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The Math Behind the Music of the 80s
Although there might have been other music produced or recorded in the 1980s, we may never know of its existence due to the cacophony of all of the various keytars, drum machines, and other synthesized...
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Amateur Radio Operators Detect Signals from Voyager 1
At the time of its construction in the 1950s, the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory was the largest rotatable telescope in the world with a dish diameter of 25 meters. It was quickly overtaken in the...
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Chaotic System Cooks Meat Evenly
For better or worse, a lot of human technology is confined to fewer dimensions than the three we can theoretically move about in. Cars and trains only travel two dimensionally with limited exceptions,...
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Apple Newton Gets Rebuilt Battery Pack
We all carry touch screen computers around in our pockets these days, but before the smartphone revolution, there was the personal digital assistant (PDA). While it wasn’t a commercial success, one of...
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A Portable Chainsaw Sawmill
Unless you’re running a commercial logging operation, with specialized saws, log grapples, mills, transportation for the timber, and the skilled workers needed to run everything, it’s generally easier...
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An iPhone Case Study
Way back in 2008, Apple unveiled the first unibody Macbook with a chassis milled out of a single block of aluminum. Before that, essentially all laptops, including those from Apple, were flimsy plastic...
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Rainwater From the Road to the Garden
Most small-scale, residential rainwater harvesting systems we’ve seen rely on using an existing roof and downspout to collect water that would otherwise be diverted out into the environment. These are...
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A Compass That Looks to the Stars
Although a lot of tools have been digitized and consolidated into our smartphones, from cameras, music players, calendars, alarm clocks, flashlights, and of course phones, perhaps none are as useful as...
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Training a Self-Driving Kart
There are certain tasks that humans perform every day that are notoriously difficult for computers to figure out. Identifying objects in pictures, for example, was something that seems fairly...
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Dog Plays Chess on ESP32
The ESP32 is s remarkably powerful microcontroller, where its dual-core processor and relatively high clock speed can do some impressive work. But getting this microcontroller designed for embedded...
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Handheld Satellite Dish is 3D Printed
Ham radio enthusiasts, people looking to borrow their neighbors’ WiFi, and those interested in decoding signals from things like weather satellites will often grab an old satellite TV antenna and...
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A Modern Battery For a Classic Laptop
Aside from their ability to operate fairly well in extreme temperatures, lead-acid batteries don’t have many benefits compared to more modern battery technology. They’re heavy, not particularly energy...
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Custom Firmware Adds Capabilities to Handie Talkie
Although ham radio can be an engaging, rewarding hobby, it does have a certain reputation for being popular among those who would fit in well at gated Florida communities where the preferred mode of...
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Math on a Checkerboard
The word “algorithm” can sometimes seem like a word designed to scare people away from math classes, much like the words “calculus”, “Fourier transform”, or “engineering exam”. But in reality it’s just...
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Button Debouncing With Smart Interrupts
Debouncing button or switch inputs on microcontrollers can be a challenging problem for those first starting to program these devices. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that real-world buttons...
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E-Bike Motor Gets New Life As Hydro Plant
For economic reasons, not every lake with a dam can support a hydroelectric power plant. Some rivers or creeks are dammed for flood control or simply for recreation, and don’t have the flow rate or...
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Atari 65XE In Laptop Form
For better or worse, Atari is no longer a household name in computing, but for a time in the 1980s, it was a huge mover in the industry. They not only produced PCs but also a huge number of video game...
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Cassette Tape Plays MP3s
Cassette tapes were a major way of listening to (and recording) music througout the 1980s and 1990s and were in every hi-fi stereo, boom box, and passenger vehicle of the era. Their decline was largely...
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Bit-Banging the USB-PD Protocol
For one-off projects, adding a few integrated circuits to a PCB is not too big of a deal. The price of transistors is extremely low thanks to Moore and his laws, so we’re fairly free to throw chips...
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New Frontiers for Nissan Leaf Motor and Battery
Nissan started off with a massive lead in the electric vehicle industry — their Leaf was the first mass-market EV available and the highest-selling EV until 2020. But the company has begun to lag...
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