Fresh hacks every day
Adafruit Industries just posted the first episode in a new educational series aimed at teaching kids about electronics. The episode is entitled “A is for Ampere” and teaches the basic theory behind electrical current. The subject seems like a common one for A-to-Z themed electrical tutorials. [Jeri Ellsworth] did a similar episode but hers is aimed more at the electronics … Read the rest
All too often, the commentors here on Hackaday display some parsimony in their engineering prowess. If someone uses a Raspberry Pi to blink a few LEDs, someone will invariably chime in that an ARM microcontroller would do just as well. Switching a relay on and off belies the capabilities of a 32-bit Cortex microcontroller when a simpler 8-bit build would … Read the rest
This is a truly hands-on approach to learning. [Kevin Darrah] ditched the microcontroller and is using push buttons to learn about 595 shift registers. The test rig uses two of the serial-in, parallel-out chips. These are cascading which means that as data from the first chip overflows it feeds the input of the second. The parts are commonly used … Read the rest
Evern wanted to write your own Atari 2600 games? This won’t get you quite that far, but it will teach you the very basics. It’s an assembly tutorial for the 6502 processor. The nice thing is that you need nothing more than your browser to participate thanks to the embedded JavaScript emulator which acts as assembler, machine, and debugger … Read the rest
Adafruit has a new tutorial on creating video with an RPi and pygame. The goal is to create custom user interfaces on low cost hardware, powered by the easy to use pygame library. The tutorial walks through getting your RPi set up to run pygame, creating a basic pygame script that controls the framebuffer, and drawing an oscilloscope display … Read the rest
Servos seem to be the go-to option when adding motors to hobby projects. They’re easy to hack for continuous rotation for use in a robot, but with the control board intact they are fairly accurate for position-based applications. But do you know how the hardware actually works? [Rue Mohr] recently published an article that looks at the inner world of … Read the rest
[JAC_101] wrote in to let us know that the Truely Mad Scientist’s LVL1 Splinter Group just built a simple Alpha Particle detector. The detector is a high voltage DC spark gap that is triggered by ionizing radiation. Making one of these detectors involves gutting a cold cathode power supply for some high voltage AC, then bumping that source up … Read the rest
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