FR4 is FR4, right? For a lot of PCB designs, the answer is yes — the particular characteristics of the substrate material don ...

In the decade or more since small inexpensive Linux-capable single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi came to the mainstream, many a hardware hacker has turned their attention to making a ...

The 30 th anniversary of the World Wide Web passed earlier this year. Naturally, this milestone was met with truckloads of nerdy fanfare and pining for those simpler times. In three decades, the ...

If you’ve been following along our USB-C saga, you know that the CC wire in the USB-C cables is used for communications and polarity detection. However, what’s not as widely known is that ...

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those ...

Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny ...

Toner transfer is a commonly-used technique for applying text and images to flat surfaces such as PCBs, but anybody who has considered using the same method on 3D prints will have realized that ...

Bringing modern connectivity to retro computers is an endearing field- with the simplicity of last-century hardware and software being a double-edged sword, often, you bring a powerful and tiny ...

For a lot of reasons, home etching of PCBs is somewhat of a dying art. The main reason is the rise of quick-turn PCB fabrication services, of course; when you can send your Gerbers off and receive ...

Much has been written about the demise of physical media. Long considered the measure of technological progress in audiovisual and computing fields, the 2000s saw this metric seemingly rendered ...

We’ve now had at least five years of USB-C ports in our devices. It’s a standard that many manufacturers and hackers can get behind. Initially, there was plenty of confusion about what we’d ...

We’re in an exciting time for cheap microcontrollers, as with both the rise of RISC-V and the split between ARM and its Chinese subsidiary, a heap of super-cheap and very capable parts are ...