Author: Al Williams

4387 Articles

The WalMart Atomic Clock

February 14, 2026 by 8 Comments

In the realm of first-world problems, your cheap wall clock doesn’t keep time, so you have to keep setting it. The answer? Of course, you connect it to NTP and synchronize the clock with an atomic time source. If you are familiar with how these generic quartz clock movements work, you can probably guess the first step is to gut the movement, leaving only the drive motor.

The motor is somewhat like a stepper motor. The ESP8266 processor can easily control the clock hands by sending pulses to the motor. The rest is simple network access and control. If the network time is ahead, the CPU gooses the clock a little. If it is behind, the CPU stalls the clock until it catches up.

Continue reading “The WalMart Atomic Clock” →

There’s Always Room For 3D Printed Batteries

February 14, 2026 by 14 Comments

There are many applications where you have limits on how much you can cram into a particular space. There are also many applications where you need as much battery as you can get. At the intersection of those applications, you may soon be able to 3D print custom batteries to fit into oddly shaped spaces that might otherwise go to waste.

Commercial batteries are typically cylindrical or rectangular. In theory, you could build tooling to make batteries of any size or shape you want, but it’s an expensive process in small quantities. [Lawrence Ulrich] on Spectrum talks about a new process, developed by [Gabe Elias], that can print anodes, cathodes, separators, and casings for custom battery shapes with no costly tooling.

As an example, consider an unmanned aerial vehicle crammed with avionics. You could put off-the-shelf batteries in the wings, but you’ll end up wasting a lot of space. A custom battery could fill the wing’s interior completely. The post also mentions batteries shaped like the earpieces of a pair of smart glasses.

A prototype showed that in the space of 48 cylindrical cells, the new process could deliver a printed battery that uses 35% more of the available volume and a 50% boost in energy density.

Could you do this yourself? Maybe, but it won’t be trivial. The current process requires a liquid electrolyte and the ability to produce thin layers of exotic materials. What oddly-shaped battery would you like to see? Us? We’d like to have a battery for a laptop that was spread uniformly so there wasn’t a heavy side that has the battery.

R2D2 Gets New Brains

February 13, 2026 by 5 Comments

While it is fun to get toys that look like your favorite science fiction props, it is less fun when the electronics in them don’t measure up to the physical design. [Steve Gibbs] took a Hasbro R2D2 toy robot and decided to give it a brain upgrade along with enhanced sensors. You can see a video of the robot doing its thing and some build details below.

In this case, the toy from Hasbro was not working at all, so [Steve] saved it from the dumpster. Instead of a repair, he decided to just gut it and rebuild it with modern electronics. The ultrasonic sensor on the forward toe is a dead giveaway.

The robot responds to voice commands better than the original and can play sound effects and clips from Star Wars. You can also control the robot with a phone app. The new or upgraded sensors include microphones, a PIR sensor, a photoresistor to sense light, a smoke and CO2 sensor, a computer vision camera, and, of course, the ultrasonic range finder.

Some motors and the original speaker are in use, but R2 now sports additional LEDs and servos. All the extras required some surgery on the plastic body. Instead of regular batteries, the ‘bot now uses a LiPo battery, so the old battery compartment was cut out to make more room.

Continue reading “R2D2 Gets New Brains” →

Inside Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Atari Style)

February 13, 2026 by 4 Comments

It’s a bit ironic that an Atari 2600 game based on Raiders of the Lost Ark — a movie about archaeology — is now the subject of its own archaeological expedition as [Dennis Debro] and [Halkun] spent time reverse-engineering the game. Luckily, they shared their findings, so you can enjoy it the same way you can visit a king’s tomb without having to discover it and dig for it. If you don’t remember the game, you might enjoy the demo from [Speedy Walkthroughs] in the video below.

If you are only used to modern software, you might think this is little more than someone dumping the program code and commenting it. However, on these old, limited systems, you have to really understand the actual architecture because there are so many things you have to manage that are specific to the hardware.

For example, the game has two 4K ROM banks that use a strange switching mechanism. The entire game is built around the NTSC television signal. Everything is oriented toward generating the 60 Hz frame rate. Game logic runs during the vertical blanking and over-scan sections to prevent strange visible artifacts due to software running.

This is a fascinating look inside game coding as it existed around 1982. Of course, you can also run everything using emulation. Usually, our reverse engineering is more hardware-related. But we do love these old games, too.

Continue reading “Inside Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Atari Style)” →

The Engineering Of The Falkirk Wheel

February 13, 2026 by 20 Comments

We live in an age where engineering marvels are commonplace: airplanes crisscross the sky, skyscrapers grow like weeds, and spacecraft reach for the stars. But every so often, we see something unusual that makes us take a second look. The Falkirk Wheel is a great example, and, even better, it is functional art, as well.

The Wheel links two canals in Scotland. Before you click away, here’s the kicker: One canal is 35 meters higher than the other. Before 1933, the canals were connected with 11 locks. It took nearly a day to operate the locks to get a boat from one canal to the other. In the 1930s, there wasn’t enough traffic to maintain the locks, and they tore them out.

Fast Forward

In the 1990s, a team of architects led by [Tony Kettle] proposed building a wheel to transfer boats between the two canals. The original model was made from [Tony’s] daughter’s Lego bricks.

The idea is simple. Build a 35-meter wheel with two caissons, 180 degrees apart. Each caisson can hold 250,000 liters of water. To move a boat, you fill the caissons with 500 tonnes of water. Then you let a boat into one of them with its weight displacing an equal amount of water, so the caissons stay at the same weight.

Once you have a balanced system, you just spin the wheel to make a half turn. There are 10 motors that require 22.5 kilowatts, and each half-turn consumes about 1.5 kilowatt-hours.

Continue reading “The Engineering Of The Falkirk Wheel” →

Does This Electron Make Me Look Fat? Weighing An Electron

February 12, 2026 by 4 Comments

[The Signal Path] shows us how to recreate a classic science experiment to measure the weight of an electron. Things are easier for us, because unlike [J. J. Thomson] in 1897, we have ready sources of electrons and measuring equipment. Check it out in the video below.

The main idea is to trap an electron using a magnetic field into a circular path. You can then compute the forces required to keep it in that circle, along with some other equations, and combine them. The result lets you compute the charge to mass ratio using parameters you can either control or measure, like the radius of the circular path and the electric field.

Helmholtz coils create the magnetic field, and a cold cathode tube provides the electrons. Honestly, the equipment looks a bit like something out of an old monster movie.

Continue reading “Does This Electron Make Me Look Fat? Weighing An Electron” →

Bash Via Transpiler

February 12, 2026 by 12 Comments

It is no secret that we often use and abuse bash to write things that ought to be in a different language. But bash does have its attractions. In the modern world, it is practically everywhere. It can also be very expressive, but perhaps hard to read.

We’ve talked about Amber before, a language that is made to be easier to read and write, but transpiles to bash so it can run anywhere. The FOSDEM 2026 conference featured a paper by [Daniele Scasciafratte] that shows how to best use Amber. If you prefer slides to a video, you can read a copy of the presentation.

Continue reading “Bash Via Transpiler” →