Fresh hacks every day
Most of the time, assuming nothing’s gone wrong with them, we take our hands so much for granted that it’s easy to forget what remarkable pieces of engineering they are…
Last time, we looked at getting started with the GOWIN tools and a Tang Nano 20K FPGA. The software from GOWIN isn’t bad, but it isn’t open source, and there …read more
Although VHS-based games have existed for about as long as VHS players have sat in millions of living rooms, they always tended to be rather sparse gaming experiences…
It must be April in October again, because Google Japan has a new, hilariously impractical reimagining of the keyboard: a conveyor belt. This time it’s on GitHub with…
Back in the old days the IBM-PC, like most of its contemporary computers, shipped with BASIC in ROM. Even after it stopped living in ROM, IBM-Compatibles shipped with…
One fascinating thing about a pulsed laser is that, though the average power may be measured in watts or milliwatts, the peak power can easily reach millions of times…
If you’re interested in aerospace, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard the rumor that NASA is trying to get its SR-71 flying again. Or at the very least, they are…
When [Thomas] showed his 1960s-era Tektronix 545A oscilloscope in a recent video, it made us both nostalgic and happy. Nostalgic because we miss the days when our…
If you saw a device that had a laptop form factor playing sound and video, alt-tabbing over to play a game or take some notes, then back to the video …read more
[Tolko] wanted to encourage kids to have some physical activity, but noted that they only wanted to play games. That led to BlobJump, a Raspberry Pi-based game sort of…
If you want to experiment with LLMs, you typically have a choice of sending your requests to someone else’s computer or fielding a very large GPU and CPU setup to …read…
When you look into the night sky, you can’t help but wish to bring the outer worlds to your doorstep. One of the best ways to do that is to …read more
It’s no secret that the size of webpages has been slowly — or not so slowly — creeping up over the years. Does a simple website need to span multiple …read more
Whereas PlayStation 3 and earlier were rather specialized consoles, today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 are essentially x86-based gaming PCs in a fancy case, with…
Solder stencils are a fantastic way to accurately apply solder paste to a PCB. Professionally-made stencils are cut from steel, but for the home hacker, soda cans…
[Nick Bild] evidently has a soft spot for the 6502, given that his Vectron65 Plus home computer project uses at least one of them, depending on the add-ons. You see…
Perhaps the most famous of all the software-defined radio (SDR) receivers is the RTL-SDR, a digital TV receiver on which an undocumented feature was found. Perhaps other…
[Mini Shaji Thomas] has a deeply interesting article on IEEE Spectrum detailing how the power distribution system for a city of over twenty million people went from…
[Ogrinz Labs] has built a Robbie the Robot suit, which is super-cool, but has a huge flaw. When inside the suit, he’s too tall to do what the original Robbie …read more
It wasn’t that long ago that a science teacher would have told students that there was no evidence of planets around other star systems. Even more recently, they might…
Internet radios have been a thing in some form for the last quarter century, and the advent of cheap networked microcontrollers has made them easier than ever to build…
A lot of the retrocomputing world is focused on the 1980s, and for good reason– the home computer revolution was in full swing in that decade, and there is a …read more
While you may not be familiar with the term “busy board”, you’ve almost certainly seen one. It’s the sort of toy with a bunch of buttons, switches, and of course …read…
Homebrew computers don’t have to be retrocomputers, but [Just4Fun]’s all-through-hole, 68008-based “68k-MBC” certainly qualifies, so it is a worthy entry in our ongoing…
