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
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
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 Outdated technology The advent of USB and Wi-Fi-enabled printers is still quite recent.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
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
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
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
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
A recent tour of an old WWII-era aircraft carrier reminded us how hard navigation was before the advent of GPS. It used to be the work of skilled people to sight the sun or the stars and use giant books to figure out a vessel’s position. Now you just ask your phone to listen to
LAWNMOWER DOESN’T NEED A BASE STATION Continue Reading
When we first saw the PZ1 laptop — a 6502 laptop-style computer with a small display and 512K of RAM — we couldn’t help but think of the old AIM 65 computer from Rockwell, although that only had 1K of memory. The other thing the AIM didn’t have was an ancillary microcontroller to help out that is way more
LAPTOPPIN’ LIKE 1975 Continue Reading
[Brian Pugh] has shared a cool new project that simultaneously runs on desktop Python and MicroPython – the Belay library. This library lets you control a MicroPython device seamlessly from your Python code – interacting with real-world things like analog/digital trinkets, servos, Neopixels and displays, without having to create your own firmware or APIs. You need a
YOUR MICROPYTHON BOARD CAN BE YOUR TINKERING PERIPHERAL Continue Reading
