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Demonstrating Gray Codes With Industrial Display

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Many people base huge swaths of their lives on foundational philosophical texts, yet few have read them in their entirety. The one that springs to the forefront of many of our minds is The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth. Full of many clever and outright revolutionary algorithms and new ways of thinking about how computers work, [Attoparsec] has been attempting to read this tome from cover to cover, and has found some interesting tidbits. One of those is the various algorithms around Gray Codes, and he built this device as a visual aid . Gray Codes, otherwise known as reflected binary, is a way of ordering an arbitrarily large set of binary values so that only one bit changes between any two of them. The most common place these are utilized is in things like rotary encoders, where it provides better assurance that the position of a shaft is in a known location. To demonstrate this in a more visual way [Attoparsec] hooked up an industrial signal light, normally used for c...
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VGA Output From A PIC18

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In the maker world, it’s the Arduino and ESP32 lines that get the lion’s share of attention. However, you can do fantastic things with PIC chips, too, if you put the dev time in—it’s just perhaps less likely another maker has done so before you. A great example is this VGA output project from [grecotron]. A PIC18F47K42 is perhaps not the first part you would reach for to pursue any sort of video-based project. However, with the right techniques, you can get the 8-bit microcontroller pumping out the pixels surprisingly well. [grecotron] was able to get the chip outputting to a VGA monitor at a resolution of 360 x 480 with up to 16 colors. It took some careful coding to ensure the chip could reliably meet the timing requirements for the standard and to get HSYNC, VSYNC, and the color signals all dancing in harmony. Aiding in this regard was that the chip was clocked with a 14.3182 MHz crystal to make it easy to divide down from all the internal timers as needed. Supporting hardware is ...
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The Most Intricate Of Freeform Digital Clocks

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Digital clock projects have been with us since the 1970s, when affordable LEDs and integrated circuits became available. In 2026 most of them use a microcontroller, but for the AliExpress fans there’s one that goes straight back to the ’70s with a pile of logic chips. You can make it on the supplied PCBs, but that wasn’t for [ALTco]. Instead, he made the circuit in free form, using six metres of brass wire . The construction is anchored together by a set of busbars that carry sockets for a set of seven-segment and driver modules. The circuit is typical for the day, with a crystal oscillator and divider chain feeding the counters for the displays. There are a few clever tricks that older engineers might recognize in order to reduce the chip count. In this case that’s negated by an extra set of circuitry allowing the time to be set from a rotary encoder. We’re impressed by the intricacy of the device, made bit by bit without a plan, it as some wires what thread their way between other...
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FLOSS Weekly Episode 867: Pangolin: People Can Lie

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This week Jonathan chats with Milo Schwartz about Pangolin , the Open Source tunneling solution. Why do we need something other than Wireguard, and how does Pangolin fix IoT and IT problems? And most importantly, how do you run your own self-hosted Pangolin install? Watch to find out! GitHub: https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin How Pangolin Works: https://docs.pangolin.net/about/how-pangolin-works Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pangolin Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here . Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License from Blog – Hackaday ...
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Testing Expensive Graphene-Reinforced Nylon Filament

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Although usually nylon (generally PA6) filament is pretty cheap, there are some more exotic variants out there, such as the PA12-based Lyten 3D graphene filament that comes in at a cool $150 for a 1 kg spool. Worse for [Dr. Igor Gaspar] here was that the company doesn’t ship to the EU, and didn’t respond to emails about obtaining a sample for testing. Fortunately he got a spool via a different route, so that he could test whether this is the strongest nylon filament or not. The full name for this filament is PA1205 , though it’s not certain what the ’05’ part stands for. PA12 is a less moisture-sensitive version of PA6, however. Among the manufacturer’s claims are that it’s the strongest nylon filament, as well as very lightweight and heat-resistant. Interestingly the datasheet recommends printing with an 0.6 mm nozzle, which is the only major deviation from typical nylon FDM filaments. Of course, printing with an 0.4 mm nozzle had to be tried. With a standard PA-CF preset in Bambu...
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Heating a Woodshop With Sawdust

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Most carpenters and woodworkers find themselves with the problem of disposing of all the sawdust they create when performing their craft. There are lots of creative solutions to this problem, such as adding it compost, using it as groundcover in a garden, adding it as filler in a composting toilet, or pressing it into bricks to burn in a stove. All of these have their uses, but involve either transporting the sawdust somewhere or performing some intermediate step to process it. [Greenhill Forge] wanted to make more direct use of it so he built this stove which can burn the sawdust directly and which provides enough heat for his woodshop . The design is based on one which is somewhat common in Japan and involves building a vessel with a central tube for airflow, with the sawdust packed around it. The tube is made from a hardware cloth or screen to allow air to reach the sawdust. The fire is lit from the top, closed, and then allowed to burn through the stack. [Greenhill Forge] welded ...
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US FCC Prohibits Approval of New Foreign-Made Consumer Routers

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The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tasked with regulating both wired and wireless communications, which also includes a national security component. This is how previously the FCC tossed networking gear made by Huawei and foreign-manufactured drones onto its Covered List, effectively banning it from sale in the US. Now foreign-made consumer routers have been added to this list, barring explicit conditional approval on said list that would exempt them during a ‘transition phase’. As per the FCC fact sheet , this follows after determination by an interagency body that such routers “pose unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States [..]”. This document points us to the National Security Determination PDF, which attempts to lay out the reasoning. In it is noted that routers are an integral part of every day life, and compromised routers are a major risk factor, ergo it follows that only US-manufactured routers are to be trusted. These – so far ficti...
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