Consider This Pocket Machine For Your iPhone Backups

What if you find yourself as an iPhone owner, desiring a local backup solution — no wireless tech involved, no sending off data to someone else’s server, just an automatic device-to-device file sync? Check out [Giovanni]’s ios-backup-machine project, a small Linux-powered device with an e-ink screen that backs up your iPhone whenever you plug the two together with a USB cable.

The system relies on libimobiledevice, and is written to make simple no-interaction automatic backups work seamlessly. The backup status is displayed on the e-ink screen, and at boot, it shows up owner’s information of your choice, say, a phone number...

DIY Synth Takes Inspiration From Fretted Instruments

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=DMDRZ1dwdG4

There are a million and one MIDI controllers and synths on the market, but sometimes it’s just more satisfying to make your own. [Turi Scandurra] very much went his own way when he put together his Diapasonix instrument.

Right away, the build is somewhat reminiscent of a stringed instrument, what with its buttons laid out in four “strings” of six “frets” each. Only, they’re not so much buttons, as individual sections of a capacitive touch controller. A Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is responsible for reading the 24 pads, with the aid of two MPR121 capacitive touch ICs.

The Diapasonix can be played...

Step into my Particle Accelerator

If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you’ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you’ll often find that the power supply was in another room and the cooling system was in yet another. So when you get a computer that fit on, say, a large desk and maybe have a few tape drives all together in a normal-sized office, people thought of it as “small.” We’re seeing a similar evolution in particle accelerators, which, a new startup company says, can be room-sized according...

Designing a Simpler Cycloidal Drive

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=WMgny-yDjvs

Cycloidal drives have an entrancing motion, as well as a few other advantages – high torque and efficiency, low backlash, and compactness among them. However, much as [Sergei Mishin] likes them, it can be difficult to 3D-print high-torque drives, and it’s sometimes inconvenient to have the input and output shafts in-line. When, therefore, he came across a video of an industrial three-ring reducing drive, which works on a similar principle, he naturally designed his own 3D-printable drive.

The main issue with 3D-printing a normal cycloidal drive is with the eccentrically-mounted cycloidal plate, since the pins which run through its holes need...

Benchmarking NVENC video transcoding on the Pi

Benchmarking NVENC video transcoding on the Pi

Now that Nvidia GPUs run on the Raspberry Pi, I've been putting all the ones I own through their paces.

Many people have an older Nvidia card (like a 3060) laying around from an upgrade. So could a Pi be suitable for GPU-accelerated video transcoding, either standalone for conversion, or running something like Jellyfin for video library management and streaming?

That's what I set out to do, and the first step, besides getting the drivers and CUDA going (see blog post linked above), was...

Amiibo Emulator Becomes Pocket 2.4 GHz Spectrum Analyzer

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=kgrsfGIeL9w

As technology marches on, gear that once required expensive lab equipment is now showing up in devices you can buy for less than a nice dinner. A case in point: those tiny displays originally sold as Nintendo amiibo emulators. Thanks to [ATC1441], one of these pocket-sized gadgets has been transformed into 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer.

These emulators are built around the Nordic nRF52832 SoC, the same chip found in tons of low-power Bluetooth devices, and most versions come with either a small LCD or OLED screen plus a coin cell or rechargeable LiPo. Because they all share the same...

Extremely Rare Electric Piano Restoration

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=cEG7hD28dW4

Not only are pianos beautiful musical instruments that have stood the test of many centuries of time, they’re also incredible machines. Unfortunately, all machines wear out over time, which means it’s often not feasible to restore every old piano we might come across. But a few are worth the trouble, and [Emma] had just such a unique machine roll into her shop recently.

What makes this instrument so unique is that it’s among the first electric pianos to be created, and one of only three known of this particular model that survive to the present day. This is a Vivi-Tone Clavier...

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Haiku R1/beta5

Back in the mid 1990s, the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system cemented the Redmond software company’s dominance over most of the desktop operating system space. Apple were still in their period in the doldrums waiting for Steve Jobs to return with his NeXT, while other would-be challengers such as IBM’s OS/2 or Commodore’s Amiga were sinking into obscurity.

Into this unpromising marketplace came Be inc, with their BeBox computer and its very nice BeOS operating system. To try it out as we did at a trade show some time in the late ’90s was to step into a very...

Мой самый упрямый экран. Figma была свидетелем

Неделю назад я написал нашему программисту: «Знаешь, наверное, к концу следующей недели я сделаю дизайн всего приложения». Да, отличное начало для истории о том, как один экран может выбесить.

Делюсь ссылкой на свой проект в Figma

Renesas Releases Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE MCUs on Cortex-M33 Architecture

Renesas has introduced the RA6W1 and RA6W2 microcontrollers, bringing Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE options to its IoT portfolio. The RA6W1 offers dual-band Wi-Fi 6, while the RA6W2 adds integrated Bluetooth LE, both targeting low-power connected devices with features such as Target Wake Time to extend battery life. The MCUs are based on an Arm […]