As it is generally practiced, ham radio is a little like going to the grocery store and striking up a conversation with everyone you bump into as you ply the aisles. Except that the grocery store is the size of the planet, and everyone brings their own shopping cart, some of which are highly modified […]
Every nation has icons of national pride: a sports star, a space mission, or a piece of architecture. Usually they encapsulate a country’s spirit, so citizens can look up from their dreary lives and say “Now there‘s something I can take pride in!” Concorde, the supersonic airliner beloved by the late 20th century elite for […]
The biggest news this week is that Raspberry Pi is no longer synonymous with single-board Linux computers: they’re dipping their toes into the microcontroller business with their first chip: the RP2040, and the supporting breakout board, the Pico. It’s an affordable, capable microcontroller being made by a firm that’s never made microcontrollers before, so that’s […]
The modern consumer is not overly concerned with their phone conversations being monitored. For one thing, Google and Amazon have done a tremendous job of conditioning them to believe that electronic gadgets listening to their every word isn’t just acceptable, but a near necessity in the 21st century. After all, if there was a better […]
One of the most basic and also most versatile communication interfaces on an MCU is the UART, or Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. Usually found in the form of either a UART or USART, the former allows for pure asynchronous serial communication, whereas the latter adds flow control. When working with MCUs, they’re also one of the […]
Hardware hacking can be extremely multidisciplinary. If you only know bits and bytes, but not solder and electrons, you’re limited in what you can build. The same is true for mechanical design, where the forces of stress and strain suddenly apply to your project and the pile of code and PCBs comes crashing to the […]
Designing your own integrated circuits as a one-person operation from your home workshop sounds like science fiction. But 20 years ago, so did rolling your own circuit boards to host a 600 MHz microcontroller with firmware you wrote yourself. Turns out silicon design isn’t nearly as out of reach as it used to be and […]
When you want to quickly pull together a combination of media and user interaction, looking to some building blocks for the heavy lifting can be a lifesaver. That’s the idea behind Max, a graphical programming language that’s gained a loyal following among anyone building art installations, technology demos (think children’s museum), and user Kiosks. Guy […]
We as humans are limited in the ways we can look at things ourselves, and rely on on the different perspectives and insights of others to help make sense of things. All it takes is one person to look at a data set and find something completely different that changes our fundamental perception of the […]
Our Sun is getting a bit frisky these days, and has rewarded us with perhaps the best screensaver image ever taken. The incredibly detailed photo of a sunspot was actually taken back in January by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument with adaptive optics that can image the sun from the near-infrared […]
I’ve always thought that there are three things you can do with metal: cut it, bend it, and join it. Sure, I knew you could melt it, but that was always something that happened in big foundries- you design something and ship it off to be cast in some large angular building churning out smoke. […]
Imagine that you’re serving on a jury, and you’re given an image taken from a surveillance camera. It looks pretty much like the suspect, but the image has been “enhanced” by an AI from the original. Do you convict? How does this weigh out on the scales of reasonable doubt? Should you demand to see […]
If you see a lot of banner ads on certain websites, you know that without a Virtual Private Network (VPN), hackers will quickly ravage your computer and burn down your house. Well, that seems to be what they imply. In reality, though, there are two main reasons you might want a VPN connection. You can […]
Mike and I were talking about an interesting smart-glasses hack on the podcast. This was one of those projects where, even if you don’t need a pair of glasses with LEDs on them to help you navigate around, you just couldn’t help but marvel at a lot of the little design choices made throughout. For […]
You probably have at least a nodding familiarity with the Fourier transform, a mathematical process for transforming a time-domain signal into a frequency domain signal. In particular, for computers, we don’t really have a nice equation so we use the discrete version of the transform which takes a series of measurements at regular intervals. If […]
It seems like just yesterday (maybe for some of you it was) we were installing Windows 3.1 off floppy drives onto a 256 MB hard drive, but hard drives have since gotten a lot bigger and a lot more complicated, and there are a lot more options than spinning platters. The explosion of storage options […]
Mike and I were talking about two very similar clock projects we’d both built recently: they both use ESP8266 modules to get the time over WiFi and NTP, and they both failed. Mike’s failed because he was visiting relatives in a different timezone with different WiFi credentials, and mine failed because daylight savings time caught […]
Back in 2018, Microsoft began Project Natick, deploying a custom-designed data center to the sea floor off the coast of Scotland. Aiming to determine whether the underwater environment would bring benefits to energy efficiency, reliability, and performance, the project was spawned during ThinkWeek in 2014, an event designed to share and explore unconventional ideas. This […]
Performing over-the-air updates of devices in the field can be a tricky business. Reliability and recovery is of course key, but even getting the right bits to the right storage sectors can be a challenge. Recently I’ve been working on a project which called for the design of a new pathway to update some small […]