#diy-electronics

#diy-electronics

What separates this from a standard Raspberry Pi build is the pair of breadboards soldered directly to the GPIO pins, seated inside the case, and accessible through a removable back panel. Connecting a sensor no longer means hunting for a separate breadboard and a tangle of jumper wires. PickentCode plugged in a temperature and humidity sensor and had it reading live data within minutes.

If you appreciate retro computing and DIY electronics, a new project from This Does Not Compute (YouTube channel) will be the best thing you will see today. The build emulates the 1984 Apple Macintosh, but in a miniaturized version. Not the smallest, but decently small to sit in the corner of your desk and do more than its intended function of a clock.

Sitting in class, bored, doodling in the corner of a notebook with no plan beyond passing time is how a lot of throwaway sketches happen. Most stay throwaway. Sometimes, though, one curved line that looks a bit like a wave or a tail slowly becomes something that sticks in your head, and you keep drawing it until it isn't just a line anymore, it's a character with a face.

We started from a very silly place,

In 2019 researchers at Berlin's Computer Games Museum made an extraordinary discovery: a rudimentary Pong console, made from salvaged electronics and plastic soap-box enclosures for joysticks. The beige rectangular tupperware that contained its wires would, when connected to a TV by the aerial, bring a serviceable Pong copy to the screen. Arcade fire East German attractions at ColdWarGames. Photograph: Dora Csala/AlliiertenMuseum At the time, they thought the home-brewed device was a singular example of ingenuity behind the iron curtain.

I've seen plenty of DIY electronics projects that make you go "wtf, why" (this Bluetooth speaker in a walnut comes to mind) but this battery-to-Bluetooth-speaker conversion sits in a completely different category. Someone actually spent two weeks gutting a battery casing, drilling 60 precision sound holes, and cramming a full Bluetooth speaker setup inside what used to house alkaline cells. The kicker? It actually sounds good. Like, surprisingly good for something that began life as a Duracell knockoff with a pink bunny on the wrapper.

The Flipper Zero might be small, but there's a lot of hardware packed into a small space, including a sub-GHz wireless antenna for operating devices and access systems.

The pico-mac-nano is a working replica of the original 1984 Apple Macintosh, designed as a tribute to the early days of computing and its technological limitations.