A Microwave Repair Even Mechanical Keyboard Fans Will Love

Microwave oven design and manufacturing have been optimized to the point where the once-expensive appliances are now nearly disposable. Despite the economics, though, some people can’t resist fixing stuff, especially when you get a chance to do it in style. Thus we present this microwave repair with its wholly unnecessary …read more

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LED Art Reveals Itself in Very Slow Motion

Every bit of film or video you’ve ever seen is a mind trick, an optical illusion of continuous movement based on flashing 24 to 30 slightly different images into your eyes every second. The wetware between your ears can’t deal with all that information individually, so it convinces itself that …read more

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Die Photos Reveal Logic from Commodore 128 PLA Chip

The 8721 PLA, or programmable logic array, was one of the chips that had to be invented to make the Commodore 128, the last of the 8-bit computers that formed the leading edge of the early PC revolution, a reality. [Johan Grip] got a hold of one of …read more

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Hackaday Podcast 077: Secret Life of SD Cards, Mining Minecraft’s Secret Seed, BadPower is Bad, and Sailing a Sea of Neon

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are deep in the hacks this week. What if making your own display matrix meant a microcontroller board for every pixel? That’s the gist of this incredible neon display. There’s a lot of dark art poured into the slivers of microSD cards and …read more

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384 Neon Bulbs Become Attractive Display

Neon lights have inspired much prose over the years, with their attractive light output receiving glowing adulation. [Pierre Muth] is a big fan, and decided to spend lockdown creating something suitably pretty for his desk.

The project consists of an 8×48 matrix display constructed out of INS-1 (ИНC-1) tubes. These …read more

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LED Matrix Watch Is The Smart Watch We Didn’t Know We Wanted

[Mile] put together this stunning LED matrix watch, on which the stars of this show are the 256 monochrome 0603 LEDs arranged in a grid on its face. The matrix is only 1.4in in the diagonal and is driven by a combination of an LED driver and some shift registers. …read more

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