Collaborate Disseminate
Hundreds of years from now, the story of humanity’s inevitable spread across the solar system will be a collection of engineering problems solved, some probably in heroic fashion. We’ve already tackled a lot of these problems in our first furtive steps into the wider galaxy. Our engineering solutions have taken …read more
Continue reading X-Rays Are the Next Frontier in Space Communications
To accurately forecast the weather, you first need lots of data — not just to train your forecasting models but also to generate more precise and granular forecasts. Typically, this has been the domain of government agencies, thanks to their access to this data and the compute power to run the extremely complex models. Anybody […] Continue reading ClimaCell bets on IoT for better weather forecasts
You’ve probably seen the videos of a grape — cut almost totally in half — in a microwave creates a plasma. A recent physics paper studies the phenomenon with a lot of high-tech gear and now the actual mechanism is known. [Veritasium] interviews the scientists and explains the grape plasma …read more
The Jacob’s Ladder is an electrical device named after a biblical “ladder to Heaven”, consisting of a pair of vertically oriented conductors that spread apart vertically. These conductors are charged with high voltage, which creates the repeatedly climbing arc we’ve all come to know and love from science fiction movies of yesteryear.
[LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER] was on a scavenger hunt for electronic junk, and came across a microwave in a skip that was begging to be hacked. After kicking around a few ideas, it was decided that the microwave would donate its high voltage transformer to create a Jacob’s …read more
Continue reading Microwave Parts Become Quick and Nasty Jacob’s Ladder
When I started working in a video production house in the early 1980s, it quickly became apparent that there was a lot of snobbery in terms of equipment. These were the days when the home video market was taking off; the Format War had been fought and won by VHS, and consumer-grade VCRs were flying off the shelves and into living rooms. Most of that gear was cheap stuff, built to a price point and destined to fail sooner rather than later, like most consumer gear. In our shop, surrounded by our Ikegami cameras and Sony 3/4″ tape decks, we …read more
Most hackers are rankled by those “Warranty Void If Broken” seals on the sides of new test equipment. Even if they’re illegal, they at least put the thought in your head that the space inside your new gear is off-limits, and that prevents you from taking a look at what’s inside. Simply unacceptable.
[Shahriar] has no fear of such labels and tears into just about everything that comes across his bench. Including, most recently, a $1.3 million 110-GHz oscilloscope from Keysight. It’s a teardown that few of us will ever get the chance to do, and fewer still would be …read more
Senate can’t protect senators staff from Cyber Attacks, Equifax fined by ICO over data breach that hit Britons, US Military given the power to hack back and defend forward,and AmazonBasics Microwave works with Alexa! Larry’s Stories govpayn… Continue reading GovPayNow.com, AmazonBasics, and FBI – Paul’s Security Weekly #576
Deep inside your smartphone are a handful of interesting miniature electromechanical devices. The accelerometer is a MEMS device, and was produced with some of the most impressive industrial processes on the planet. Sometimes, these nanoscale devices are produced with plasma etching, which sounds about as cool as it actually is. Once the domain of impossibly expensive industrial processes, you can now plasma etch materials in a microwave.
Of course, making plasma in this way is nothing new. If you cut a grape in half and plop it in a microwave, some really cool stuff happens. This is just the 6th …read more
If you have even the slightest interest in microwave electronics and radar, you’re in for a treat. The Signal Path is back with another video, and this one covers the internals of a simple 24-GHz radar module along with some experiments that we found fascinating.
The radar module that [Shahriar] works with in the video below is a CDM324 that can be picked up for a couple of bucks from the usual sources. As such it contains a lot of lessons in value engineering and designing to a price point, and the teardown reveals that it contains but a single …read more
Continue reading A Radar Module Teardown And Measuring Fan Speed The Hard Way
[Kerry Wong] comes across the coolest hardware, and always manages to do something interesting with it. His widget du jour is an old demo board for a digital RF attenuator chip, which can pad a signal in discrete steps according to the settings of some DIP switches. [Kerry]’s goal: forget the finger switch-flipping and bring the attenuator under Arduino control.
As usual with his videos, [Kerry] gives us a great rundown on the theory behind the hardware he’s working with. The chip in question is an interesting beast, an HMC624LP4E from Hittite, a company that was rolled into Analog Devices …read more
Continue reading Digital Attenuator Goes from Manual to Arduino Control