Collaborate Disseminate
Mike and I were talking about two very similar clock projects we’d both built recently: they both use ESP8266 modules to get the time over WiFi and NTP, and they both failed. Mike’s failed because he was visiting relatives in a different timezone with different WiFi credentials, and mine failed …read more
Will someone please think of the rubber duckies?!
For decades they’ve been reduced to a laughing stock: a caricature of waterfowl. Left without a leg to stand on, their only option is to float around in the tub. And they don’t even do that well, lacking the feet that Mother …read more
This is one of those so-simple-I-wish-I-invented-it hacks. Professor [Michael Peshkin] is teaching his engineering students remotely. While he has a nice second camera that he can use to transmit whatever he doodles on paper, most of his students just have the single webcam built into their laptops.
The solution is …read more
Last week, I wrote about two recent projects of mine that serve as cautionary tales in keeping projects simple — you probably can’t simplify everything, so it’s worth the time to find out which simplifications have the most bang for the buck. This week, I’d like to share a …read more
“Keep it simple” sounds like such good advice, but what exactly is the “it”; what parts of a project should you try to keep simple? You can’t always make everything simple, can you? Are all kinds of “simplicity” equally valuable, or are there aspects of a design where simplicity has …read more
[Serge Vaudenay] and [Martin Vuagnoux] released a video yesterday documenting a privacy-breaking flaw in the Apple/Google COVID-tracing framework, and they’re calling the attack “Little Thumb” after a French children’s story in which a child drops pebbles to be able to retrace his steps. But unlike Hänsel and Gretl with the …read more
Continue reading COVID-tracing Framework Privacy Busted by Bluetooth
This week our own [Donald Papp] wrote a thought-provoking piece on buying and selling 3D-printer models. His basic point: if you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve purchased it, and there’s no refund policy, how can you tell if your money is being well spent? It’s a serious problem …read more
The best thing about field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), when you have a massively parallel application, is that everything runs in parallel. The worst thing about FPGAs, when you need a lot of stuff to happen in sequence, is that everything runs in parallel. If you have a multi-step computation, for …read more
People sometimes say “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” as if that were a bad thing. Hitting up Wikipedia, they’re calling it the Law of the Instrument or Maslow’s Hammer and calling it a cognitive bias. But I like hammers…
I’m working on a new tool, …read more
You know how it is. You’re working on a project that needs to move air or water, or move through air or water, but your 3D design chops and/or your aerodynamics knowledge hold you back from doing the right thing? If you use OpenSCAD, you have no excuse for creating …read more
Continue reading Quick 3D-Printed Airfoils with these OpenSCAD Helpers