Black Friday Deal: Over $200 Off the VZMORE AX9 Max Mini PC! (Sponsored)

Mini PC manufacturer VZMORE has launched an early Black Friday deal for its AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470-powered VZMORE AX9 Max model: $229 off, bringing the regular price down to $1,270 from $1,499. The VZMORE AX9 Max mini PC ships with 32GB DDR5 and a 1TB NVMe SSD preloaded with Windows 11 Pro. It features four video outputs (2x HDMI 2.1, 2x USB-C) , a 3.5mm audio jack, two 2.5GbE ports, and WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, as well as a range of USB 2.0, USB 3.2, and USB4 ports. VZMORE AX9 Max specifications: SoC – AMD Ryzen...

M5Stack Core Matrix ESP32-C61 IoT controller features 16×16 LED matrix, WiFi 6, and 6-axis IMU

M5Stack’s Core Matrix is an ESP32-C61-based IoT controller with a 16×16 white LED matrix for displaying icons, animations, device status, and notifications. It supports 2.4 GHz WiFi 6 connectivity and is designed for IoT applications, sensor data monitoring, and interactive displays. It also includes a 6-axis BMI270 IMU, a microSD card slot, a passive buzzer, three user buttons, a power button, and a USB-C port. The board supports external modules and sensors through M5-Bus and Grove interfaces, with battery-power management circuitry that lets it run on either USB power or an external battery. M5Stack Core Matrix specifications: SoC – Espressif...

Space Invaders on a VFD

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=1vF0gAJhwfU

When most people think of vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs), they probably imagine the clock on a microwave or the equalizer on a piece of stereo equipment. But there was a brief period where the glowing phosphor displays were actually used for portable game systems before things like LCD took over.

While the salvaged display that [José Luis Monteiro] and his father have been hacking on certainly isn’t portable, it does play a mean Space Invaders. It’s vertical resolution is a bit tight for the gameplay, but the various sprites look fantastic and the art style works particularly well with the retro...

Lillith Tells Your Future

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=xcHdYE_OsR0

Maybe you are old enough to remember Zoltar in an arcade, or perhaps you’re just a fan of the movie Big. Either way, maybe you’d like to build an animated fortune teller. [Oh Well Why Not] did just that and gives you a roadmap for you to make your own. It took four months to build, but with the road already mapped, you can probably do it in less. Then again, who can predict the future?

The fortune teller, Lillith, uses servos and some voice generation to provide the same experience. If you dare to hit the button, you’ll get a glimpse...

Custom Game Boy Cart Speeds Up Development

https://player.vimeo.com/video/1244644134?dnt=1

These days, it is easy enough to get a flash cart for your Game Boy that makes it easy to run code — yours or otherwise — on it, but they aren’t necessarily ideal for actual development. The process of shuttling new code over to the cart via an SD card isn’t bad if you’re doing it once, but it gets very annoying if you’re trying to make rapid incremental changes.

Which is specifically what [MrFrenchLame] was looking to improve on with his development cart. Rather than using a SD card to move over ROMs, the cart features a small bootloader...

Reverse engineering a vintage diode-transistor logic chip

Going through a collection of old parts, CuriousMarc encountered some ICs that he couldn't identify. He opened up one of these ICs, and I studied it under the microscope. After some reverse engineering, I determined that it was a logic chip that implemented four NAND gates using old-fashioned diode-transistor logic (DTL).1 The chip turned out to be the ST680A, a member of the Signetics 600 series of chips from 1965. In this article, I discuss the circuitry in this chip and how diode-transistor logic works.

Integrated circuits can be packaged in many ways. One of the most popular is the plastic...

An FPGA Version of the AT&T UNIX PC for MiSTer

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=H2lQfCW9Y_Y

We all have our childhood heroes, which in the case of [Hrvoje Cavrak] was the 1985 AT&T UNIX PC. This 18 kg behemoth of a workstation computer boasted a 10 MHz Motorola 68010 CPU, up to 4 MB of RAM and dozens of megabytes of storage in addition to endless expansion options, making it a powerhouse of a personal computer for the discerning professional. Now, many decades later [Hrvoje] has an FPGA-based version to tinker with.

This project targets the MiSTer project, meaning that this softcore with SystemVerilog, Verilog and VHDL components should synthesize and run on any MiSTer-compatible FPGA system, such...

Procolored K13 Lite DTF printer review – Custom apparel printing with printer, curing oven, and heat press

Back in May, we wrote about the Procolored X One 3-in-1 laser engraver with UV and UV-DTF color printing, and the company contacted us a few months later for a review. But instead of having us review the laser engraver, they proposed that we test their K13 Lite DTF printer “developed for small businesses and creators producing customized apparel and merchandise”. Basically, a T-shirt printer using DTF (Direct-to-Film) technology. I wasn’t so sure at first, since T-shirt and garment printing isn’t exactly one of the primary topics we cover here at CNX Software! But I eventually decided to go ahead,...

Making a Dog Car Wash Without (very) Fancy Tools

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=BuRyQYf03xA

[Stuff Made Here] got fed up with the hassle of washing their dog, and in traditional engineer fashion, decided that automating the process would solve the problem. However, as science fiction writers love to warn us, automation and living things don’t always mix.

The concept, much like a car wash, is to have an arch-like structure spray the dog with oscillating nozzles. A secondary nozzle provides a simple air drying function on each of the pods. An “undercarriage” nozzle of similar design runs in a channel below the dog to ensure all mud has been removed. The nozzles move along linear...

Artemis II Rocket Was Powerful Enough to Disrupt GPS

Rockets certainly have a substantial impact if you ever see a launch in person. The noise, shock waves, and even heat can be awe-inspiring. What is less obvious are the impacts a launch has on our upper atmosphere, or “anthropogenic space weather” as the fancy scientists call it. A pre-print from a recent study on Artemis II’s impact on our atmosphere shows a shockingly wide range of effects.

As a whole, the impact on Artemis comes in waves. Each stage of the Space Launch System performs burns in different parts of the atmosphere, creating increasing ripples as the rocket moves through...