Collaborate Disseminate
Early 3D printers usually had a microswitch that let you know when the Z axis was at the zero point. There was usually an adjustment screw so you could tune …read more Continue reading 3D Printer Z Sensor Claims 0.01 mm Resolution
One of the great things about plastic is that it can be relatively flexible. We see things all the time that snap together, but when 3D printing, you don’t often …read more Continue reading Oh Snap! 3D Printing Snapping Parts Without Breakage
We take shortcuts all the time with our physical models. We rarely consider that wire has any resistance, for example, or that batteries have a source impedance. That’s fine up …read more Continue reading The Importance of Physical Models: How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot or Anywhere Else
Among old CPUs, the 6809 never got as much attention as some of its cousins. The Radio Shack CoCo used it and so did a construction article in Wireless World …read more Continue reading Old 6809 Computer Lives Again on Breadboards
You don’t need much to do a persistence of vision display. A few LEDs and a processor is all it really takes. [B45i] made a simple PC board with five …read more Continue reading $1 POV Display Goes Round and Round
The recent Supercon 6 badge, if you haven’t seen it, was an old-fashioned type computer with a blinky light front panel. It was reminiscent of an Altair 8800, a PDP-11, …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Programming by Card
It used to be that every well-stocked doomsday bunker had a Geiger counter. These days, you don’t have to have a big tube-based meter. You can inexpensively get a compact …read more Continue reading Detecting Radiation for Fun and Profit
If you have a soft spot for a Z80 computer but want a new operating system experience, try Zeal. You can watch a demo of the open-source OS in the …read more Continue reading Z80 Gets New OS
[Adrian] had a Commodore computer to fix and decided to see how his latest tiny portable scope would work. He paid $57 for the tiny little test instrument although the …read more Continue reading Cheap Scope Troubleshoots Commodore
If you attended the 2022 Supercon, you might have heard the story about the SMD soldering challenge table nearly catching on fire. A magnifying lamp caught the sun just right …read more Continue reading Smelting Solar Style