Honest Hardware in Pine and Iron Pipe
Pine boards and black iron pipe, and I'd still call it the most honest PC I've seen this year. Dante Mutti spent two years on Hydropower, and three decisions earn…
Topic
Technology
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Meridian Orrery: One Motor, Eight Planets
I'll take one stepper over eight motors every time. That's the Meridian Orrery by illusionmanager, as Hackaday reported on May 1. All eight planets, the Sun and the Moon are…
Nuvistor 555 Timer
Glorious, and absurd... I'm saying that as a compliment. Eric Schlaepfer, who posts as TubeTimeUS, built a 555 timer out of eight tetrode nuvistors, and Hackaday covered it this month…
The Careful Mistake
In November 1988 a graduate student wrote a program to answer a simple question: how big is this internet we have built? It stole nothing. It deleted nothing. Its entire purpose was to exist, spread, and count.
The Computer That Fits In A Mint Tin
Salim Benbouziyane crammed a working computer into an Altoids tin, keyboard included. Comfortable? He says no, the keys barely travel. I'll take a cramped keyboard I can carry in a…
Rogue Makers and Air Pirates
Now that's a theme name with some swagger to it. Clockwork Alchemy runs Rogue Makers and Air Pirates for three days in Redwood City, October 16 to 18, and I'd…
The Two Languages That Lost a Mars Probe
On 23 September 1999, a NASA orbiter arrived at Mars after nine months and 400 million miles. Nothing aboard it was broken. Everything worked. It fired its engine on schedule, behaved impeccably — and passed behind the planet forty-nine seconds early.
The Machine That Said It Was Impossible
Between 1985 and 1987, a machine built to treat cancer delivered massive radiation overdoses to six patients across North America. Three of them died.
The Tower That Told No One
In the summer of 1978, the engineer who designed a brand-new Manhattan skyscraper sat down to do a piece of arithmetic nobody had asked him to do. The building was finished. It was occupied. And the answer said it could be brought down by a storm New York could expect roughly every sixteen years.
Hubble: The Perfect Mistake
In 1990 NASA launched the finest telescope ever built, and it came back blurred. Its mirror had been polished more precisely than any large mirror in history — to the wrong shape, too flat at the edge by about two microns, one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.