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Author Archives: Fernando Gomes
Radio Telescopes Horn In With GNU Radio
Who doesn’t like to look up at the night sky? But if you are into radio, there’s a whole different way to look using radio telescopes. [John Makous] spoke at the GNU Radio Conference about how he’s worked to make a radio telescope that is practical for even younger students to build and operate.
The only real high tech part of this build is the low noise amplifier (LNA) and the project is in reach of a typical teacher who might not be an expert on electronics. It uses things like paint thinner cans and lumber. [John] also built some …read more
Posted in radio hacks, Radio Telescope, sdr, software-defined radio, space
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CNC Mill Repairs iPhone 7
Modern smartphones are highly integrated devices, bringing immense computing power into the palm of one’s hand. This portable computing power and connectivity has both changed society in innumerable ways, and also tends to lead to said powerful computers ending up dropped on the ground or into toilets. Repairs are often limited to screen replacement or exchanging broken modules, but it’s possible to go much further.
The phone is an iPhone 7, which a service center reported had issues with the CPU, and the only fix was a full mainboard replacement. [The Kardi Lab] weren’t fussed, however, and got to work. …read more
Posted in iphone, phone hacks, phone repair, reflow, smartphone, smartphone repair
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Cloning Knobs For Vintage Testing Equipment
Knobs! Shiny candy-colored knobs! The last stand of skeuomorphism is smart light switches! Everyone loves knobs, but when you’re dealing with vintage equipment with a missing knob, the odds of replacing it are slim to none. That’s what happened to [Wesley Treat] when he picked up a vintage Philco tube tester. The tester looked great, but a single knob for a rotary switch was missing. What to do? Clone some knobs! You only need some resin and a little bit of silicone.
The process of copying little bits of plastic or bakelite is fairly standard and well-tread territory. Go to …read more
Posted in casting, cloning knobs, knob, misc hacks, Philco, resin, silicone
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Epsom Salts Restores Lead Acid Battery
Despite a lot of advances in battery technology, lead acid batteries are still used in many applications due to cost and their ability to provide a lot of surge current. But they don’t last forever. However, [AvE] shows that in some cases a failed battery can be restored with — of all things — epsom salts. If it makes you feel funny to use the stuff grandpa soaks in when he has a backache, you can call it magnesium sulfate.
You can find a complete explanation in the video below (which includes [AvE’s] very colorful language), but fundamentally, the magnesium …read more
Posted in AvE, battery, chemistry hacks, epsom salt, epsom salts, lead acid battery
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Strobe For Wood Turning Makes Inspection Easy
The lathe is a simple enough tool to understand, but requires much practice to truly master. During the turning process, it’s often necessary to inspect the workpiece. This generally necessitates stopping the lathe, waiting for everything to spin down, and then starting again. This can be a major time sink when added up across the full scope of a project. However, the magic of strobes can help.
The basics of [Darcy]’s project will be familiar to any hacker who has worked with rotating machinery before. The rotational speed of the lathe is measured, in this case using a reed switch …read more
Posted in lathe, strobe, tool hacks
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Automate Your Home From the Clearance Rack
The month or so after the holidays have always been a great time to pick up some interesting gadgets on steep clearance, but with decorations and lights becoming increasingly complex over the last few years, the “Christmas Clearance” rack is an absolute must see for enterprising hackers. You might just luck out like [ModernHam] and find a couple packs of these dirt cheap wireless light controllers, which can fairly easily be hacked into the start of a home automation system with little more than the Raspberry Pi and a short length of wire.
In the video after the break, [ModernHam] …read more
Posted in capture, Holiday Hacks, home automation, Raspberry Pi, rpitx, RTL-SDR, smart plug, wireless hacks
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Full Color Dot Matrix Is The Art We Need
Fans of 80s-era computer printing technology are few and far between, but Apple’s ImageWriter II was a beast of a printer. This tractor feed dot-matrix printer is nigh-indestructible. The print quality was actually pretty great. It was loud as hell, which is a mark of quality electromechanical components. It could do color, and color dot-matrix art on tractor feed paper is the aesthetic we need. If you’re not convinced yet, you can also take off the perforations from tractor feed paper and make a cool little paper snake.
[Dandu] isn’t one to let things like serial printers and obsolete color …read more
Posted in art, dot matrix, ImageWriter, ImageWriter II
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Unobtanium Bezels Finally Modeled For 3D Printing
In 1991, Apple released the Quadra line of computers, named after their utilization of the new Motorola 68040 CPU. The Quadra line initially consisted of two models, the Quadra 700 and the Quadra 900. These two models, and the Quadra 950, released as a slight upgrade to the 900, were the peak of performance. You could conceivably load these machines up with 256 Megabytes of RAM, in an era where hard drives hovered around 80 Megabytes. This much RAM would cost as much as a house. These were powerhouses, the first ProTools workstations, and they ran Jurassic Park. If you …read more
Posted in 3d printed, 3d Printer hacks, bezels, mac, Mac Hacks, macintosh, Quadra
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Lime SDR (and Pluto, Too) Sends TV
If you have experienced software defined radio (SDR) using the ubiquitous RTL SDR dongles, you are missing out on half of it. While those SDRs are inexpensive, they only receive. The next step is to transmit. [Corrosive] shows how he uses DATV Express along with a Lime SDR or a Pluto (the evaluation device from Analog Devices) to transmit video. He shows how to set it all up in the context of ham radio. An earlier video shows how to receive the signal using an SDR and some Windows software. The receiver will work with an RTL SDR or a …read more
Posted in amateur radio, atv, DATV Express, DVB-S, DVBS, ham radio, Lime SDR, pluto sdr, radio hacks, SDRAngel, tv, video hacks
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Is That A Vintage Computer In Your Pocket?
There’s a lot of debate over which of several contenders was the first modern computer. One of those first operating computers was the University of Cambridge’s EDSAC — the brainchild of Dr. Maurice Wilkes. The EDSAC scored a lot of firsts and used a serial data path along with mercury delay line memories. Over on Hackaday.io, [David Boucher] wanted to simulate the EDSAC in a much smaller form factor than the original room full of racks.
As you can see in the video below, he succeeded in that task, using a Teensy and a small LCD display. We’re reminded EDSAC …read more
Posted in edsac, retrocomputing, Teensy
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