News

Happy new year, from all of us at oomlout! What? No, our calendar's fine, thank you: today marks the start of the Chinese New Year, known to electronics companies worldwide as "the time of year when your suppliers and hardware partners stop answering emails for a week or two." It's also the time of year when it's traditional to give each other gifts in the form of money sealed in lucky red envelopes. More recently, the tradition has shifted into the 21st century: popular chat platforms, such as WeChat, have begun to support the sending of digital envelopes of money...

Here at oomlout we're big fans of China's Shenzhen, home to every type of hardware and component an electronics hacker could ever want. We're not alone in this, of course: we've previously talked about Seeed Studio's love for Hua Qiang Bei, taken a look at reverse-engineering cloned chips, and even the famous Hacker Camp Shenzhen. Now, though, visitors to the region have the chance to go armed with one of the most useful tools we've seen: a sourcing tool in the form of a bilingual guidebook. Created by noted hacker Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, best known for creating the maker-friendly open-hardware...

Many applications of 'smart' devices revolve around controlling the flow of power to an existing home appliance. From internet-connected light switches to devices like Google's Nest thermostat, it's a popular market - but one that the beginning hobbyist may shy away from thanks to perfectly-understandable concerns regarding trial-and-error engineering mixing poorly with 240V AC electricity supplies. Developer Peter Bailey has come up with a neat workaround for these concerns, however: build an Arduino-powered RF transmitter which communicates with a cheap, off-the-shelf remote-controlled passthrough mains relay. The result: the ability to control an attached mains-powered device through any interaction you can...

Developing software for the Arduino brings with it a number of challenges, not least of which is the amount of memory available. Where a modern desktop computer may have 8GB or more of memory, and even a mobile phone has 512MB or more, the popular Arduino Uno has just 2KB of SRAM built into its ATmega328 microcontroller chip. Even newer boards, such as the joint Intel-Arduino designed Genuino 101, measure the available RAM in kilobytes rather than megabytes. A microcontroller isn't a PC, though, and the programs you create will require considerably less memory than playing the latest games or...

Laser cutters are amazing machines, and increasingly accessible to the hobbyist maker thanks to projects like the Arduino-powered MicroSlice. There's just one fly in the ointment, however: software. The majority of commercial laser-cutting software is designed to run on Microsoft Windows, and while cross-platform equivalents exist they typically have a somewhat steeper learning curve. Enter LaserWeb. Created by Peter van der Walt and introduced to us by our friends over at Hackaday, LaserWeb is a cross-platform open-source laser cutting platform with a user interface accessible from any modern web browser and a wealth of features. As well as the ability...