We aren’t sure if [Looking Glass Universe] didn’t trust the accepted number for Planck’s constant, or just wanted the experience of measuring it herself. Either way, she took some…

Few people know LLMs (Large Language Models) as thoroughly as [Andrej Karpathy], and luckily for us all he expresses that in useful open-source projects. His latest is nanochat, which he bills as a…

Friends, I’ve gotten myself into a pickle and I need some help. A few years back, I decided to get into solar power by building a complete PV system inside a mobile trailer. The rationale for…

Beehives are impressive structures, an example of the epic building feats that are achievable by nature’s smaller creatures. [Full Stack Woodworking] was recently building a new work desk, an…

If you want to print, say, a book, you probably will type it into a word processor. Someone else will take your file and produce pages on a printer. Your words will directly turn on a laser beam or…

Making nylon plastic from raw chemicals used to be a very common demo; depending where and when you grew up, you may well have done it in high school or even earlier. What’s not common is tak…

Let’s say you want to blink an LED. You might grab an Arduino and run the Blink sketch, or you might lace up a few components to a 555. But you needn’t go so fancy! [The Design Graveyar…

Vector Control, also known as Field Oriented Control or FOC is an AC motor control scheme that enables fine-grained control over a connected motor, through the precise control of its phases. In a r…

During the AI research boom of the 1970s, the LISP language – from LISt Processor – saw a major surge in use and development, including many dialects being developed. One of these diale…

One downside of working with the old Inmos Transputer devices is the rarity and cost of the original silicon. Obviously, you can’t sidestep the acquisition of the processor—unless you emulate…

If you think about it, STL files are like PDF files. You usually create them using some other program, export them, and then expect them to print. But you rarely do serious editing on a PDF or an S…

The original Stream Deck was a purpose-built device to make it easier to manage a live video stream on the fly. Since its release, many other similar products have hit the market. Among them is the…

In the last edition of our ongoing series on how planets get ore– those wonderful rocks rich in industrial minerals worth mining– we started talking about hydrothermal fluid deposits. Hydrothermal …

The first generation of real-time train information screens for British railways came in the form of suspended color CRTs in familiar rounded fiberglass housings. They were a ubiquitous sight acros…

So much news, so little time left until Supercon! We hope you all have your tickets. If not: Workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now. We’re getting down to the last slightly-mo…

Sometimes it’s fun to bring props from video games into the real world. [Hulk] has done just that with their latest Halloween build—creating a working replica of the lantern from Minecraft. K…

The Razer Nari is a decent wireless headset, but it’s a little oddball—because it uses a bespoke USB dongle for pairing. This is all well and good if you’re using a supported configurat…

Over on YouTube, [The Modern Rogue] created an interesting video showing a slide-rule-like encryption device called the Réglette. This was a hardware implementation of a Vigenère-like Cipher, techn…

It is easy to write off Tinkercad as a kid’s toy. It is easy enough for kids to learn and it uses bright colors looking more like a video game than a CAD tool. We use a variety of CAD tools, …

The chiptune music scene is largely rooted in the sounds of the original Nintendo Game Boy and the Commodore 64, while still welcoming a wide range of other hardware under its general umbrella. Sti…