Hacker Friendly

After months of revisions and additions (including a complete redesign of the project website), the second English edition of Wireless Networking in the Developing World is finally ready for release!
Click through for the official press release.
 

 

Here’s a wonderful animation done to Pierre Henry’s Psyché Rock.

This is the sort of world we would have ended up with if Dali were an electrical engineer.
 

 

I’ve just finished watching all of Walter Lewin’s exceptional MIT course 8.02: Electricity and Magnetism. In lecture #31, he gives an hour long lecture about rainbows. I highly recommend watching it, even if you don’t have time to work through the rest of the course. You’ll learn all sorts of fascinating things about the phenomenon […]

 

Check out this retro home-brew 7cm oscilloscope. It was beautifully designed and executed, down to the mahogany housing and exposed CRT.
I like this engineer’s attitude:
The choice of tubes is somewhat arbitrary. The EF91 would be very suitable in all three functions, since among small-signal pentodes, it is unusual in having suitable characteristics for providing a […]

 

This was a fun 20-minute project: A tiny Jacob’s Ladder made from an LCD backlight inverter, powered by USB. The ladder itself is made from a piece of 24AWG wire harvested from a scrap of CAT5. It makes sparks just a few millimeters wide, but they do climb very rapidly!
Rather than tempt fate and […]

 

For the last several weekends, I’ve been working on building my first spark gap Tesla coil from the ground-up. After many long nights and blown capacitors, it finally worked!
This is the story of how I came to build one of these remarkable, expensive, loud, dangerous, and incomparably cool high voltage toys.
WARNING: If you find yourself […]

 

Blistering heat. Sand storms. Vast distances. Lack of reliable power. These are just some of the challenges of operating an FM radio station in remote locations like Timbuktu. Where do you get an FM exciter that is up to the task?
Adapted Consulting has just released OpenFM: an open source 150 Watt FM transmitter specifically designed […]

 

Now here’s an industrial robot we can all enjoy. Who doesn’t like taiko?
On July 21, a team of four MOTOMAN machines — two dual-armed MOTOMAN-DIA10 robots and two MOTOMAN-HP3 welding robots — gave a special taiko performance at the nearly 400-year-old Kokura Gion Daiko Festival in Kitakyushu, which is famous for its traditional drumming […]

 

I didn’t want to miss out on the iPhone media blitz, so here’s what we all really want to know about America’s favorite fanboy gadget: Will It Blend™?
 

 

Yesterday was 2nd annual Seattle Power Tool Race & Derby at the Georgetown block party. It was a fantastic day full of speed, danger, and grinding metal. Two 60′ tracks of plywood and two-by-fours were the proving ground for dozens of insanely creative racing machines made from modified power tools.
Hackerbot Labs entered four […]