Kritik sah

[Evan Monsma], the prolific experimenter with cameras, found himself with an issue: he had a small Sony action camera with good performance in every respect but battery life, which was as low as twenty minutes. This was too short for practical everyday use, so [Evan] built an external adapter to add a larger battery and a few other features. In fairness to the camera’s designers, it wasn’t really meant for consumer use; it was meant as more of a stunt camera, where endurance is less of a concern than size and weight. [Evan] wanted to use it for more general situations, hence the new battery. He first attached a small CNC-machined aluminium half-cage, which provided mounting points for additional hardware, including a screw-mount for a neutral-density filter. [Evan] next designed, 3D-printed, and attached a mount and battery clip for a larger Sony camera battery; the mount also held a voltage converter to step the battery’s 7.2 V down to the original battery’s 3.7 V. A USB power ada...

The Amazon Echo Dot is one of Amazon’s so-called ‘smart speaker’ offerings that tie into their larger Alexa-fueled ecosystem, designed to be a pretty minimalistic device that gives you access to this voice assistant and also the Amazon AWS cloud access to your home. If that latter part isn’t really your jam, you can always try to unshackle the device from the Amazonian cloud by rooting the device, as [Andy] recently did with a 2018 Echo Dot 3 . In addition to the video there is also a blog post in which the steps required to root the device are covered. This is then used to turn the device into a Home Assistant voice satellite, using a Claude-vibecoded project created by [Julian Imhof]. As [Andy] notes, this code seems to work, but it’s completely unaudited so YMMV. Device support is also limited to only certain Echo Dot and Echo Show devices as listed on the project page. The first step is to gain USB access to the board inside the device, which for US...

It’s no big secret at this point that we are looking at the final years of the two venerable Voyager spacecraft. With their power supplies diminishing and their 1970s-era electronics still giving it all they got, their teams are working miracles to stretch out the time to the final goodbye for as long as possible. Despite these efforts Voyager 1 went silent for more than 24 hours on October 18 and 19, with the team still trying to figure out what happened . The most recent change to Voyager 1 was the same ‘big bang’ switching of multiple instruments to lower-power versions, while keeping an eye on keeping the electronics and fuel at reasonable temperatures. This should give both spacecraft a few more years before power reserves fall below usable levels. Whether this switch is related to this communication blackout is currently unknown. From the diagnostic data that the team obtained after communications were restored it’s clear that a group of thrusters went o...

Those in the virtual reality scene might be interested in [Prohurtz]’s add-on for the Bigscreen Beyond VR headset.  BSB-SLAM adds SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) tracking to the headset by attaching a sensor to the front of the headset, and providing the software to tie the two together. As a result, the headset can be fully tracked in 3D space with no need for external base stations. It essentially adds inside-out tracking as a DIY add-on. An early version, shared with a brief video demo posted to X . Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean the headset becomes wireless. The Beyond connects to a PC, essentially acting as a display, and that part is the same. But it does mean the headset is no longer tied to having to work in a room with base stations pre-installed. [Prohurtz]’s solution does this by adding a small off-the-shelf Xvisio XR50 board, USB cable, and 3D-printed mount to the unit. The headset works as normal, just with some extra software needed ...

[Dave Farquhar] takes a walk down memory lane about the Commodore 1600 VICModem , perhaps the first phone modem to sell for less than $100. Commodore, of course, was famous for making cheaper computers like the VIC20, the Commodore 64, and lower-cost peripherals like disk drives. But how did they hit the $100 price point with the modem when competing 300 baud modems sold for at least twice that, and a 1200 baud unit would set you back at least $600? First, Commodore didn’t handle the design themselves. Instead, they outsourced to Anchor Automation, a well-known modem manufacturer. It used a Motorola MC14412 modem on a chip, along with six other chips. The chip could, in theory, do 600 baud, but the modem was rated for 300. But it did make some interesting design choices. Old-school modems were not allowed to connect to the phone lines directly, so you dialed the phone number and then shoved the handset into some padded cups known as an acoustic coupler that placed a microphone...

When it comes to internal combustion engines (ICEs), it’s generally accepted that each cylinder doesn’t have more valves to let in a fresh fuel mixture and to exhaust the aftermath than absolutely necessary. You could argue in favor of this also because it reduces the amount of valve seat surface and thus the potential for leaks, but there is historical precedent for higher valve counts. Hence [Alexander’s Laboratory] had to give a ten-valve engine a shake , just to see what effect adding more valves has. A cited historical example is the Yamaha FX750 , which features a five-cylinder engine that has three inlet and two outlet valves per cylinder, making for a 20-valve design that is claimed to improve performance, also because each valve can be smaller and lighter than with a single valve per side. Other motorbike manufacturers would also try such configurations, with some fascinating examples shown in the video. What [Alexander] tries here is to create a 10-valve ve...