NASA’s expensive Mars exploration Curiosity rover is finally doing what it was created to do: rove. Following a successful wheel test, the probe moved forward. Photo Gallery: Curiosity Rover Makes First Tracks on Mars article tells that Curiosity beamed back some incredible images of its tracks, which tell scientists that the soil is firm, great →
Soldering is an art. With practice, one can learn to easily assemble complex circuits. When you make mistakes you need to do rework, which is usually quite time consuming with through-hole parts. The solder must be completely removed pin-by-pin and the vias cleared of solder before a new part can be installed. The ‘slap method’ →
Antenna on the Cheap (er, Chip) article shows how to build a simple “classic” WLAN antenna from Pringles potato chip can. I have built antenna based on this plan (some improvising) and I can say that it worked. Besides WLAN I have used it for wireless video at 2.4 GHz. Cantenna article tells that in →
iFixit.org article How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free tells an interesting story. The problem? An underfunded school needed computers for the classroom. Budget? $0. How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free article tells how just one sixth-grade teacher got those computers at that budget. In 2007, Robert acquired 18 donated →
From cables to speakers to stands that prop up your phone, there are more cool accessories out there than you can shake a stick at—and they all seem grossly overpriced. Top 10 Cellphone Accessories You Don’t Need to Buy (Because You Can DIY Them for Cheap) article describes 10 cellphone accessories that are cheap and →
I bought Fuji HS20 camera few months ago (just some months before the model was discontinued). HS20 is a pretty good superzoom digital camera. It has a very long zoom lens and good macro properties. I have taken many of the photos posted recently to this blog using this camera. To take good macro photographs →
Is electronics heading to be less and less hackable? DIY site iFixit has been keeping tabs on the tech world whilst providing handy self-repair guides for popular electronics. Now the site maintainers have seen trend that electronics products seem to become intentionally harder and harder to fix in recent years. The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, →
Surprisingly Simple Arduino Motion-Sensing Project Makes For Some Weekend Fun article tells that Matt Williamson built a tiny, Arduino-based motion sensor that will SMS you when something moves by your desk or into a room. It’s completely open source and the notifications system runs on your PC thanks to a simple Python script. Why is →
Have you ever wanted to find out how strong a magnet really was, or how the strength of the magnetic field varied as you changed the distance from the magnet. Devices used to measure the local magnetic field are called magnetometers or gaussmeters. There are commercially available meters for this, but they are usually a →
I bought USB Virtual 7.1 Channel External Sound Card Adapter to build a cheap PC based digital storage oscilloscope. Sound card based oscilloscope is not new to me, I have used it sometimes. There are many free oscilloscope software that you can use. For example “zeitnitz” is a very fine program! Using an external USB →