Kritik sah

Although generally glass isn’t associated with touch-sensitive surfaces, the addition of an ITO (indium tin oxygen) coating adds the exciting property of not only being transparent to the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also of being electrically conductive. The logical result is that fine folk like [Sokol] simply had to use their newly acquired ITO-coated glass to make a button out of . Here the easy option is of course to just use it as a capacitive sensor where the conductive ITO layer is used for the capacitive charge and the glass provides the insulator, but here we see it demonstrated how to create a pressure-sensitive implementation instead. The measured conductivity on the ITO-coated glass in the video is pretty good, at just over 20 Ohm. This thus makes said capacitive button very easy to achieve. To make it a touch-sensitive button, two pieces of glass are used, with the ITO sides facing. Paper is used to create a spacer, after which the slight ...

We’ve likely all looked at a simple problem in our lives and thought that it would be an easy fix, only to realize that the project is enormously more complicated than we first realized. Whether that’s starting a home improvement project, doing a quick repair to a bicycle or car, or trying to install an obscure piece of software on a Linux machine, the amount of time we budget for these tasks often ends up woefully underestimated. [ Oscar ]’s night light needs to have its brightness set every night, and it seems easy enough to get a microcontroller to automate that, right ? Well, upon opening the small device, the first issue is that there is no labeling on any of the parts, so simply adding a jumper on to existing microcontroller pins without damaging anything wouldn’t easily be possible. Adding a secondary microcontroller is the next logical step, but the power supply in the night light is extremely underpowered so using even the smallest Raspberry Pi or off-t...

One thing our futuristic world is largely lacking in is droids and robot companions and the like. [solitary dev] is helping to rectify that problem by building a little robot called TongDou . As [solitary dev] tells it, TongDou is a “tiny open-source desktop gremlin.” An ESP32-S3 serves as TongDou’s brain, buried inside a tasteful brass tube chassis. An OLED display is TongDou’s face, and he uses a pair of wheels driven by gearmotors for locomotion. A speaker plays back pre-recorded voice lines, while a 24GHz radar and an IMU enables TongDou to keep track of the space it’s moving through. They are publishing the design files on Github so other makers can build their own if so desired. [solitary dev] hopes to develop TongDou into something to make a “workspace feel less dead.” It’s not dissimilar from the way studios used to use robots to liven up otherwise hackneyed movies and TV shows, and we could absolutely use some of that whimsy in...

The NES Advantage was a cool bit of hardware back in 1987, bringing an arcade stick to the home console gaming experience. Naturally they don’t get much use these days, unless of course they’ve been modded to work with modern systems, as [Aaron] has done. [Aaron]’s goals were straightforward. The stick should work with modern systems over Bluetooth, but the mod should not involve cutting the case or making any new holes. All controls, including Turbo and Slow Motion, still had to work, too, and there would be no adding extra buttons for configuration or control. To achieve this, [Aaron] whipped up a custom PCB which replaces the original cable attached to the NES Advantage. Power is via a small LiPo cell, charged via a TP4056 and paired with a TPS63900 buck-boost converter. An ESP32-WROOM-32E interfaces all the original controls, reading the stick’s CD4021 shift registers to do so. It then either emulates a Switch Pro Controller over Bluetooth Classic, for use ...

The elusive brainstem is a small, yet critical part of our brain: the slightest damage to it could prove fatal. But how it works is not fully understood today. Indian Scientists at SGBC (Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre) work to change that by producing the most detailed map of it ever seen . Instead of more costly methods, this map was created with a high-resolution microscope. Starting with three samples, (45W fetus, 9Y and 54Y) the brain stems were imaged using MRI and BFI (Block Face Imaging), then sliced into 20/40µm pieces, imaged, annotated using in-house software and added to the dataset. From a combination of these images, MRI and BFI scans, they created a 3D model of the brainstem that you can explore in your browser. The new research gives vital data needed for neurological research, and could help advance research on a wide range neurological diseases from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s. You can find the paper here , which has not yet been peer reviewed at time o...

Betacam is not the Betamax you may have had at home– it was a professional format that lived on into the 21st century, in the “SP” form. In many places, it would have been the last tape format in use. So it is perhaps understandable that [ldursw] decided to recreate an obsolete and unobtainable IC to save a Sony broadcast-grade editing Video Tape Recorder (VTR). Still mad, perhaps, but in a way we very much appreciate. The Sony BVW-75 VTR had an odd flaw where the output lacked colour, unless paused with dynamic tracking off. Then colour would appear, but only in odd stripes. Clearly the chroma circuit was at fault. Some sluthing found that a sync separator IC– that separates the sync pulses that keep everything moving together, if the name didn’t give it away– wasn’t behaving correctly. More sluthing found that the chip in question was no longer available. Luckily, the concept of a sync separator hasn’t quite given up the ghost, and ano...

As useful as USB-to-M.2 SSD adapters are, sometimes you come across a bit of a dud. A case in point is the Orico-branded TCM2-C3 that features both an attractive clear case and in its earlier revisions a JMicron controller-based circuit that apparently degrades over time, causing erratic boot behavior. After implementing a fix a few years ago, [Mark Furneaux] can happily report that the thus fixed enclosures are still working. These faulty board revisions feature the JMicron JMS583 controller IC, which has a 1.0V core voltage input pin. Apparently to save power, Orico designed the board to target the minimum ~-0.95V core voltage per the datasheet. Apparently due to component drift or degradation, this lower core voltage is after a while often not enough any more to start the controller, which thus translates into an unresponsive USB device and presumably some panic about lost data. Although [Mark] doesn’t describe the fix in detail, it entails bumping up this core voltage to s...