Pi Pico Enhances RadioShack Computer Kit

While most of us now remember Radio Shack as a store that tried to force us to buy batteries and cell phones whenever we went to buy a few transistors and other circuit components, for a time it wa…

Upgrading At Least One Component Of A TI Calculator

Even though Texas Instruments were the first company to produce an integrated circuit and a microprocessor, their success as a company in the 60s and 70s was not guaranteed. At the time there wasn&…

The Early History Of The Microcontroller: It Came From Texas

Although for most generations alive today the era of microcontrollers (MCU) feels like it starts somewhere with the Intel 8051 and AVR MCUs, the history of these self-contained computing marvels th…

Perfecting The Pulse Oximeter

We’re always looking for interesting biohacks here on Hackaday, and this new research article describing a calibrated pulse oximeter for different skin tones really caught our attention. Puls…

An Oscilloscope Trigger For Vintage Video Processors

Working on retro computers is rarely straightforward, as [ukmaker] recently found out while designing a new display interface. Their oscilloscope was having trouble triggering on the video signal p…

Exploring Texas Instrument’s Forgotten CPU

Texas Instruments isn’t the name you usually hear associated with the first microprocessor. But the TI TMX 1795 was an 8008 chip produced months before the 8008. It was never available commer…

Flashing TI Chips With An ESP

Texas Instruments is best known to the general public for building obsolete calculators and selling them at extraordinary prices to students, but they also build some interesting (and reasonably-pr…

Talking To A Texas Instruments Calculator

Texas Instruments is a world-class semiconductors company, but unfortunately what they are best known for among the general public is dated consumer-grade calculators thanks to entrenched standardi…

Hacking An Obsolete Yet Modern Calculator

The gold standard for graphing calculators, at least in the US, are the Texas Instruments TI-84 series. Some black sheep may have other types, but largely due to standardized testing these calculat…

New Part Day: DLP300s The Next Big Thing For Low Cost Resin Printing?

The majority of non-SLA resin 3D printers, certainly at the hacker end of the market, are most certainly LCD based. The SLA kind, where a ultraviolet laser is scanner via galvanometers over the bui…