Kritik sah

Itanium was once meant to be the next step in computing, to compete with the likes of IBM, Sun and DEC, but also for Intel to have an architecture that couldn’t be taken from it, as the PC was from IBM by its clones. Today, however, Itanium is a relic of the past. [Asianometry] tells us the story of Itanium . By the ’90s, servers were an established market dominated by RISC architectures and Unix-like operating systems. Intel wanted to compete in this market, due in part to worries of losing control over x86. So, when Hewlett Packard came to Intel in late ’93, Intel eventually agreed to collaborate on a new project in EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). The project initially called PA-WW (later IA-64 and Itanium), was also a radical approach to ILP (Instruction-Level Parallelism). As HP engineers saw RISC architectures potentially hitting performance limits in the future, the idea was a compromise between fully compiler-driven VLIW and the fully hardware-driven super...

The Angle Computer of the B-52, opened. (Credit: Ken Shirriff) In the ages before convenient global positioning satellites to query for one’s current location military aircraft required dedicated navigators in order to not get lost. This changed with increasing automation, including the arrival of increasingly more sophisticated electromechanical computers, such as the angle computer in the B-52 bomber’s star tracker that [Ken Shirriff] recently had a poke at . We covered star trackers before , with this devices enabling the automation of celestial navigation. In effect, as long as you have a map of the visible stars and an accurate time source you will never get lost on Earth, or a few kilometers above its surface as the case may be. The B-52’s Angle Computer is part of the Astro Compass, which is the star tracker device that locks onto a star and outputs a heading that’s accurate to a tenth of a degree, while also allowing for position to be calculated from it. Inside the devic...

LED candles are neat, but they’re very suboptimal for wish-making: you can’t blow them out. Unless you take the circuit from [Andrea Console]’s latest project that lets you do just that, using only analog electronics — no microcontroller in sight. He’s using the known temperature-voltage behaviour of the LED for control here– sort of like the project we saw in last year’s Component Abuse Challenge that let you illuminate the LED with a butane lighter . Here it’s a bit less dramatic, relying only on the small cooling effect your breath has on the LED. There are two parts to the circuit, really– a latching section to turn the thing on from a single button press, and breath-detecting section. The breath-detecting section relies on an op-amp acting as a comparator, comparing the voltage across the LED’s current-limiting resistor, and a reference stored in a 100 µF capacitor. Blowing on the candle spikes the voltage on the LED, and thus the current-limiting resistor too fast for the capa...

Distraction free writing tools are a reaction to the bells and whistles of the modern desktop computer, allowing the user to simply pick up the device and write. The etyper from [Quackieduckie] is one such example , packing an e-paper screen into a minimalist case. These devices are most often made using a microcontroller such as an ESP32, so it’s interesting to note that this one uses a full-fat computer — if an Orange Pi Zero 2W can be described as “Full-fat”, anyway. There’s an Armbian image for it with the software pre-configured, and also mention of a Raspberry Pi port. It works with wired USB-C keyboards, and files can be retrieved via Bluetooth. It doesn’t look as though there’s a framebuffer or other more general driver for the display so it’s likely you won’t be using this as a general purpose machine, but maybe that’s not the point. We like it, though maybe it’s not a daily driver. This hack is part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge . You’ve just got time to get your own...

Cyberdecks are typically reminiscent of weird computers in futuristic sci-fi films, moreso than the computers of today. The cool thing about cyberdecks, though, is you get to build them however you like. [WillTechBuilds] has put together a deck of his own that diverges from cyberdeck norms and ends up closer to something you might have bought off the shelf at Best Buy. For a start, the build eschews the typical Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer that normally lives at the heart of a cyberdeck. In its place is a motherboard harvested from a GMKTec NucBox G5. It runs the Intel N97 CPU. It’s an x86 processor that’s roughly equivalent in power to an i5 from 10 years ago, but it only sips 12 watts. The compact motherboard is installed in a compact 3D-printed case along with a porbable USB-C battery pack, a small widescreen LCD, and a Lenovo ThinkPad trackpoint keyboard. This latter design choice, along with the x86 chip, is what gives this build so much of a laptop feel. There’s...

