[Angus Gratton] recently cracked open a pair of USB to Ethernet converters to see what’s inside. One was an Apple branded device, the other a no-name from eBay. The former rings in at $30, with the latter just $4. This type of comparison is one of our favorites. It’s especially interesting with Apple products as …
Comparing USB to Ethernet converters: Apple vs. Knock-off
3D printing Minecraft worlds
If you’ve ever wanted to build an awesome tabletop game or model train layout scenery, you probably couldn’t do better than printing Minecraft worlds on a RepRap. This guide comes courtesy of [Nudel] who figured out how to use Mineways with his RepRap. While [Nudel]‘s landscape print doesn’t have the full color of something from Shapeways, he only spent $3 …
Rooting a Motorola Actv (Android wristwatch)
[Chris'] family made the mistake of giving him a hackable Christmas gift. We’d bet they didn’t see much of him for the rest of the day as he set about rooting this Android wristwatch. This thing has some pretty powerful hardware under the hood. It’s sporting an OMAP3 processor running at 600 MHz along with …
Juice Bridge powers your breadboard in a snap
[Quinn Dunki] got tired of messing around with wires when connecting things to her benchtop power supply, so she built herself useful little power bridge that plugs directly into any standard breadboard. The board is small and simple, but quite useful all the same. It was built to power both sides of the breadboard, and …
Rebekah Brooks quits – Murdoch accepts this time
‘Stayed on bridge’ of News Int’l ship, ran it onto rocks
News International boss Rebekah Brooks, who has been at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal, has resigned from her post and apologised for the “hurt” her company had caused to crime victims a…
Bulldozer prototype suggests AMD shooting for Sandy Bridge performance
AMD’s Bulldozer processor architecture still hasn’t formally launched, but Donanim Haber got a hold of a recent engineering sample with benchmarked speeds that come close to Intel’s current Sandy Bridge CPUs. With the ability to run limited cores at up…
Retro-radio: building on another WiFi radio hack
[Jay Collett] likes listening to Internet radio stations and decided to build his own standalone hardware that lets him listen without being at his computer. But he wasn’t starting from square one on this project. [Jay] built on the epic instruction set that [Mighty Ohm] published when he first built his own WiFi radio. Both …
IOIO now supports Android Open Accessory
After the announcement of the Android Open Accessory ADK, [Ytai] decided he should get the the ADK running on the IOIO Android breakout board. The first batch of Android ADK boards sold for about $400. While that price has come down considerably, the IOIO is still cheaper and smaller. [Ytai] put the source and all …
Intel lifts wraps on 3D transistor, new chip
Intel Corp. on Wednesday introduced a three-dimensional transistor that the company said would also allow chips to operate with less power while maintaining high performance.
Intel said the company is embracing the new chip technology as it shifts to …
Propeller-Android communications using debug mode
Here’s a new way to connect an Android phone and a Propeller microcontroller. It’s called the PropBridge and uses a very simple circuit with a voltage regulator, a couple of transistors, and a few resistors. The trick to this method lies in creative use of software features that already exist on Android hardware, the Android …
