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BMW F Series Gear Selector, Part One: Failures
I'm overdue to write up some of my vague electric vehicle conversion project, so here's a small part of it.
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I Hacked My Car Guides: Creating Custom Firmware
Notice Note: As of 2022/10/25 the information in this series is slightly outdated. See Part 5 for more up to date information. I take no responsibility for any damages due to the information or steps provided on this site. The content is for educational purposes only. You modify your own car’s firmware at your…
213
Holography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms (1999)
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
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Quarter-Scale Retrocomputing
Creating a quarter-scale replica of the iconic BeBox computer, complete with blinkenlights and custom case design
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High-Security Mechanical Locks (2020)
Outside of a very few specialized fields high-security locks are almost totally unknown. Even in the field of locksmithing where high-security locks are known, they are often misunderstood. Today I am going to offer you a primer on the fascinating world of high-security mechanical locks, the securit
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Hitachi Wood Plug Cutter Works Perfectly in Hand Held Drills (2013)
I had meant to post on this some time back and forgot. I don’t altogether like plug cutters much, but good quality ones work well in drill presses (pillar drill UK). It’s the drill press that’s the problem more than anything. Often when I need a plug
217
The Beautiful Diablo 2 Resurrected Machine
The last game I played extensively was "Diablo 2" during the year 2000 when Internet finally became affordable in France. I loved that it was a difficult game to master, I loved the mandatory grinding which made accomplishments meaningful. I loved to trade and the economy players invented.
218
NEC’s Tetris Processor
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
219
Air Support in a Backpack: The Switchblade
In March 2022, it was reported that the United States was sending over some Switchblades to Ukraine.
220
A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
221
Eye-tracking is a missing input device for VR experiences
So you want to shoot lasers from your eyes, hmm?
222
A Small Ode to the CRT
I used to hate Cathode Ray Tubes . As a kid in Europe, everything flickered at 50Hz, or made a loud whistle at 15.625KHz (back when I could still hear it). CRTs just seemed crude, “electro-brutalist” contraptions from the valve era. They were heavy, and delicate, and distorted, and blurry, and whistled, and gave…
223
Capcom CPS-1 Graphic system study
As I keep on exploring the internals of the machine that animated so many hours of my childhood, I came to study its GFX system.
224
Using a tiny HC32L110 ARM chip
A while ago, Hackaday highlighted a new chip, the HC32L110. This chip was one of the many ARM-based microcontrollers that sprung up in China, but this one was remarkable because its diminuitive size: it came in an 16-pin WCSP package of a miniscule 1.6x1.4mm. Aside from that, it seems to be a chip that is somewhat…
225
Pieca: A Raspberry Pi Camera System for Leica M Mount Lenses
Taking pictures and geeking out over cameras was one of my first hobbies starting with an old Olympus point and shoot, I then moved up to a DSLR upgrading as new and exciting technology became acce…
226
C64 Theremin
The Theremin is one of the earliest electronic instruments. It's played by moving one's hands in front of two antennas: One controls pitch and the other controls volume.
227
Upgrading my old Chumby 8 Linux kernel
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent a good chunk of my spare time over the past 6 months working on a project I’ve been thinking about for over a decade. I bought a Chumby 8 in 2011. It’s an 8″ touchscreen device powered by the Marvell PXA166 processor. It is essentially a souped-up digital picture frame with…
228
RISC-V Linux on ESP32
I've been playing with the idea of running linux on ESP32 since the first days I've met its more robust module, the WROVER-B, on paper it se...
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The digital ranging system that measured the distance to the Apollo spacecraft
During the Apollo missions to the Moon, a critical task for NASA was determining the spacecraft's position. To accomplish this, they devel...
231
Why the Black MacBook Cost More
From 2006 until 2008, Apple sold one of the coolest Macs ever: the black MacBook. The black MacBook was sold alongside the more popular — and less expensive — white MacBook. The price difference between the white and black models is often brought up when discussing Apple’s various strategies around product design and…
232
Remotely Controlled Lawn Tractor
The process of building a remotely controlled tractor.
233
Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…
234
Linux Developer Laptops: Dell's Precision 5500 series reigns supreme (2019)
I’m an entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI developer tools and data systems. My principal role is Founder at Kenn Software . I am also a Principal Architect at Posit , where I contribute to Python and AI strategy. I was a founder of Voltron Data , Ursa Labs (with Posit ), and DataPad. I wrote Python for Data…
235
Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60
An illustrated overview about the process of clearing the supervisor password from a ThinkPad T60, based on guides that some smart and persistent people have written.
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RISC-V is getting MSIs
Message signaled interrupts or MSIs describe a way to signal an interrupt without a dedicated interrupt request pin (IRQ). One of the most prevalent uses for MSIs is the PCI bus, and the PCI specification defines the MSI and MSI-X standards. The potential benefits may include: (1) reduced number of direct wires from…
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The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software
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Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
I took a spare ThinkPad T430 and put all my home server workloads on it. Here's how it went.
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The Talos II, Blackbird POWER9 systems support tagged memory
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adding tagged memory functionality to CPU architectures. Such architectures associate one or more tag bits with each quantum of a system's memory. There are many motivations for this ability to associate “metadata” with individual memory words, but one of the most clear is the…
240
Ryzen 7000 amdgpu boot hang
So you decided to build a brand new system using all the latest and coolest tech, so you buy a Ryzen 7000 series Zen 4 CPU, like the Ryzen 7700X that I picked, with a new mother board and DDR5 memory