[ad_1] Easily add Python-controlled GPIO pins to any computer Arduino Team — June 24th, 2024 Let’s say that, hypothetically, you wanted to use your computer to blink an LED or read the state of a button. Could you? Almost certainly not — at least not without additional hardware. Most modern computers don’t provide any interface […]

[ad_1] It is funny how sometimes things you think are bad turn out to be good in retrospect. Like many of us, when I was a kid, I was fascinated by science of all kinds. As I got older, I focused a bit more, but that would come later. Living in a small town, there […]

[ad_1] Displays are crucial to modern life; they are literally everywhere. But modern flat-panel LCDs and cheap 7-segment LED displays are, well, a bit boring. When we hackers want to display the progress of time, we want something more interesting, hence the plethora of projects using Nixie tubes and various incantations of edge-lit segmented units. […]

[ad_1] [Luizão] wanted to create some hardware to honour the memory of the technology used to put man on the moon and chose the literal core of the project, that of the hardware used to store the software that provided the guidance. We’re talking about the magnetic core rope memory used in the Colossus and […]

[ad_1] [Ken Shirriff] likes to take chips apart and this time his target is an NFC chip used in Montreal transit system tickets. As you might expect, the tickets are tiny, cheap, and don’t have any batteries. So how does it work? The chip itself is tiny at 570 µm × 485 µm. [Ken] compares […]

[ad_1] Beyond bothering large language models (LLMs) with funny questions, there’s the general idea that they can act as supporting tools. Theoretically they should be able to assist with parsing and summarizing documents, while answering questions about e.g. electronic design. To test this assumption, [Duncan Haldane] employed three of the more highly praised LLMs to […]

[ad_1] There’s no shortage of Geiger counter projects based on the old Soviet SBM-20 tube, it’s a classic circuit that’s easy enough even for a beginner to implement — so long as they don’t get bitten by the 400 volts going into the tube, that is. Toss in a microcontroller, and not only does that […]

[ad_1] Wiremold is great stuff — it’s relatively cheap, easy to work with, and offers all sorts of adapters and angle pieces which take the hassle out of running (and hiding) wires. But [Dr. Gerg] found a shortcoming of this otherwise very flexible product: since each run is intended to start and end in a […]

[ad_1] The venerable Intel 486 was released in 1989 as the successor to the extremely popular Intel 386. It was the minimum recommended processor for Windows 98.  (Surprisingly, the Windows 95 minimum was a 386!)  But by the time XP rolled around, you needed at least a 233 MHz Pentium to install. Or at least […]

[ad_1] When a ransomware attack targets something like a hospital, it quickly becomes a high-profile event that understandably results in public outrage. Hospitals are supposed to be backstops for society, a place to go when it all goes wrong, and paralyzing their operations for monetary gain by taking over their information systems is just beyond […]