Magic eye spectrum analyzer

its goddamned magic

  If Nixies aren't cool enough, maybe it's time to step it up to magic eye tubes. Magic eye tubes are, like Nixies and Dekatrons, display tubes. Unlike the alphanumeric characters of Nixies or rotating points of light in a Dekatron, Magic eye tubes are either bar graph or 'Pac-Man' displays that were used to show the signal strength of a radio station on very expensive radio … [Read more...]

A Bluetooth trackpad from a resistive touchscreen

touch

If you've checked out your favorite online retailer of absurdly inexpensive Chinese electronics, you'll find a whole bunch of replacement parts. Phone parts are especially common, with high-resolution LCDs available for just a few dollars. There are also a few touchscreen kits - resistive touchscreen digitizers that can easily be read with a microcontroller. [Vinod] got his hands on one of these … [Read more...]

This has not been a good week for the hacker community

RIP

The Internet lost a few great minds this week. [Aaron Swartz], confronted with an upcoming federal trial for his actions in downloading and releasing public domain academic articles from JSTOR, hanged himself this week. As one of the co-developers for RSS, the Creative Commons license, and slew of other works, [Aaron]'s legacy expanded the freedoms and possibilities of the most important human … [Read more...]