Having molten aluminium interact with atmospheric water forms a source of hydrogen which can be rather problematic if you’re trying to cast aluminium parts. As the molten metal cools down, the dissolved hydrogen is forced out, creating bubbles and other flaws that make aluminium foundries rather upset. While you can inject inert gases to solve the problem, you can also lean into this issue to make some rather fascinating aluminium crystals and geodes , as [Electron Impressions] recently did. The key here is to use a eutectic Al-Cu alloy at around 45% Cu by weight, as this alloy readily forms large crystals as it cools down. With hydrogen injected into the molten metal, this hydrogen forms large bubbles inside the cooling metal with crystals clearly visible. A way to create proper geodes involves very slow cooling and pouring off the still molten metal before the eutectic point is reached. As can be seen in this video, this creates a rather impressive looking geode after it’s been sm...

3D cutaway of the lock with the handle engaging the cog that rotates the mechanism. (Credit: Works By Design, YouTube) Throughout the centuries the art of lock-making and lock-picking have been trapped in a constant struggle, with basic lock designs being replaced by ever more complex ones that seek to thwart any lockpicking attempts, as well as less gentle approaches. When it comes to the very common pin-and-tumbler lock design, the main issue here is that the keyway also provides direct access to the lock’s mechanism. This led [Works By Design] to brainstorm a lock design in which the keyway is hidden . The ingenious part here is that because the actual key is rotated away after insertion, there is no clear path to the pins. This did require some creative thinking to have a somewhat traditional style key as well as a way to turn the internal mechanism so that the key would be pressed against the pins. Here inspiration was drawn from the switchable magnet mechanism as seen with ...

Perhaps at this point, getting NetBSD running on an obscure piece of hardware is a dog-bites-man story, and not worth reporting– their motto, after all, is “Of course it runs NetBSD”. So, the fact that [RetroComputingRanch] has got NetBSD running on a vintage Chyron Maxine broadcast computer is perhaps remarkable only for the fact that few people have even heard of Chyron before. He’s already done a series of videos in which they explore this odd, old computer, which is powered by a Motorola 68040 on a VME bus and was once used to generate digital overlays– text and the like– on broadcast TV. NetBSD does have a port for the Motorolla VME SBCs, so he was able to vibe it onto the specific vme168 board that the Chyron is based on. It happens off screen, but apparently it was AI agent work that went into condensing the documentation for this machine as well as getting the NetBSD port set up. That’s a bit ironic, since NetBSD would never allow that in its commits.  Again, the Chyron...

We wouldn’t be surprised if you’d never seen the Spira before. The lightweight three-wheel vehicle is closer to a go-kart than a traditional car, and that’s before you even get to the foam body panels. But even the most niche of products enjoys a certain fandom, and [Matt Spears] certainly seems to love working on his Spira. His latest video documents the new modifications he’s made to the car in an effort to ride it on abandoned railroad tracks in the western United States . His first attempt at riding the rails worked pretty well but he hit an obstruction at high speed which destroyed his front axle and damaged a few other parts on the vehicle, which gave him a perfect excuse to make some upgrades. He swapped the old rear axle out with one from a go-kart, complete with custom wheels and a new braking system. The drivetrain received an upgrade with a 5 kW electric motor, and although [Matt] planned on casting new wheels for the higher speeds, the chemicals he needed didn’t arrive in...

Most makers find themselves in need of a benchtop power supply at some point or another. Basic models can be had relatively cheaply, but as your current demands go higher, so does the price. [Danilo Larizza] has figured out an alternative solution— repurposing old server hardware to do the job instead. The build is based around an HP Common Slot (CS) server power supply. They can be readily had for well under $50 if you know where to look. Even better, they can deliver over 50 amps at 12 volts, which happens to be a very useful voltage indeed. All you need to do is some minor mods. A jumper on a couple of pins will get the power supply running, and with the addition of some terminals for your hook-up leads, you’re ready to go. As a hot-swappable single unit, the power supply is already outfitted with a ventilation fan to keep everything cool. If so desired, you can even make some further mods to bump output voltage a little ways past 13 or 14 volts if you’d like to use them for cert...

