On not designing circuits with evolutionary algorithms

animation

[Henrik] has been working on a program to design electronic circuits using evolutionary algorithms. It's still very much a work in progress, but he's gotten to the point of generating a decent BJT inverter after 78 generations (9 minutes of compute time), as shown in the .gif above. To evolve these circuits, [Henrik] told a SPICE simulation to generate an inverter with a 5V power … [Read more...]

Refurbing a C64 with a Raspberry Pi

C64

When [Carl] first heard of the Raspberry Pi, he immeidatly though how freakin tiny this board is compared to a Mini ITX motherboard. After ordering a Raspi, [Carl] decided to put his barely-larger-than-a-credit-card computer inside a Commodore 64. [Carl]'s updated C64 functions exactly like the original - the 30-year-old keyboard works thanks to the help of a Keyrah keyboard and control port … [Read more...]

Make your own integrated circuits at home

nyan

The Nyan Cat you see above is only 600 micrometers from head to tail. To put that into perspective, that's about 10 times the diameter of a human hair. Also, that Nyan is etched into 200 nanometer thick copper foil and is the work of the HomeCMOS team, who is developing a hobbyist-friendly process to make integrated circuits and MEMS devices at home. The project is far from complete; HomeCMOS … [Read more...]

Bootable emulator for the DCPU

dcpu

[Notch], the guy behind Minecraft, is currently working on a new game called 0x10c. This game includes an in-game 16-bit computer called the DCPU that hearkens back to the 1980s microcomputers with really weird hardware architecture. [Benedek] thought it would be a great idea to turn his ThinkPad into a DCPU, so he wrote a bootable x86 emulator for the DCPU that is fully compliant with the … [Read more...]

Ask Hackaday: How about some model rocket hacks?

rockets

There's nothing like the smell of black powder in the morning, along with the excitement and burnt propellant in the air that comes after launching a model rocket. All those 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s kids out there may remember the classes of model rocket engines - generally A, B, C, and D sized engines used to push your cardboard tube with balsa fins skyward. A lot has changed in the world of … [Read more...]