Kritik sah

Running an optical character recognition (OCR) server might sound like it would need some powerful hardware, like a rack-mounted, water-cooled machine, or at least a nice desktop or laptop. But if you have the time, anything could be used. [Hemant] has a long-running personal project that processes a lot of image data over a long time, and set up the OCR server on an iPhone 8 running entirely with solar power, rather than turn to more typical hardware. Part of what makes this task feasible for low-powered hardware is Apple’s Vision framework , which uses machine learning to aid in things like character recognition (among other tasks). It will run on an iPhone just as easily as a Mac. The phone’s built-in battery already provides the first step of an off-grid setup. This build relies on a separate power bank to integrate the phone with the solar panel more easily. On the software side, [Hemant] reports that the true challenge wasn’t setting up the server as much as it...

If you’re located in the Northeast United States and thought you heard an explosion yesterday afternoon, it wasn’t just your imagination — multiple sources have now confirmed that a 1 meter (3 foot) meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and broke up in the air off the coast of Massachusetts, releasing the energy equivalent of 300 tons of TNT. Well, maybe. The latest update from NASA says it might actually qualify as a meteorite , with radar data indicating that debris from the space rock may have fallen into Cape Cod Bay. For those unfamiliar, the difference between a meteor and a meteorite is whether or not any of the object survived its encounter with the atmosphere and made it down to the surface. There’s an argument to be made that a larger asteroid would have likely set off some alarm bells as it approached the planet, but the fact that this deep space interloper showed up unannounced is a sobering reminder that our ability to detect incoming threat...

When we think of CRT camera viewfinders, most of us probably imagine the tiny CRTs you’d find in a 1980s camcorder. They’re super cute and a load of fun to play with, but they’re very much a consumer device. Professional cameras of the type you’d find in a studio had their own viewfinders, which were a lot closer to a small TV. They’re about as high quality as it gets for a monochrome CRT, and [Evan Monsma] has done the conversion to a general-purpose monitor . On one side, this is a very straightforward hack, simply a case of tracing wires to identify the power and video pins. Given a tool battery, the monitor fires up and gives a super-sharp picture. What we like about this is the wooden base he’s made for the thing, at the same time rough-and-ready, and professional-looking from the outside. It has a routed space for the cables, and once mounted flush with the monitor base and given a bit of wood stain, it looks almost as though it was manufacture...

In 2024, [Jan Roetz] decided to see whether he could 3D print a Benchy – the boat-shaped benchmarking tool used in 3D printer calibration – in less than one minute. Two years later, after experiments with air bearing print beds, dry ice cooling, multi-filament hotends, and more, he’s finally broken the one-minute mark . There are three primary factors limiting the speed of the printer: the extrusion flow rate, the cooling rate for extruded plastic, and the motion system itself. The printer’s hotend combines four strands of filament in one hotend and can extrude about 400 cubic millimeters of plastic per second. For cooling, an air duct around the nozzle could deliver about 400 liters of air per minute, which left the motion system as the only bottleneck. The original print bed was on top of an air bearing on a granite base, and its motion could be controlled by cords connected to stepper motors. This whole system had very low friction, but its inertia was too high. [Jan] theref...

You would think a guitar amplifier would be a straightforward piece of analog electronics. But, of course, these days, everything has firmware, including [mforney]’s Yamaha THR10c . The service manual showed both a UART and JTAG header on the schematic, so as many of us would, he took that as a challenge. Of course, the production board doesn’t have headers for these ports, but that’s not a real problem. The serial port seemed quiet, but the JTAG port was more productive. This revealed two binary images: a bootloader and the main firmware. Once you have the code, it is a straightforward, if not laborious, process to reverse engineer what the code does. The next step is to figure out how to load new firmware. You can see in the post that this was done, and custom features sprang into life with custom-patched firmware. We never get tired of seeing people dig into consumer devices like this. Things like JTAG and the wide availability of JTAG tools have made it easier ...

Mini game controllers with buttons and joysticks that move like the real deal are a pretty cool keychain and fidget toy, but at least for some of us there’s this intrusive thought that tells us that it would be so much cooler if it actually was a functional game controller. Enter [Brux] tearing into a miniature GameCube controller and adding the required guts. The keychain/fidget toy is made by Backpack Buddies and is one of a range of similar toys that feature buttons you can press and joysticks that move, giving a pretty good start on the externals of the controller. Once cracked open at the seam, some interior redecorating had to be performed to clear space and add something to mount switches onto. Here [Brux] opted to glue SMD switches to custom 3D components in lieu of a PCB. These were subsequently wired up with thin enameled wire, before attaching the original buttons to them following some more plastic surgery. Some tiny joystick innards were then installed before gluin...