Reading a radio directly from silicon
Ken Shirriff reconstructed the Philips TDA7000 from a photograph of its die. His method turns patterns in silicon into transistors, then into a schematic, one functional block at a time.
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IRZ archive, page 20.
This Engine Is 3D-Printable. Just Not on One Printer
A thermoacoustic engine is becoming reproducible from published 3D files. The interesting part is not the word printable, but how the design divides heat, pressure and geometry between polymer and metal processes.
Building a Hammond organ to understand how it makes sound
Uri Tuchman built a simplified hand-cranked Hammond to show how spinning steel discs become musical notes — with no digital circuits at all.
This Motorola 68000 drives PCI cards. All the work is in the translator
A Motorola 68000 can drive real PCI cards, but only because an FPGA translates timing, byte order, addressing and interrupts between two incompatible buses.
He makes one PCB a year. That's exactly often enough to forget the workflow
Kevin Lynagh is not automating PCB design. His KiCad helpers automate the awkward moment when he has to remember how his entire workflow worked last time.
This drone hits the ice so it can stop flying
Ice Dart is not designed to hover above an iceberg. It absorbs impact, drives eight spines into the ice and uses reverse thrust to become a fixed sensor on slopes approaching 60 degrees.
This Synth Had All the Buttons. It Still Needed a Mental Map
V-STAGE is covered in physical controls. Jason Dasent and Roland still had to add spatial descriptions, accessible text and audio to make the instrument learnable without sight.
To control an excavator, MIT built a miniature one
Two joysticks force an operator to translate intent into four machine joints. MIT's World-Space Interface copies the excavator geometry so software can perform that translation instead.
Five dollars of components and a breadboard to learn electronics
Glitch'n offers a free electronics course on breadboard for a few dollars. The real product is not the circuit — it's the learning progression.
A forest in one line, but not a thousand free trees
p5.strands is preparing an API where one line can launch hundreds of instances. The speedup comes from shared geometry and fewer draw calls, not free rendering.