Kritik sah

Sometimes, you want to build a simple project– the minimum viable product that solves your problem and nothing else. Other times you might be feeling a little extra, and want to use oodles of machined aluminum, six steppers, two cameras, a Teensy and a PC with a GPU just to bounce a ball. That’s the mood behind [T-Kuhn]’s hexa-bouncer, a Stewart Platform on steroids.  You can read all about it on his blog or witness it in action in the video below .  Trust us, really have to see it in action. The six stepper motors connected to planetary gearboxes each drive an arm. Ingenious linkages allow the steppers to control a ping-pong paddle in every axis of rotation and translation. A Teensy 4.0 coordinates those steppers, but the marching orders are coming from a PC where a Unity application — available on GitHub — is performing Inverse Kinematics using the two cameras to track the ball in 3D. You might imagine a GPU comes in handy there. Both the article and ...

Retrocomputer enthusiasts have a bad rap as nerds who just want to play old video games. There’s some truth in this, but the reality is that we’re nerds who want to do all sorts of things with old hardware — everything from consoles to servers. Servers like the DEC AlphaServer 2100 [derelictelectronics] picked up at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest this year. He was kind enough to record a tour for those of us who missed seeing these early Alpha machines in their heyday. DEC did sell these units with multiple-CPU reports from the get-go, but the [derelictronics] particular model has  a single CPU board carrying a 64-bit Alpha RISC processor. This machine from 1994 dates to near the height of the RISC wars when it seemed everyone needed to have their own high-end architecture, all of them RISC. While the machine could host up to 2GB of RAM, the example [derelictelectronics] found only has 256 MB, which was still not a small number for 1994! He does get the machine ...

Game jams are a fun competition in which the aim is to write a game under a particular theme while under a time constraint, usually a weekend.  [Hoani] entered one where the aim was to write a game within the constraints of the Nokia 3310’s user interface: a 94 by 48 pixel grey LCD, a buzzer, and a keypad. His entry was Trick Shot II, a ball-bouncing game running on his game engine, which is cool enough, but making a custom PCB for a Nokia 3310 case to run it on ? Next level. Look away if you don’t like restomods, for a real Nokia 3310 is gutted to take this board. On it is a Pi Pico, the Nokia LCD, which has outlasted the original phone as a part by decades, and a Nokia keypad layout. The first prototype was not a perfect fit because it had a 1.6mm board rather than 1mm. The engine meanwhile is written in Go, and has both graphics and sound APIs. Considering that the Pico’s power exceeds whatever CPU the phone had by many orders of magnitude, we’d imagine it h...

It probably goes without saying that if you send four humans to observe the Moon up close, they’ll see things that those of us stuck here on Earth have never noticed. Luckily for us, they took impeccable notes and brought plenty of cameras, which NASA has shared with the rest of the class as Artemis II: Sights & Sounds of Science . Well, technically it’s called the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, but we appreciate the space agency adding a little flair to it and formatting the findings for public consumption. Arguably the most significant observations detailed in the report are the impact flashes on the lunar surface. As you may recall, the trajectory of the Orion spacecraft meant the crew experienced a unique solar eclipse on the sixth day of the mission , giving them an unprecedented close-up view of the darkened Moon. During this time, they were able to see flashes of light with their unaided eyes, which NASA has since confirmed were small rocky fragmen...

Although the demise of the Zilog Z80 processor has long been predicted, it would seem that this moment has finally arrived. The owner of the Zilog name – Littelfuse – recently sent out PCN ZAC26-0074 , notifying customers that they will be taking final orders for the eZ80 and all other microcontroller lines that they currently own. Over at Mouser, eZ80 parts have correspondingly all been marked as “End of Life”. This comes a few years after the original Z80 and its peripherals were discontinued , with the eZ80 still being an alternative until now. Any potential sellers will have to put in their orders today, with orders still accepted until December 21 2026, with final deliveries taking place throughout 2027 as Littelfuse winds down its MCU manufacturing. This means that for commercial customers are least this is pretty much the end of the road for any circuit that still uses the eZ80 or similar. Many of us have fondness for the Z80 , which also has led to a p...

Small displays are affordable and easy to use, but their size can present a challenge. To help address this, [mcer12] created PixelFonts , a family of condensed fonts designed specifically for low-resolution displays, making sure every line holds as much text as it can fit. PixelFonts works alongside either the AdafruitGFX or U8g2 libraries; one writes to the display using the common syntax of the chosen library, and the font itself comes from PixelFonts. Text can be displayed in regular and 3D shadowed versions, as well as in a wide variety of heights and weights. There’s support for accented letters, albeit only in lowercase due to space constraints. Want to make some changes? Every font comes with a BDF file to make alterations as widely accessible as possible. Making the most of every pixel is important with small displays, but there’s more than one way to do so. For example, when it comes to color LCDs, subpixel rendering can improve legibility of small fonts; ano...