Want to play the xylophone but don’t want to learn how? [Rachad]’s automatic xylophone might be just the ticket. It uses homemade solenoids to play tunes under computer control. Think of it as a player piano but with electromagnetic strikers instead of piano keys. You can hear the instrument in action in the video below. […]
AUTO XYLOPHONE USES HOMEMADE SOLENOIDS Continue Reading
A common hacker upgrade to an espresso machine is to improve stability and performance with a better temperature controller, but [Schematix]’s Smart Coffee project doesn’t stop there. It entirely replaces the machine’s controller and provides an optional array of improvements for a variety of single-boiler machines (which is most of them). Smart Coffee isn’t free, it
SMART COFFEE REPLACES ESPRESSO MACHINE CONTROLLER WITH ARDUINO, SENSORS Continue Reading
For electronics, your knowledge probably follows a bit of a bell curve over time. When you start out, you know nothing. But you eventually learn a lot. Then you learn enough to be comfortable, and most of us don’t learn as much about new things unless we just happen to need it. Take SMD components.
AN SMD CAPACITOR GUIDE Continue Reading
There was a time when plotters were the pinnacle of computer graphics output. While they aren’t as common as they used to be, there are some advantages to having a plotter. [Symon] wanted a plotter and decided to make one from scratch. Truthfully, he wants to build a CNC machine, so the plotter is just a
LESSONS LEARNED WHILE BUILDING A DIY PEN PLOTTER Continue Reading
Compared to their manual counterparts, electric wheelchairs are far less demanding to operate, as the user doesn’t need to have upper body strength normally required to turn the wheels. But even a motorized wheelchair needs some kind of input from the user to control it, which still may pose a considerable challenge depending on the
AUTONOMOUS WHEELCHAIR LETS JETSON DO THE DRIVING Continue Reading
Even though it seems the worst of COVID has passed, October generally kicks off cold and flu season, so why not continue to pass out Halloween treats in a socially-distanced fashion? That is, of course the idea behind [Gord Payne]’s Halloween Treat Trough of Terror. Lay a treat at the top of the trough and it
2023 HALLOWEEN HACKFEST: TREAT TROUGH OF TERROR IS ACTUALLY PRETTY CUTE Continue Reading
Although we generally think of Internet of Things (IoT) and similar devices as things that are scattered around above ground, there are plenty of reasons to also have such devices underground. These so-called IoUT devices are extremely useful when it comes to monitoring underground structures, but communication via radiowaves is obviously impacted when soil is
USING LORA NODES AS SOIL MOISTURE SENSING ANTENNAS Continue Reading
We all know, at least intellectually, that our computers are all built with lots of tiny transistors. But beyond that it’s a little hard to describe. They’re printed on a silicon wafer somehow, and since any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, they miraculously create a large part of modern society. Even most computers
CPU BUILT FROM DISCRETE TRANSISTORS Continue Reading
There are many questions that can be asked for software projects, with most of these questions starting with ‘Why…?’. This is true for the challenge of proving that cascading stylesheets are Turing-complete, or that you don’t need all those fancy ISA bits of an ARM processors when you already got the LDM and STM commands in the 32-bit ISA.
TURING COMPLETE PROGRAMMING ON ARM WITH TWO INSTRUCTIONS Continue Reading
[mircemk] had previously built a frequency counter using an Arduino, with a useful range up to 6 MHz. Now, they’ve implemented a new design on a far more powerful STM32 chip that boosts the measurement range up to a full 30 MHz. That makes it a perfect tool for working with radios in the HF range. The
SIMPLE STM32 FREQUENCY METER HANDLES UP TO 30MHZ WITH EASE Continue Reading
