The monitor forgot what black looked like
Dissecting the RP2040 scanvideo library, Kevin went from seventeen VGA pins down to six, enough for the ZX Spectrum palette. And one missing black pixel was enough to dim the whole screen.
Archive
Tech · page 5
IRZ Tech archive, page 5.
Twenty-seven copper pads, no touch chip
SPOKE turns 27 copper pads punched into a circuit board into a MIDI controller. The interesting part: the RP2040 has no touch hardware at all, so detection is a discharge time counted in software.
Robot touch fits in sixteen electrodes
A 3D-printed tactile skin locates a press to within a few millimeters with sixteen electrodes and not a single discrete sensor. A close reading of the process: recipe, results, blind spots.
The Blueprints for a Civilization Fit on an SD Card
Open Source Ecology squeezed its entire machine wiki into a file readable without a network. Seven years later, that 2019 copy is still the newest one anyone can download.
A leak ten billion times weaker, predicted before the first rivet
On an airliner or a destroyer, the energy leaking from one antenna to another gets computed before the first weld. On the menu: a cubic cost, a ghost cavity that makes the model lie, and a story starting in 1981.
Your Wi-Fi router can now tell when someone crosses the room
Xfinity WiFi Motion turns already-installed gateways into motion detectors without cameras. The sensor arrives through software, and a new category of presence data arrives with it.
Keep the little robot. Replace only its brain
A basic Elegoo car becomes a face-chasing robot without replacing its motors, shield or chassis. The useful lesson is not AI itself but adding capabilities one layer at a time.
The qubit gets smaller when its electric field stops spilling out
A transmon is large partly because its capacitor spreads electric field through vacuum and substrate. hBN can confine that field between two plates, at the cost of much harder materials and interfaces.
This photogrammetry GUI weighs 1.4 GB because simplicity has to live somewhere
Simple Photogrammetry GUI turns a stack of 3D tools into three buttons. Its 1.4 GB bundles reveal where all that complexity has actually gone.
A component has no true 0°. The whole chain just needs to choose the same one
IPC, IEC and manufacturers do not always put zero in the same place. Rotation becomes reliable when the CAD library, pick-and-place file and assembler share one convention.