Hardware Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 24, 2024

• Tom's Hardware ☛ PC designed to be air cooled at the center of a massive fan — centrifugal force says no

  So, what happened? Did the static buildup short out the PC or something? Fortunately, nothing so mundane. Instead, the fan PC was tested at increasingly higher speeds until the weighty cooler was violently flung from the PC in the last moments of the original video. No wonder Sodabaka hid behind a riot shield for much of the video demo.

• Ken Shirriff ☛ Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

  To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called NFC, but what's happening internally? How does the ticket work without a battery? How does it communicate with the turnstile? And how can it be so cheap that you can throw the ticket away after one use? To answer these questions, I opened up a ticket and examined the tiny chip inside.

• Terence Eden ☛ 3D Printing My Teeth

  As previously mentioned, I recently had a some dental issues and learned how to view a CT Scan in 3D using Linux.

  At a hackathon last week, my friend Sidd brought along a 3D printer. How hard is it to convert a CT scan to a file suitable for printing? Slightly trickier than I expected! Most of the guides I found were outdated, or the software didn't work on Linux, or the instructions assumed a level of expertise that I just didn't possess.

  So here's my simple guide to getting it working.

• Hackaday ☛ The Best DIY PCB Method?

  Now before you start asking yourself “best for what purpose?”, just have a look at the quality of the DIY PCB in the image above. [ForOurGood] is getting higher resolution on the silkscreen than we’ve seen in production boards. Heck, he’s got silkscreen and soldermask at all on a DIY board, so it’s definitely better than what we’re producing at home.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ ASUS Chromebox 5a with 13th Gen Intel processors start at $294.00

    The ASUS Chromebox 5a is a versatile mini-PC equipped with 13th Generation Intel Core or Celeron processors. These devices support multiple 4K@60Hz displays and include an M.2 2280 PCIe slot for storage expansion.