Typewriters may be long past their heyday, but just because PCs, word processor software, and cheap printers have made them largely obsolete doesn’t mean the world is better off without them. Using a typewriter is a rich sensory experience, from the feel of the keys under your fingers that even the clickiest of PC keyboards […]
CONVERTING AN 80S TYPEWRITER INTO A LINUX TERMINAL Continue Reading
When [Robot Cantina] isn’t busy tweaking the 420cc Big Block engine in their Honda Insight, they’re probably working on some other completely far out automotive atrocity. In the video below the break, you’ll see them take the concept of a ‘lean burn’ system from the Insight and graft hack it into their 1997 Saturn coupe. What’s a lean burn
SAVING FUEL WITH ADVANCED SENSORS AND AN ARDUINO Continue Reading
Most of us have probably by now seen the SawStop brand of self-stopping table saw, which detects when something meatier than wood has the bad taste to touch the spinning blade, more or less instantly stopping it and preventing sudden traumatic amputations. It’s an outstanding idea, and we’d love to see the technology built into
HOMEMADE SAWSTOP ATTACHMENT IS JUST ABOUT AS SKETCHY AS IT SOUNDS Continue Reading
There are various ways to measure plant health, and we’ve seen many projects creating open-source solutions. One we haven’t seen is a dendrometer, which involves measuring various physical dimensions of trees to track their health and growth. [John Opsahl] is changing this with the OpenDendrometer, a tool for tracking the diameter of tree limbs and fruit.
OPENDENDROMETER CAN MEASURE HOW YOUR TREE FEELS Continue Reading
In a continuation of Clem Mayer’s previous project, he’s now adding Wi-Fi connectivity for starting prints wirelessly from anywhere. Outdated technology The advent of USB and Wi-Fi-enabled printers is still quite recent. Before they were released to the market, these devices could only communicate over far more primitive data links. The classic parallel port is
Adding Wi-Fi to a 35-Year-Old Printer for Making ASCII Art Continue Reading
Like artificial intelligence, speech synthesis was one of those applications that promised to revolutionize computing in the 1980s, only to fizzle out after people realized that a robotic voice reading out predefined sentences was not actually that useful. Nevertheless, computer manufacturers didn’t want to miss out on the hype and speech synthesizers became a relatively
HACKADAY PRIZE 2022: MODERN PLUG-IN GIVES TRS-80 ITS VOICE BACK Continue Reading
The widespread adoption of the CAN bus (and OBD-II) in automobiles was largely a way of standardizing the maintenance of increasingly complicated engines and their needs to meet modern emissions standards. While that might sound a little dry on the surface, the existence and standardization of this communications bus in essentially all passenger vehicles for
PROBING CAN BUS FOR EV BATTERY INFO Continue Reading
Sometimes you need to display a number nice and large, making it easily readable at a good distance. [Lewis] has just the thing for that: a big expandable 7-segment display. The build is modular, allowing it to be extended from 2 to 10 digits and beyond. The digits themselves are made of 3D-printed parts assembled onto
YOU CAN BUILD A GIANT 7-SEGMENT DISPLAY OF YOUR VERY OWN Continue Reading
There have been plenty of Z80 computer builds here on Hackaday, but what sets them apart is what you do with them. [Andrew] writes in with his Z80 single-board computer made from scratch, using the Arduino standard headers for its I/O. In turn, since he needed an easy way to program the flash memory which holds
Z80 COMPUTER IS BOTH ARDUINO AND SHIELD Continue Reading
Digital displays are useful for quick and accurate readout, but lots of people prefer the physical motion of a needle moving along a dial. For instance, many smartwatch users choose an analog face to show the time, and modern cars with digital dashboards often default to showing an analog speedometer. Following this trend, [Miro Pavleski]
HACKADAY PRIZE 2022: ARDUINO-POWERED WEIGHING SCALE HAS A REAL ANALOG DISPLAY Continue Reading
