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Blowing the Dust off of an IBM AS/400 Server
If you’ve never seen an IBM AS/400 machine, don’t feel bad. Most people haven’t. Introduced in 1988 as a mid-range server line, it used a unique object-based operating system and was geared...
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See the Radioactive World with This Peltier Cloud Chamber
Remember when a homemade cloud chamber was a science fair staple? We haven’t participated for decades, but it seemed like every year someone would put a hunk of dry ice in a fish tank, add a little...
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A Fully Automatic Electric Can Crusher
Those of us who recycle our empty drink cans know the annoying storage problem these containers present. For an object with very little metal, a can takes up a huge amount of space, and should you...
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ULX3S: An Open-Source Lattice ECP5 FPGA PCB
The hackers over at Radiona.org, a Zagreb Makerspace, have been hard at work designing the ULX3S, an open-source development board for LATTICE ECP5 FPGAs. This board might help make 2019 the Year of...
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UPnP, Vulnerability As A Feature That Just Won’t Die
UPnP — in a perfect world it would have been the answer to many connectivity headaches as we add more devices to our home networks. But in practice it the cause of a lot of headaches when it comes to...
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Hold That Cam Belt Pulley In Place With This Neat CNC Work
The modern overhead-cam internal combustion engine is a mechanical masterpiece of hundreds of parts in perfect synchronisation. In many cases it depends for that synchronisation upon a flexible...
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A Cloned Bluetooth Tracker Meets its Maker
The holidays bring us many things. Family and friends are a given, as is the grand meal in which we invariably overindulge. It’s a chance for decades old songs and movies to somehow manage to bubble...
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3D Printing An Entire Rocket
If you’re ever flying into LAX and have the left side window seat, just a few minutes before landing, look out the window. You’ll see a small airport just below you and what appears at first glance to...
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Web Development: What’s Big In 2019?
I try to keep up with web development trends but it’s hard to keep pace since it’s such a fast evolving field. Barely a week goes by without the release of a new JS framework, elaborate build tool or...
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Wireless Charging Without so Many Chargers
[Nikola Tesla] believed he could wirelessly supply power to the world, but his calculations were off. We can, in fact, supply power wirelessly and we are getting better but far from the dreams of the...
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Twelve Circuit Sculptures We Can’t Stop Looking At
Circuits are beautiful in their own way, and a circuit sculpture takes that abstract beauty and makes it into a purposeful art form. Can you use the wires of the circuits themselves as the structure of...
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Seymour Cray, Father of the Supercomputer
Somewhere in the recesses of my memory there lives a small photograph, from one of the many magazines that fed my young interests in science and electronics – it was probably Popular Science. In my...
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Cheap Muon Detectors Go Aloft on High-Altitude Balloon Mission
There’s something compelling about high-altitude ballooning. For not very much money, you can release a helium-filled bag and let it carry a small payload aloft, and with any luck graze the edge of...
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Scramjet Engines on the Long Road to Mach 5
When Charles “Chuck” Yeager reached a speed of Mach 1.06 while flying the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis in 1947, he became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound in controlled level flight....
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The Printed Solution To A Handful Of Resistors
Resistors are an odd bunch. Why would you have 1.0 Ω resistors, then a 1.1 Ω resistor, but there’s no resistors in between 4.7 Ω and 5.6 Ω? This is a question that has been asked for decades, but the...
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New Contest: 3D Printed Gears, Pulleys, and Cams
One of the killer apps of 3D printers is the ability to make custom gears, transmissions, and mechanisms. But there’s a learning curve. If you haven’t 3D printed your own gearbox or automaton, here’s...
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Plastics: Acrylic
If anything ends up on the beds of hobbyist-grade laser cutters more often than birch plywood, it’s probably sheets of acrylic. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching a laser beam trace...
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Brush With The Power Of 3D Printing
When it comes to 3D printing, functional prints are still few and far between. Sure, you can print a mount for anything, a Raspberry Pi case, but there are few prints out there that are truly useful,...
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A Compiler in Plain Text Also Plays Music
As a layperson reading about some branches of mathematics, it often seems like mathematicians are just people who really like to create and solve puzzles. And, knowing that computer science shares a...
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Sharpest Color CRT Display is Monochrome Plus a Trick
I recently came across the most peculiar way to make a color CRT monitor. More than a few oscilloscopes have found their way on to my bench over the years, but I was particularly struck with a find...
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