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Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and More
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Hackaday ☛ Connector-Free Zone: PCB Edge As USB-C Interfaces
Sometimes when you’re making a PCB that you plan on programming over USB, but you only plan on plugging in a couple of times, it would be nice to make that connection without another BOM item. Over on GitHub [AnasMalas] has released a PCB edge USB-C connection symbol/footprint to do just that!
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Creator makes Wi-Fi sound like dial-up Internet — uses Raspberry Pi and 2-watt speaker to convert digital data into analog signals
This Raspberry Pi project captures Wi-Fi data and then blasts it out as sound to make it feel like you're connecting via a dial-up modem.
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Old VCR ☛ The Apple Network Server MacOS ROMs have resurfaced
Recently a former employee who was on the business development team for Apple's server products posted on the Tinker Different boards: not only did he have the mythical MacOS ROM, he had it installed in a Deep Dish booting the MacOS. Deep Dish was the code name for the planned but unreleased ANS 300, a small rackmountable version (as opposed to the rackmount plates Apple sold for the 500 and 700 which take up a whopping 19U), so here was a prototype machine running development ROMs booting an operating system it was never actually sold with. More to the point, he confirmed the Windows NT ROMs actually did exist and worked as well.
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Chris Aldrich ☛ Acquired 1946 Royal KMM Standard Typewriter (Royal Typewriter Co. Inc.)
I purchased this 1946 Royal KMM standard typewriter on October 4th via Goodwill for $22.00. It’s equipped with an extra-wide 18 inch platen and carriage with “support wings” and a 10 key decimal tabulator which means in its day it would have been used for some heavy-duty accounting.
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Arduino ☛ This machine lets you practice baseball solo, similar to Topgolf
To avoid reinventing the wheel (literally), LeMaster started with a pitching machine that feeds balls down a ramp to a wheel spinning at high speed, which then flings the ball. To introduce some variability, LeMaster added pan and tilt motors. A linear actuator does the tilting, while a stepper motor and 3D-printed gearset do the panning. Two proximity sensors act as limit switches for the pan mechanism.
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Arduino ☛ Morphing Meta-antennas enable frequency manipulation
An antenna’s physical properties are inextricably linked to its electromagnetic properties and how it radiates and receives radio waves. One of the simplest examples is extension, like with an old cell phone or FM radio antenna. But shape and structure can have more dramatic effects, which is why we have so many different kinds of antennas. If you could change the shape of an antenna on demand, you could influence the frequencies it transmits, receives, and resonates. An MIT CSAIL-led research team developed morphing Meta-antennas that take advantage of that for many useful applications.