscar] at Obsolescence Guaranteed is well-known for fun replicas of the PDP-8 and PDP-11 using the Raspberry Pi (along with some other simulated vintage computers). His latest attempt is the …read more
While most pet owners are happy to help out their furry friends, everyone has a limit. For [Gauthier], getting up to open or close the window every three minutes so …read more