We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument . As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been systematically turning off various systems to extend the mission for as long as possible. It’s believed that deactivating LECP should buy them another year, during which engineers hope to implement a more ambitious power-saving routine. If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument back in March of 2025 . The JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to reactivate previously disabled systems on the twin space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, there’s no fighting the inevitable. At some...

Noise cancelling headphones are a great way to insulate yourself from the bustle of the city, but due to their power requirements, continuous use means frequent recharging. [Alessandro Sgarzi] has an elegant and unique solution — powering the noise cancelling electronics by harvesting energy from the ambient noise of the city via a sheet of piezoelectric film . This impressive feat is achieved using a LTC3588-1 power harvesting IC and a pair of supercapacitors, while an STM32L011K4T6 microcontroller processes the input from a MEMS microphone and feeds a low-power class D amplifier. This circuit consumes an astounding 1.7 nW, a power that a noisy city is amply able to supply. Audio meanwhile comes via a traditional 3.5 mm connector, which we are told is the cool kids’ choice nowadays anyway. We like this project, and since it’s part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge , it’s very much in the spirit of the thing. You’ve just got time to get your own entry in, so get a move on! ...

Capacitive displacement sensors span a wide range of resolution, from the touchscreen sensors which can only detect displacement as a binary state, all the way to the sensors in semiconductor fabs which measure down to nanometers. The sensor [Matthias Wandel] built with a Raspberry Pi Pico lands somewhere in the middle, providing both sensitive measurements and an absolute scale. The idea is that the amount of overlap between two metal plates should be detectable by measuring the capacitance between them. Reaching any kind of usable resolution would require a very precise measure of capacitance, around the picofarad range. [Matthias] realized that the Pico’s GPIO pins have an inherent capacitance, and can have a pull-down resistor set, essentially creating an RC circuit. [Matthias] would set a pin to a high-level output, then switch it to an input. The amount of time the pin takes to switch from high to low indicates the RC constant, which includes the capacitance attached to the pi...

The Unity game development platform was first released in 2005, long after the PlayStation had ceased to be a relevant part of the console market. And yet, you could use Unity to develop for the platform, if you so desire, thanks to the efforts of [Bandwidth] and the team behind psxsplash.  Yes, it really is possible to design games for the original PlayStation using Unity and Lua. Using a tool called SplashEdit, you can whip up scenes, handle scripting, loading screens, create UIs, and do all the other little bits required to lash a game together. You can then run your creation via the psxsplash engine, deploying to emulator or even real hardware with a single click. Currently, development requires a Windows or Linux machine and Unity 6000.0+, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward to start making games with a modern toolset for one of the most popular consoles of all time. Just remember, you’ve only got 33 MHz and 2MB of RAM to play with. We still love to see the leg...

Ever encountered a minor annoying bug in a video game? How about one dating back to 2018? Usually, you have no hope of fixing it, but this time is different. [Joey Cheerio] shows the first-time programmer approach to (with great difficulty) fixing a bouncy ball prop turning invisible when shot in Team Fortress 2 . It starts with a band-aid solution that hides the problem: just turn off jiggle physics! While that works, it also affects many other models in the game, and doesn’t tackle the root cause. Time to investigate. Because this ball often goes overlooked, [Joey Cheerio] didn’t even realize that it was supposed to have jiggle physics, accidentally removing it. Turns out, after scouring the internet for old footage, it’s supposed to jiggle after all. Back to square one, [Joey Cheerio] infers that the jiggle bone accidentally removed was related to the problem, eventually figuring out that the specific type of jiggle bone used (is_boing) caused the issue. Time to dig in the code. ...

