Magnetic Angle Sensor Mods Make Encoder Better for Blasting

Most of the hacks we see around these parts have to do with taking existing components and cobbling them together in interesting new ways. It’s less often that we see existing components gutted and repurposed, but when it happens, like …read more

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Laser Galvos and an ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids

Playing Asteroids now isn’t quite what it used to be when it came out 40 years ago. At the time, the vector-scan display was part of the charm; making do with an emulator running on a traditional raster display just …read more

Continue reading Laser Galvos and an ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids

Extraterrestrial Excavation: Digging Holes on Other Worlds

We humans are good at a lot of things, but making holes in the ground has to be among our greatest achievements. We’ve gone from grubbing roots with a stick to feeding billions with immense plows pulled by powerful tractors, and from carving simple roads across the land to drilling …read more

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Asteroids Crash Into Earth Over Twice as Often as 290 Million Years Ago

Scientists find that a surge in Earth impacts began during the Permian period, possibly because of disruptions in the asteroid belt. Continue reading Asteroids Crash Into Earth Over Twice as Often as 290 Million Years Ago

Arcade Asteroids, Now In Colour

Asteroids is one of the classic games of the early arcade era. Launched in 1979 by Atari, it relied upon using an XY vector monitor to deliver crisp graphics for its space-based gameplay. One of the limitations of the original arcade games was that the game was only rendered in a single colour, white. Over 30 years later, [Arcade Jason] decided to see what it would take to build a color Asteroids machine.

The hack relies on the fact that the original game used a four-bit resistor ladder DAC to draw vectors in different intensity levels. Through some ingeniously simple …read more

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