Hackaday Links: January 7, 2018
Whelp, Spectre and Meltdown are the tech news du jour right now, and everyone is wondering: what is the effect of this problem on real hardware in real server rooms? Epic Games patched their machines...
View ArticleA Stepper Motor for Two Dimensions
We’ve all heard linear motors, like those propelling Maglev trains, described as “unrolled” versions of regular electric motors. The analogy is apt and helps to understand how a linear motor works, but...
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Entropy and The Arduino: When Clock Jitter is Useful
What do you do, when you need a random number in your programming? The chances are that you reach for your environment’s function to do the job, usually something like rand() or similar. This returns...
View ArticleSpeculative Execution Was A Troublemaker For Xbox 360
Part of why people can’t stop talking about Meltdown/Spectre is the fact that all the individual pieces have been sitting in plain sight for a long time. When everyone saw how it all came together last...
View ArticleBrewBuddy is a Home Brewer’s Best Friend
Whether coffee, tea, or beer is your jam, brewing is a delicate pas de deux of time and temperature. Proper brewing of any of these beverages can elevate the experience from average to amazing. With...
View ArticleExtracting A Vector Font From A Vintage Plotter
There is a huge variety of hardware out there with a font of some form or other baked into the ROM. If it’s got a display it needs a font, and invariably that font is stored as a raster. Finding these...
View ArticleIntel Rolls Out 49 Qubits
With a backdrop of security and stock trading news swirling, Intel’s [Brian Krzanich] opened the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show with a keynote where he looked to future innovations. One of the...
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The 348,296th Article About Cryptocurrency
The public has latched onto the recent market events with an intense curiosity brought about by a greed for instant riches. In the last year alone, the value of Bitcoin has risen by 1,731%. We’re...
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Edgytokei’s Incredible Mechanism Shows Time Without a Face
Taking inspiration from Japanese nunchucks, [ekaggrat singh kalsi] came up with a brilliant clock that tells time using only hour and minute hands, and of course a base for them to sit on. The hands at...
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Tube Amps are Still Tubular in 2018
Our friend [Pete] was reminiscing over the golden days with his old and broken antique Grundig Majestic console when he realized it deserved proper refurbishing. Now, any generic stereo record player...
View ArticleGetting a Handle on Meltdown Update Impact, Stay Tuned for Spectre
When news broke on Meltdown and Spectre ahead of the original disclosure plan, word spread like wildfire and it was hard to separate fact from speculation. One commonly repeated claim was that the fix...
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Friday Hack Chat: Assembling In Quantity With MacroFab
Building one of something is easy. You see it here every day, and yes, building a single robot, or a board to convert Segas to HDMI, or an Internet of Things thing is easy. Manufacturing is another...
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Spectre and Meltdown: Attackers Always Have The Advantage
While the whole industry is scrambling on Spectre, Meltdown focused most of the spotlight on Intel and there is no shortage of outrage in Internet comments. Like many great discoveries, this one is...
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Star Chart Watch is a Romantic Tragedy
It’s becoming abundantly clear that [Colin Merkel] doesn’t know the definition of “good enough”. Not only has he recently completed his third (and most impressive) wristwatch build, but he also managed...
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Color Changing Clock gets a Pi Zero Heart
Hackaday reader [Don] dropped by the tip line recently to let us know about the latest version of his color-changing LCD clock project. This is his second version of the hardware which makes some...
View ArticleLED Tree Brings Gravity to Christmas
Here’s a fun entry into our coin cell challenge. The power source is the actuating force in [Frank]’s blinky LED Christmas tree, which takes advantage of the physical structure of coin cells and our...
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Glitch Delays And Teensy Audio
With the release of the Teensy 3.6 and the associated audio processing libraries, it’s never been a better time to get into DIY synth and effects projects. [Scott] is a musician and maker of electronic...
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Fail of the Week: Engine Flips Out
A few weeks ago an incredible video of an engine exploding started making the rounds on Facebook. This particular engine was thankfully in a dyno room, rather than sitting a couple of feet away from a...
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Making A Headphone Amp Perform New Tricks
Hands up if you’ve had the misfortune to work in an office with a fondness for following the latest fads. Paperless office, how long did that last? Or moving from physical telephones to a flaky VOIP...
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3D Printed Hovercraft Takes Flight
Last time we checked in on [Ivan Miranda] he was putting a drill press on the Internet. Lately, he has been trying to 3D print a hovercraft with some success. He made four attempts before arriving at...
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