Collaborate Disseminate
Smartphones are an integral part of life, but what if you can’t see the screen? There is text-to-speech available, but that’s not always handy and can be slow. It also …read more Continue reading Vibrating Braille Display is Portable
There have been all kinds of wild ideas to get spacecraft into orbit. Everything from firing huge cannons to spinning craft at rapid speed has been posited, explored, or in …read more Continue reading You’ve Probably Never Considered Taking an Airship To Orbit
According to [Asianometry], no one believed in the scanning electron microscope. No one, that is, except [Charles Oatley].The video below tells the whole story. The Cambridge graduate built radios during …read more Continue reading How We Got the Scanning Electron Microscope
You have an hour to kill, and you like old communication technology. If you happen to be in Windsor, Connecticut, you could nip over to the Vintage Radio and Communication …read more Continue reading Spend an Hour in the Virtual Radio Museum
It never fails. Lay down some kind of superlative — fastest, cheapest, smallest — around this place and someone out there says, “Hold my beer” and gets to work. In …read more Continue reading Simplest Speaker Oscillator, Now Even Simpler
Look around you. Chances are, there’s a BiC Cristal ballpoint pen among your odds and ends. Since 1950, it has far outsold the Rubik’s Cube and even the iPhone, and …read more Continue reading This Is How a Pen Changed the World
Another week in football, another VAR controversy to fill the column inches and rile up the fans. If you missed it, Coventry scored a last-minute winner in extra time in …read more Continue reading VAR Is Ruining Football, and Tech Is Ruining Sport
What’s the simplest audio frequency oscillator you can imagine? There’s the 555, of course, and we can think of a few designs using just two transistors or even a few …read more Continue reading No Active Components in This Mysterious Audio Oscillator
Most hams can tell you that it’s possible to get a nasty RF burn if you accidentally touch an antenna while it’s transmitting. However, you can also cop a nasty …read more Continue reading Radio Frequency Burns, Flying a Kite, and You
[Stevenson Streeper] is a maker, and was recently charged with a serious mission. He had to prototype, design, and build a board game. A software-controlled board game, that is, and …read more Continue reading Building a Giant Boardgame Isn’t Easy