Wireless

How-To: Coffee Can Radar

How-To: Coffee Can Radar

The MIT Open Courseware (OCW) radar materials from Dr. Gregory L. Charvat (and peers) that Matt blogged about back in February have just been released! This is hands-on education that my father, for one, spent a few years of his life (and no small amount of money) to acquire at a fancy university in the late 1960s.

Top 10: Swarmbots!

Top 10: Swarmbots!

I first wanted to call this post “When ‘Bots Attack” or something similarly FOX-esque, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. There’s been plenty of alarmism about robots recently, and swarming robots are particularly juicy targets for people looking to stir up controversy since there seems to be something particularly loathsome and/or frightening to us about swarming creatures in general.

Makey Awards 2011 Nominee 05: Google Android, “Most Hackable Gadget”

Makey Awards 2011 Nominee 05: Google Android, “Most Hackable Gadget”

And it’s not just because the Android and Makeys mas-bots were apparently separated at birth.

And yes, we know Android is technically an operating system, and Android-compatible phones are really an entire class of gadgets. But in one sense, that’s the whole point. Gadget-lovers will debate the pros and cons of particular handsets endlessly, and there are significant other players in the smartphone market, but increasingly the most informative demographic among smartphone users these days is “Android or iPhone?”

Pringles Can Antenna Turns 10

Pringles Can Antenna Turns 10

Ten years ago, over a hot 4th of July weekend, a few of us “alpha geeks” were hanging out on Rob Flickenger‘s porch in Sebastopol, CA testing out homebrew microwave antennas when we stumbled upon the fact that you could squeeze about 12db out of an empty Pringles can and some miscellaneous hardware. At the […]