Collaborate Disseminate
As a programming language, Lisp has been around longer than any other active language except for Fortran. To anyone who regularly uses it, it’s easy to see why: the language …read more Continue reading Lisp Runs This Microcontroller Pendant
Diffraction gratings create beautiful rainbow patterns when interacting with natural white light, and [audreyobscura] was familiar with their properties. Thus, she set about producing an attractive 3D-printed suncatcher ornament that …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Suncatcher Shines in the Light
“This is one of the most extraordinary black hole systems I’ve ever come across.” Continue reading This Black Hole Is Wildly Ejecting Plasma Jets as It Eats a Star
It is 1980-something and you see someone typing on a keyboard. The display is graphical, and they use a mouse to finish a document, send it over the network to another similar computer, where another user edits it a bit and prints it on a laser printer. Given the time-frame you might think the computer is a Mac, but you’d be wrong. The Xerox Star had all the features Apple “invented” about three years before the Macintosh arrived. If you never heard of the Star, that’s not surprising. At $16,500 each, there were only about 25,000 sold. Your chances of …read more
Who loves a good R2-D2 robot? Everyone, but especially young Star Wars fans who — frustratingly — have no problem spotting a controller and spoiling the illusion of an R2 unit brought to life. [Bithead942]’s concealed his R2-D2’s remote and re-establishes the illusion of an autonomous droid — no Jedi mind-tricks necessary.
[Bithead942] prefers to accompany his droid in traditional a Rebel Alliance pilot’s suit, so that gives him a bit of extra space under the jumpsuit to help conceal the controller. Dismantling a Frsky Taranis X9D controller, [Bithead942] meditated on how to use it while so concealed. In a …read more
Continue reading This Isn’t The R2-D2 Controller You’re Looking For
Frequent solar flares from red dwarfs make the exoplanets less than ideal. Continue reading Planets Orbiting the TRAPPIST-1 Star Might Not be Great for Life After All
Machine learning and automated technologies are poised to disrupt employment in many industries — looking at you autonomous vehicles — and medicine is not immune to this encroachment. The Qualcomm Tricorder competition run by the X-Prize foundation has just wrapped, naming [Final Frontier Medical Devices]’s DxtER the closest thing available to Star Trek’s illustrious medical tricorder which is an oft referenced benchmark for diagnostic automation.
The competition’s objective was for teams to develop a handheld, non-invasive device that could diagnose 12 diseases and an all-clear result in 24 hours or less without any assistance. [Dynamical Biomarkers Group] took second place …read more
There’s building small computers — like the Raspberry Pi — and then there’s building small computers — like this Desktop Viewer from Star Trek.
[Monta Elkins] is using a Beetle for this project; it’s an Arduino clone, hosting the ATMega32U4 microcontroller, with a unique feature that allows you to twist connecting wires to secure them to the board. Instead, [Elkins] went with the logical choice of soldering them. For a display, he used a SPI serial OLED 128 x 64 monochrome screen which he has cycling through a number of iconic Star Trek TOS symbols and animations. The images were …read more
Continue reading Star Trek Desktop Viewer In The Palm Of Your Hand!
It’s that time of the year again when you gotta start worrying if you’ve been naughty enough to not receive any gifts. Hopefully, Blinky Lights will appease St. Nick. Grab a strip of RGB LEDs, hook them up to an Arduino and a Power supply, slap on some code, and Bob’s your Uncle. But if you want to retain your hacker cred, you best do it the hard way. Which is what [roddersblog] did while building his Christmas Starburst LED Stars this year — and bonus points for being early to the party.
For starters, he got panels (as in …read more
The next giant leap for mankind is to the stars. While we are mostly earthbound — for now — that shouldn’t stop us from gazing upwards to marvel at the night sky. In saying that, if you’re an amateur astrophotographer looking to take long-exposure photos of the Milky Way and other stellar scenes, [Anthony Urbano] has devised a portable tracking setup to keep your photos on point.
When taking pictures of the night sky, the earth’s rotation will cause light trails during long exposures. Designed for ultra-portability, [Urbano’s] rig uses an Arduino UNO controlled Sanryusha P43G geared stepper motor coupled …read more
