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Reverse Engineering Apple’s Mikey Chip
On the old iPods, generally referred to here in the future as iPod Classic, there lives a tiny, undocumented chip called Mikey. It sits at the headphone output and performs only two functions: powering...
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Basically, Galvanizing Metal Without Acid
As useful as steel and iron are to the modern world, their tendency to rust is a major downside. There’s a spectrum of ways to prevent it, from quickly slapping on a coat of paint to alloying,...
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A Modular Macro Keypad
The introduction of the ATmega32U4 microcontroller, with its integrated USB controller, made a lot of hardware tasks much simpler than they were before. One of the arenas it revolutionized was custom...
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Abusing SQL to Play DOOM
Most laypeople who encounter SQL think of it purely as a tool for managing large datasets. While that is certainly what it was designed for, SQL is still a programming language at its core. It includes...
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Myst on the Atari 2600
Although the Atari 2600 was a hugely popular game console in the late 70s, its hardware specs were limited, to say the least. For a dedicated game console of the era this isn’t too surprising, but...
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ESP32 Replacement for Lighting Display Controller
As a company, NanoLeaf has been producing modular lights that can be easily snapped together into various geometric shapes for around a decade. Similar to the addressable LED light strips many of us...
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Ski Lift Removes Mice from Chicken Coop
Getting rid of rodents like squirrels, mice, or groundhogs is a lot like digging a hole on the beach. No matter how much you remove, it’ll always fill back in. So, while [Super Valid Designs] could...
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Dramatically Increasing Usable Closet Space
As any science YouTuber or first-year physics student is quick to point out, the universe is mostly empty space. Not just space itself, but the amount of “empty” space between nuclei and their...
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A Split Keyboard Designed for Human Hands
A surprising number of things we use in everyday life retain most of their design cues from their 19th century ancestors. The bicycle retains the same basic design as it had in 1890, as does the sewing...
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Miniaturized, Working Replica of Vintage Leslie Speaker
Few pieces of vintage audio gear from the turn of the century (the previous one) inspire the kind of devotion that a Leslie speaker does. Sure, there are plenty of pieces that are rarer or more...
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Tricking an Air Conditioner Into Cooling
Modern heat pumps, of which air conditioners are a subset, seem like simple machines in theory. They just move heat from one place to another. But in order to operate efficiently, they need specific...
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USB-C Adapted for Legacy Sprinkler Systems
In the modern world USB has become a truly universal connector, with its inclusion on almost every major piece of consumer electronics. It has even expanded well beyond things that we’d think of as...
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LLM Moats Quickly Evaporating
In the business world, a moat is a quality of a business that makes it difficult for competitors to take that company’s profits. With how hard it is to train models for large language models (LLMs) and...
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Woodstove Assistant Keeps the Heat on Safely
Those who have never lived in a cold climate might romanticize winters around a fire, keeping warm under blankets while snow gently falls outside. While it certainly can be a cozy experience, using a...
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Fat Tire Brakes Get Wireless Upgrade
At first glance, wireless brakes seem like a recipe for disaster. For something as critical as braking, many bicyclists might prefer a physical connection to their method of safely controlling speed....
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Motorized Planer Height Adjustment Dials In
Having access to a planer opens up a lot of options for woodworking. It enables a craftsman to work with much rougher lumber and the finished results generally have tighter tolerances. But as...
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3D Printed Piano Action Faithful to the Original
A piano’s internal mechanism for translating a key press into sound is surprisingly complicated. It has to do a lot of things simultaneously and quickly: provide precise control over velocity, ensure...
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This Library Needs to Be At Least… Three Times Bigger
Many of us have noted a tremendous price increase in many computer components for some mysterious reason. Whatever this cause is will be debated among the various modern philosophers and Diogeneses,...
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DOOM Played on Series of 555 Timers
It’s technically true that any piece of software can be reproduced in hardware, although modern software’s size and complexity generally makes this a non-starter. But if we go far enough back in time,...
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Panoramic Photography with a Linear Scanner
Although digital photography took a big bite of the film industry’s lunch, it wasn’t able to completely eliminate the need — or desire — for photographers to use film in some situations. But digital...
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