LEDs and Whats Wrong with the Maker Movement.

About a week ago, Hackaday hosted the Superconference. Dubbed the “greatest gathering of hardware hackers, builders, engineers and enthusiasts on the planet”, it featured talks on subjects ranging from 3D Printing to Security to Augmented Reality (AR). Media outlets jumping on the tech buzzword of the day would undoubtedly have had a field day if they had just copied off the list of talk titles.

While Kitty Yeung and Pat Dooley’s talk introducing Quantum Computing serve to remind us of how little of the potential of computing we have uncovered, it was Mike Harrison’s talk on LEDs that first caught my eye.

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You Can Make an Oscilloscope Out of a Cheap USB Sound Card

At its most basic, an oscilloscope is an instrument that graphs an electronic signal over time. They’re extremely useful when evaluating electronics—particularly when you’re working with analog signals. Most modern oscilloscopes offer a lot of additional features that help you really dig into those signals, but simple oscilloscope functions can be handled by a small amount of hardware. Most of the cost in that case comes from the display itself, which is why you may want to follow this tutorial to turn a USB sound card into an oscilloscope that can be used with your computer.

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Homelab With 20 Raspberry Pis

I’m sure a lot of you have seen my previous post “My Humble Homelab (With Raspberry Pi Rack)”.
I’ve made a few big changes to my server rack since that post so I thought I’d share. Most notably, I’ve gotten rid of my 2 Dell R710 enterprise servers and replaced them with…10 Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.

Below is a table explaining in order, exactly what I’ve got in the rack now.

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