If you use home automation these days, you’re probably used to using smart speakers, your smartphone, or those tabletop touchscreen devices. If you wanted something cooler and more personal, you could try building something like [Rick] did. A Raspberry Pi 400 is the basis for the machine, and it still uses the original keyboard. It’s paired with a...

Decently useful AI has been around for a little while now, and robotic arms have been around much longer. Yet somehow, we don’t have little robot helpers on our desks yet! Thankfully, [Yifei] is working towards that reality with Tabletop Handybot. What [Yifei] has developed is a robotic arm that accepts voice commands. The robot relies on a Realsense...

There was a time when real system administrators just logged into Unix systems as root. But as we all know — with great power comes great responsibility. It’s too easy to do terrible things when you are really just trying to do normal work, and, on top of that, malicious software or scripts can do naughty things without you noticing. So common practice...

You might have had a boombox back in the 1990s, but probably not like the Yamaha MDP-10. As [Nicole] explains, the odd little device played MIDI files from a floppy disk. Technically, it wasn’t truly a boombox because it lacked batteries, but it sure looks like one. The box also had a MIDI input jack, but no output. For an antique gadget, it is pretty...

Helicopters are perhaps at their coolest when they’re being used as flying cranes — from a long dangling cable, they can carry everything from cars, to crates, to giant hanging saws. What you might find altogether more curious are the helicopters that fly around carrying gigantic flat antenna arrays. When you spot one in the field, it’s not exactly...

Over the past few years a number of teams have been putting a lot of effort into taking beloved Nintendo 64 games, decompiling them, and lovingly crafting them into highly portable C code. This allows for these games to not only run natively on PCs, but also for improvements to be made to the rendering engine and other components. Yet this artisan...