When  Ridge Racer hit the arcades in the early 1990s, it came in a few different versions. The last variant used three large CRTs to create a wraparound display for the player. Incredibly rare, it’s believed that only a single-digit number of machines remain in existence. [beaumotplage] has secured a remaining example, and been working to preserve this historical artifact. The first mission when it comes to this machine was to dump the ROMs, which have thus far not been preserved in any major archive. With that done, [beaumotplage] worked to hack a version of MAME that could emulate the Three Monitor Version’s unique mode of operation. As it turns out, each screen is driven by its own arcade board, with the three boards linked via C139 serial links. To emulate this, the trick was simply to write some C139 linkup code and run three versions of MAME all at once, letting them communicate with each other as the original boards would have. It’s a little janky in operation right now, ...

Generally when a game console with an optical drive stops reading discs the first thing that people do is crank on the potentiometer that controls the power to the laser diode to ramp up its output. While this can be a necessary solution to eke out a bit more life out of a clearly dying laser diode, this can actually massively shorten the lifespan of a good diode that’s just held back by bad capacitors. This is demonstrated by [Skawo] with a fix on a GameCube that stopped reading discs . While it’s absolutely true that laser diodes have a limited lifespan, so do the capacitors and other components in the system. Thus, after tearing down this Japanese GameCube, [Skawo] accesses the optical PCB for some delicate plier-based capacitor surgery. One can absolutely question such violence, as well as the replacement mix of MLCC ceramics and a stray THT electrolytic capacitor, but the results after reassembly are obvious. Without having to adjust the laser diode’s potentiometer, the game co...

Those who have worked on a hobby operating system for x86 will have interacted with its rather complex and confusing interrupt model. [Evalyn] shows us why and how to use Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) , a new standard by the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group. Of course, it would be silly to omit the fact that Linux received patches first . But that isn’t the interesting part; after all, Linux is often the first place to have support for this kind of thing. No, what’s interesting is [Evalyn]’s implementation, to our knowledge among — if not the first — non-Linux operating system to support it. The kernel confirming that FRED has been detected and enabled To know why we should switch to FRED, we must first understand what it replaces. The Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT) tells the CPU what code to run when certain interrupts or faults happen. The big problem that the IDT has is inconsistency, most egregiously the fact that the stack layout depends on which interrupt happened...

Although modern-day silvered glass mirrors have pretty much destroyed the market for bronze mirrors, these highly polished pieces of metal once were the pinnacle of mirror technology. Due to the laborious process required these mirrors saw use essentially only by the affluent. That said, how hard would it be to make a bronze mirror today with all of the modern technologies that even a hobbyist can acquire for their shed? Cue [Lundgren Bronze Studios] giving it a shot, starting by casting something flat-ish to start polishing. Just getting that initial shape to start polishing is a chore, with hammering out the shape possibly being also a viable method. When casting metal it’s tricky to avoid having air bubbles and other defects forming, though using a sand mold seems to help a lot. After you have the rough shape, polishing using power tools seems like cheating, but as you can see in the video even going from 50 to 8000 grit with a rotating disc left countless scratches. Amusingly, ...

Cooking food with fire is arguably the technology that propelled humans to become the dominant species on Earth. It’s pretty straightforward to achieve, just requiring a fuel source, a supply of oxygen from the air, and a way to initiate the reaction; then it self-sustains. You wouldn’t think there’s much to improve, but what about cooking with plasma? [Jay] from the plasma channel is no stranger here, and he thinks that there may be something in this idea, certainly enough to actually build something . Now, let’s be straight with you, this isn’t a new concept, and you can buy a plasma-based cooking appliance right now. But they are all AC-powered devices. What if you want to go camping? [Jay] attempts (and succeeds) in building a portable, rechargeable 600W plasma cooking device that can actually cook food, but it was not all plain sailing. The existing off-the-shelf ZVS driver modules available were a bit weak and unreliable, and the required flyback coils were hard to find with t...