The Motor Synth Is What You Get When You Forget Hammond Organs Exist

There’s nothing new, ever. It’s all been done. But that doesn’t mean you can’t invent something interesting. A case in point is the Motor Synth, a crowdfunding project from Gamechanger Audio. It’s what you get when you combine advanced quadcopter technology with the market for modular and semi-modular synthesizers.

The …read more

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Linear CCDs Make For Better Cameras

Digital cameras have been around for forty years or so, and the first ones were built around CCDs. These were two-dimensional CCDs, and if you’ve ever looked inside a copier, scanner, or one of those weird handheld scanners from the 90s, you’ll find something entirely unlike what you’d see in …read more

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Visualizing How Signals Travel In A PCB

If you play with high speed design for long enough, eventually you’re going to run into clock skew and other weird effects. [Robert Feranec] recently ran into this problem and found an interesting solution to visualizing electric fields in a PCB.

A word of warning before we dig into this, …read more

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Wireless LEDs Aren’t A First, But You Can Make Your Own

Wireless LEDs. That’s what [Scotty Allen] found in Japan, and if you find something you just have to replicate it.

[Scotty] found these wireless LEDs in a display stand for model makers and gunpla. Because you don’t want to run wires, drill holes, and deal with fiber optics when illuminating …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 26, 2019

Thinkpads are great, especially the old ones. You find a T420, and you can have a battery hanging off the back, a battery in the optical drive bay, and for some old Thinkpads, there’s a gigantic ‘slice’ battery that doubles the thickness of your laptop. Here’s the most batteries in …read more

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New Part Day: A 64-Bit RISC-V CPU In Raspberry Pi Hat Form

Over the last few years the open-source RISC-V microprocessor has moved from existing only on FPGAs into real silicon, and right now you can buy a RISC-V microcontroller with all the bells and whistles you would ever want. There’s an interesting chip from China called the Sipeed M1 that features …read more

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New Part Day: Espressif Announces ESP32-S2 With USB

Espressif, the company behind the extremely popular ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers has just announced their latest chip. It’s the ESP32-S2. It’s a powerful WiFi-enabled microcontroller, and this one has support for USB OTG.

Compared to the ESP32 we know and love, there are a few differences. The ESP32-S2 uses a …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 19, 2019

Cheap nostalgia, that’s the name of the game. If you can somehow build and ship ‘cheap nostalgia’, you’re going to be raking in the bucks. For the ‘musicians’ in the crowd, the king of cheap nostalgia has something great. Behringer is cloning the Yamaha CS-80. and it was announced at …read more

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