Collaborate Disseminate
We’ll beat everyone to the punch: yes, actually building a working Turing machine, especially one that uses a Raspberry Pi, is probably something that would have pushed [Allen Turing]’s buttons, …read more Continue reading TMD-3: Clever Hall Sensor Hack Leads to Better Turing Demo
As computers get more and more powerful and artificial intelligence algorithms improve, few games remain where the best humans can reliably beat their electronic counterparts. In chess this barrier was …read more Continue reading FPGA Plays Tic-Tac-Toe
If you really think hard about it, a CPU is just a very general-purpose state machine. Well, most CPUs are, anyway. The MC14500 is a one-bit computer that has only …read more Continue reading One Bit CPU Runs at a Blistering 60Hz
Playing Asteroids now isn’t quite what it used to be when it came out 40 years ago. At the time, the vector-scan display was part of the charm; making do with an emulator running on a traditional raster display just …read more
Continue reading Laser Galvos and an ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids
For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily understood. Making the abstract concepts easy to understand is what this Turning machine demonstrator aims to do.
The TMD-1 is …read more
Continue reading TMD-1 Makes Turing Machine Concepts Easy to Understand
Sometimes connectivity problems go away by power cycling a router. It’s a simple but inconvenient solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist, but that didn’t stop [Mike Diamond] from automating it for a few bucks in parts. The three-dollar router rebooter may be a simple device with only one job, …read more
When working on a project that needs to send data from place to place the distances involved often dictate the method of sending. Are the two chunks of the system on one PCB? A “vanilla” communication protocol like i2c or SPI is probably fine unless there are more exotic requirements. Are the two components mechanically separated? Do they move around? Do they need to be far apart? Reconfigurable? A trendy answer might be to add Bluetooth Low Energy or WiFi to everything but that obviously comes with a set of costs and drawbacks. What about just using really long wires? …read more
Continue reading Trials and Tribulations in Sending Data with Wires
When [Steve Parker]’s girlfriend got a tea kettle that takes voice commands, he suddenly saw his fancy bean-to-cup coffee machine as a technological dinosaur. It may make good coffee, but getting the DeLonghi going is inconvenient, because it runs a self-cleaning cycle each time it’s turned on or off.
Thus began [Steve]’s adventure in trying to turn the thing on with Alexa via Particle Photon. Because of the way the machine is designed, simply adding a relay wouldn’t do—the machine would just turn off and back on, only to start the self-clean again. Once inside, he found it’s controlled by …read more
Continue reading Alexa And Particle Modernize Coffee Machine By One Iota
To the uninitiated the words ‘State machine’ sound like something scarily big and complex. They aren’t (necessarily) and can be quite useful. In fact, state machines are no physical machines but a model of processes. They link the states a system can be in with allowed transitions. For example a media player when stopped can change to play or open another file. While playing, it can go to pause, stop, reverse, fast forward and so on. A state machine creates a map of all states and how they are connected. It is an abstract tool hat offers a graphical approach …read more
Continue reading State Your Intentions More Clearly With State Machines
The secret to domestic bliss often lies in attention to detail, an area in which we can all do a little better. But if paper notes and smartphone reminders are not enough to help you remember to knock jobs off your list, perhaps this IoT task reminder will give you the edge you need to keep the peace at home.
As [Andreas Spiess] points out, his best intentions of scheduling recurring tasks in Google Calendar were not enough to keep him on on top of his share of chores around the house. He found that the notifications popping up on …read more
Continue reading IoT Chore Reminder for the Serially Forgetful