Hackaday Links: April 15th, 2018

San Fransisco is awash in electric scooters. Three companies — Lime, Bird, and Spin — have been dumping ‘smart’ electric scooters on the sidewalks of San Fransisco over the last few weeks. The business plan for all these companies is to allow anyone to ride them via an app. $1 unlocks the scooter, and rides are fifteen cents a minute. No one, it appears, is looking at the upside of abandoned, dead electric scooters: they’re a remarkable source of lithium batteries and brushless motors. Hello, my name is Mr. Cyberpunk. My friends and I drive around the city collecting abandoned …read more

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Smoothly Modernized Nixie Display

The renaissance of Nixie tube popularity amid the nostalgia surrounding older tech has made them almost prohibitively expensive for individual projects. Seeing an opportunity to modernize the beloved devices, [Connor Nishijima] has unleashed this new, LED edge-lit display that he has dubbed Lixie.

We featured his prototype a few years ago. That design used dots to make up each character but this upgrade smooths that out with sleek lines and a look one would almost expect from a professional device — or at the very least something you’d see in a cyberpunk near-future. The color-changing Neopixel LEDs — moderated by …read more

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