SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS is a long time. It’s so long that most of us don’t remember a time before the transistor, and long enough for many engineers to have devoted entire careers to its use and development. In honor of this most important of technological achievements, this issue’s package of articles explores the transistor’s historical journey and potential future.
APIs for Personal Weather Station Contributors
Culture shifts. But it’s held in place by norms, and those are driven by status and affiliation.
IF GRAIN MUST be dragged to market on an oxcart, how far can it go before the oxen eat up all the cargo? This, in brief, is the problem faced by any transportation system in which the vehicle must carry its own fuel. The key value is the density of energy, expressed with respect to either mass or volume.
Raspberry Pi Pico W brings WiFi to the Pico platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling, and now as of CircuitPython 8.0.0-beta.2, there is CircuitPython WiFi support for the Pico W! This guide includes examples for testing your WiFi connection, using requests to pull JSON feeds, ping API's and log sensor data for IoT projects; all using CircuitPython!
Persistence-of-vision, or POV, displays work on the principle that if a light blinks in front of your eye, you perceive it for some amount of time after it’s gone. Blink lights in sequence when moving, and you can create what looks like a static image. “Programmer with a soldering iron” B45i found a deal on ATtiny13 microcontrollers for roughly $.30 each, and was able to create a POV display with one for less than a dollar.
In this blog post, I want to refine your mental model for Flexbox. We'll build an intuition for how the Flexbox algorithm works, by learning about each of these properties. Whether you're a CSS beginner, or you've been using Flexbox for years, I bet you'll learn quite a bit!
Kiosks are designed to offer users specific information or a specific experience, while preventing access to any other activities on the device. They are often found in airports, shops, hospitals, cafes, and museums — any location where people need easy access to information or services like timetables, waiting times, product information, directions, self check-in machines, and so on.
When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year. To learn more about First Known Use dates, click here.
Dutch daredevil Mark of The Flying Dutchmen shared stunning 4K POV footage of a coaster ride down a mountain into the Oeschinen Valley in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland.
Back in college I used to run part of my website from a Linux box in my room. I made it into a speech synthesiser, and people could connect to the machine to talk into my flat.
NOVEMBER MARKS THE 50th anniversary of Pong. Why should we care?
This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.
Now, you don't just go hooning any old EV around the strip, at least not if you're Ken Block. In this case, his ride is a stunning one-off electric Audi, the S1 Hoonitron, inspired by the 1987 Audi Sport quattro S1 Pikes Peak car.
Building and testing different types of Lego Pneumatic Engines that run on compressed air.
A university group named the GreenTeam, from the University of Stuttgart set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 0-62 mph (0-100 kph) electric vehicle acceleration in a 1.461-sec 0-62 mph run.
Whether they are used for powering information displays, automating testing, controlling machinery, monitoring an environment, or doing other tasks, enterprises see Raspberry Pis as serious devices for doing serious tasks. Each model has a long product lifecycle—even the older models (1B+, 2B, 3A+, 3B, and 3B+) will remain in production until at least January 2026. There is little risk that they will go obsolete, so you can maintain a sufficiently large stock and treat them as modular components that you replace rather than fix.
How can we “fingerprint” a codebase to see its structure at a glance? Let’s explore ways to automatically visualize a GitHub repo, and how that could be useful.
The crossed spikes that you see in some images of stars are not actually parts of the stars. They are imaging artifacts that are created by the telescope itself and are called diffraction spikes. Certain telescopes have a large primary mirror that focuses the incoming beam of light onto a secondary mirror or a sensor that is held over the primary mirror. The secondary mirror diverts the light out of the telescope so it can be seen or further processed. Or, alternately, a sensor held above the primary mirror converts the image to an electrical signal that is delivered to a computer.
The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. Print versions of the book are available on Amazon.com.
When life gives you lemons, write better error messages