Over on his blog our hacker [Scott Baker] restores a Prompt 80, which was a development system for the 8-bit Intel 8080 CPU. [Scott] acquired this broken trainer on eBay and then set about restorin…

If you ever develop an embedded system in a corporate environment, someone will probably tell you that you can only use 80% of the CPU or some other made-up number. The theory is that you will need…

An overriding memory for those who used 8-bit machines back in the day was of using BASIC to program them. Without a disk-based operating system as we would know it today, these systems invariably …

Developing Android applications seems like it should be fairly straightforward if you believe the glossy marketing by Google and others. It’s certainly possible to just follow the well-trodde…

Using digital techniques has caused a resurgence of interest in VLF — very low frequency — radio. Thanks to software-defined radio, you no longer need huge coils. However, you still nee…

A few years ago, I bought an 8 mm home movie camera in a second hand store. I did a teardown on it here and pulled out for your pleasure those parts of it which I considered interesting. My vague p…

When you think about highly-precise actuators, stepper motors probably aren’t the first device that comes to mind. However, as [Diffraction Limited]’s sub-micron capable micro-manipulator shows, th…

How hard can it be to create your own inductors? Get a wire. Coil it up. Right? Well, the devil is definitely in the details, and [Nick] wants to share his ten tips for building “the perfect&…

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Jerry Walker] repairs a Tektronix 577 curve tracer. A curve tracer is a piece of equipment which plots I-V (current vs voltage) curves, among other things. T…

It’s not every day we hear of a new space propulsion method. Even rarer to hear of one that actually seems halfway practical. Yet that’s what we have in the case of TFINER, a proposal b…

A look underneath the water’s surface can be fun and informative! However, making a device to go under the surface poses challenges with communication and water proofing. That’s what th…

If you’re working with a microcontroller that reads a sensor, the chances are that at some point you’re faced with a serial port passing out continuous readings. The workflow of visuali…

Before you decide to click away, thinking we’re talking about some heart rate monitor that connects to a display using WiFi, wait! Pulse-Fi is a system that monitors heart rate using the WiFi…

Something rather significant happened on the Internet back in May, and it seems that someone only noticed it on September 3rd. [Youfu Zhang] dropped a note on one of the Mozilla security mailing li…

The Estes line of flying model rockets have inspired an untold number of children and adults alike, thanks in part to their simplicity. From the design and construction of the rockets themselves to…

Thunderstorms were raging across southern Germany as Elliot Williams was joined by Jenny List for this week’s podcast. The deluge outside didn’t stop the hacks coming though, and we&#82…

Even with teachers with names like Kirchhoff and Helmholtz, old Heinrich Hertz himself likely didn’t have the slightest idea that his name would one day become an SI unit. Less likely still w…

With the days of dial-up and pitiful 2G data connections long behind most of us, it would seem tempting to stop caring about how much data an end-user is expected to suck down that big and wide bro…

Knobs are ubiquitous in technology user interfaces, but touchscreens are increasingly replacing them for interface controls. The latest project from [upir] combines a rotating knob with a touchscre…

Semiconductor fabrication is complicated requiring nasty chemicals for everything from dopants to etchants. Working with such chemicals at home is dangerous and after releasing hydrochloride acid f…