Sometimes when you’re making a PCB that you plan on programming over USB, but you only plan on plugging in a couple of times, it would be nice to make …read more
When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history …read more
In an era where running a website without HTTPS is shunned, and everyone wants you to encrypt your DNS queries, you’d expect that the telecommunications back-ends are secured tightly as …read more
One of the lost pleasures of our modern world is the experience of going shopping at a grocery store, a mall, or a drugstore, and finding this month’s electronics magazine …read more
If you ever wanted to win a bar bet about a world record, you probably know about the Guinness book for World Records. Did you know, though, that there are …read more
We always enjoy videos from [w2aew]. His recent entry looks at vertical or VFETs, which are, as he puts it, a JFET that thinks it is a triode. He clearly …read more
There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week with the news that an airliner had been hit by space junk. The plane, a United Airlines 737, was operating at …read more
Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close …read more
In a recent write-up, [David Delony] explains how he built a Wolfram Mathematica-like engine with Python. Core to the system is SymPy for symbolic math support. [David] said being able …read more
It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big paper ledgers if you were an accountant. But most people just scribbled their …read more
In our modern semi-dystopia, it seems like most companies add automation features to their products to lock them down and get consumers to buy even more proprietary, locked-down components. The …read more
It’s something of a shock to be reminded that Microsoft’s Windows 95 is now 30 years old — but the PC operating system that brought 32-bit computing to the masses …read more
If you want to work with radioactive material, a cheap Geiger counter isn’t really what you want. According to [Project 326], you need a gamma ray spectrometer. The video below …read more
[Paul McCabe] wrote in to let us know about his $25 robot. This small wheeled robot is based on an ESP32 and made using cardboard and hot glue. You drive …read more
While we use a lot of CAD tools, many of us are fans of Tinkercad — especially for working with kids or just doing something quick. But many people dislike …read more
Finely powdered aluminium can make almost anything more pyrotechnically interesting, from fireworks to machine shop cleanups – even ceramics, as [Degree of Freedom] discovered. He was experimenting with mixing aluminium …read more
When we first saw [DiPDoT’s] homebrew computer, we thought it was an Altair 8800. But, no. While it has a very familiar front panel, the working parts are all based …read more
It’s just about all we can think about over here: the week leading up to the 2025 Superconference. From what we hear, it’s all-hands-on over in Pasadena right now, as …read more
It’s rather amazing how many electronic components you can buy right now are not quite the genuine parts that they are sold as. Outside of dedicated platforms like Mouser, Digikey …read more