It may be named after the most famous volleyball in history, but “Wilson” isn’t just a great conversationalist. [Hayden Brophy] built the free-drifting satellite buoy to see if useful science can be done with off-the-shelf hardware and on a shoestring budget. And from the look of the data so far, Wilson is doing pretty well. Wilson belongs […]
DRONE BUOY DRIFTS ALONG THE GULF STREAM FOR CITIZEN SCIENCE Continue Reading
Audio and video synthesizers have been around for decades, and are pretty much only limited by one’s willingness to spend money on them. That is, unless you can develop your own FPGA-supercharged synthesizer to really get a leg up on the consumer-grade components. Of course, as [Julian] found out in this four-year project, you tend to pay
FREE TO GOOD HOME: FPGA SUPERCHARGED AUDIO/VIDEO SYNTHESIZER Continue Reading
It isn’t hard to imagine a scenario where you are stuck at home all day with nothing to do and certain items are in short supply. Sure, bathroom tissue gets all the press, but try buying some flour or a freezer and see how far you get. Plus online shopping has given up on next
FROM THE MACGYVER FILES: USING A STEPPER MOTOR AS AN ENCODER Continue Reading
After this pandemic thing is all said and done, historians will look back on this period from many different perspectives. The one we’re most interested in of course will concern the creativity that flourished in the petri dish of anxiety, stress, and boredom that have come as unwanted side dishes to stay-at-home orders. [Hunter Irving]
NIGHTMARE FUEL TELEPRESENCE ‘BOT MAY BECOME YOUR LAST FRIEND Continue Reading
Making a microcontroller perform as a frequency counter is a relatively straightforward task involving the measurement of the time period during which a number of pulses are counted. The maximum frequency is however limited to a fraction of the microcontroller’s clock speed and the accuracy of the resulting instrument depends on that of the clock
NTP, RUST, AND ARDUINO MAKE A PHENOMENAL FREQUENCY COUNTER Continue Reading
latforms are both useful to know at a professional level, and simply fun to engineer and code. The 2022 Complete Raspberry Pi & Arduino Developer Bundle helps everyone from coding experts to new engineers get the most from these popular tools. Edouard Renard, the bundle’s instructor, designs his courses to be learned one step at a time,
Get started in robotics and microcontrollers with this bundle Continue Reading
The classic arcade game Cyclone has attracted many players, along with their coins, thanks to its simple yet addictive gameplay. In its most basic form it consists of a light racing around a circular track, which the player then has to stop at exactly the right place. Arduino enthusiast [mircemk] made a home version of this game, which
GOING AROUND IN CIRCLES WITH HOMEMADE ARCADE CLASSIC CYCLONE Continue Reading
Time-of-flight sensors used to be expensive obscurities, capable of measuring the travel time of photons themselves and often used for tracking purposes. However, the technology is cheaper now, such that [jean.perardel] has used TOF sensors to build a useful and affordable gesture-tracking system. The system relies on four VL53L1X time of flight sensors, which have a
HEDGEHOG GESTURE SENSOR BUILT WITH CHEAP TIME-OF-FLIGHT MODULES Continue Reading
Have you ever heard of a Centurion minicomputer? If not, don’t feel bad — we hadn’t either, until [David Lovett] stumbled upon a semi-complete version of the 1980-ish mini in all its wood-trimmed, dust-encased glory. And what does a hacker do with such an acquisition but attempt to get it going again? Of course, getting
HOMEBREW ROM READER SAVES DATA FROM A VINTAGE MINICOMPUTER Continue Reading
Master of 3D printed robots, [James Bruton], plans to do some autonomous rover projects in the future, but first, he needed a modular rover platform. Everything is cooler with tank tracks, so he built a rover with flexible interlocking track sections. The track sections are printed with flexible Ninjaflex filament. Each section has a tab designed
MODULAR ROVER PLATFORM ROLLS ON 3D PRINTED FLEXIBLE TANK TRACKS Continue Reading
