Technology

The Cutest Oscilloscope Ever Made

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If you thought your handheld digital oscilloscope was the most transportable of your signal analyzing tools, then you’re in for a surprise. This oscilloscope made by [Mark Omo] measures only one square inch, with the majority of the space taken up by the OLED screen.

It folds out into an easier instrument to hold, and admittedly does require external inputs, so it’s not exactly a standalone tool. The oscilloscope runs on a PIC32MZ EF processor, achieving 20Msps and 1MHz of bandwidth. The former interleaves the processor’s internal ADCs in order to achieve its speed.

For the analog front-end the signals first enter a 1M ohm terminator that divide the signals by 10x in order to measure them outside the rails. They then get passed through a pair of diodes connected to the rails, clamping the voltage to prevent damage. The divider centers the incoming AC signal around 1.65V, halfway between AGND and +3.3V. As a further safety feature, a larger 909k Ohm resistor sits between the signals and the diodes in order to prevent a large current from passing through the diode in the event of a large voltage entering the system.

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Build Your Own WiFi-Equipped and Feature-Packed Geiger Counter

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Ambient radiation is naturally surrounding you at all times, but it’s almost never dangerous. The radiation levels are too low to be a problem. But there are areas where it is higher than normal and potentially-dangerous. Those areas are almost always clearly marked by the country’s government, but it can be fun to see if you can find “hot spots.” To do that, you’ll need a way to measure radiation. Instructables user prabhat_ has a tutorial explaining how to build one of the most feature-packed Geiger counters we’ve ever seen.

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GreatScott! Finds Out if You Can 3D Print a Mains Transformer

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Transformers are one of the basic, common, and important electrical components in use today. Transformers are tailored to a variety of applications, but all of them transmit electricity without a physical metallic connection between two coils that share a ferrous core. When the first coil is energized with alternating current, it creates a varying magnetic flux that energizes the second coil. By giving the second coil a different number of windings than the first, you can change the voltage. YouTuber GreatScott! wanted to find out if it’s possible to 3D print the core of a mains transformer, and made a video with his findings.

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OpenAI Builds a Robot That Can Single-Handedly Solve a Rubik’s Cube – Literally

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If you’re anything like us, you think a Rubik’s cube is an intellectual torture device that can only be solved with the use of dark magic or Faustian bargains made at crossroads. And yet, many people are capable of solving the puzzle so quickly that it looks almost easy. Even robots can solve them through the methodical application of known techniques. But most of those robots are design specifically for that task. This robot built by OpenAI is able to solve a Rubik’s cube using just one hand that is normally intended for general purpose use.

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This Amazing New 3D Printer Is Capable of Producing Working Electronic Components

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3D printing is incredibly useful for creating functional prototypes, and is even sometimes viable for manufacturing production parts. But the vast majority of 3D printing is done with thermoplastics, and material like metal is very expensive to print. Complex parts that are made from multiple kinds of material, such as electronic components, have been impossible to print. Fortunately, that may be changing soon thanks to the new EFORGE 3D printer.

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An Affordable Arduino-Powered Bionic Hand

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Modern robotics is full of some amazing things, like Boston Dynamics backflipping robots, but the hardware associated with these robots comes at a fairly steep cost. An industrial robotic arm can cost anywhere from $25,000 to $400,000 and that price tag can stop a hobbyist or tinkerer from experimenting with robotics. Youbionic is intending to change this with its new affordable bionic arm.

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Raspberry Pi 3 vs Raspberry Pi 4 Performance with TensorFlow, TF Lite, & Coral USB Accelerator

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Have you wondered how much faster the Raspberry Pi 4 performs than the Raspberry Pi 3 at running computationally intensive TesnorFlow object detection models?
This video gives a performance comparison between the Pi 3B+ and the Pi 4 4GB, showing what framerate is achieved when running TensorFlow and TensorFlow Lite SSD-MobileNet detection models.
It also shows how much faster the models run when using Google’s Coral USB Accelerator.

A series of mysterious bleeps and bloops defined the early days of the internet

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Once upon a time, going onto the internet was a journey through sound. Before all our phones were online all the time, before there were wifi connections in houses, planes, libraries, and coffee shops, we were logged off before we made the conscious decision to log on. Doing so meant listening to familiar dial tones, then a series of mysterious bleeps and bloops, and finally a loud static-y crash that sounded like a radio stuck between stations (if you remember that sound too).

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