HackSpace Magazine Issue 43 – Only the Best: Mini Hot Plate Preheater via Adafruit Industries

Sometimes a soldering iron just isn’t the right tool for the job. After you learn to solder through-hole  components, you’ll often find yourself soldering surface mount components. And although you can solder them by hand, a reflow oven or hotplate is much easier and more reliable. They can be big and expensive, but not this little hotplate from Adafruit. I know a few people who have this handy little hotplate, and it works great. It’s perfect for rework, preheating, or even reflowing solder paste. Just make sure your PCB is small because it’s only 30 mm × 30 mm.

Read HackSpace Magazine Issue 43 – Only the Best: Mini Hot Plate Preheater @HackSpaceMag @Adafruit via Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

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Tell time and temperature with sliding numbers via Arduino Blog [Arduino]

While dial clocks are functional and well-understood, for something a bit more uniquely styled, Luuk Esselbrugge has created a 3D-printed timekeeping unit with four rows of sliding numbers.

Read Tell time and temperature with sliding numbers via Arduino Blog

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Do You Fear the Robots? (CARTOON) via Small Business Trends

Read Do You Fear the Robots? (CARTOON) via Small Business Trends

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Algorithm Visualizer

 

# Algorithm Visualizer

> Algorithm Visualizer is an interactive online platform that visualizes algorithms from code.

[](https://github.com/algorithm-visualizer/algorithm-visualizer/graphs/contributors)
[](https://github.com/algorithm-visualizer/algorithm-visualizer/blob/master/LICENSE)

Learning an algorithm gets much easier with visualizing it. Don't get what we mean? Check it out:

Visit Algorithm Visualizer

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Random Robot Makes Random Art via hack a day [Raspberry Pi]

For the price of a toothbrush and a small motor with an offset weight, a bristlebot is essentially the cheapest robot that can be built. The motor shakes the toothbrush and the bristle pattern allows the robot to move, albeit in a completely random pattern. While this might not seem like a true robot that can interact with its environment in any meaningful way, [scanlime] shows just how versatile this robot – which appears to only move randomly – can actually be used to make art in non-random ways.

Instead of using a single bristlebot for the project, three of them are built into one 3D printed flexible case where each are offset by 120°, and which can hold a pen in the opening in the center. This allows them to have some control on the robot’s direction of movement. From there, custom software attempts to wrangle the randomness of the bristlebot to produce a given image. Of course, as a bristlebot it is easily subjected to the whims of its external environment such as the leveling of the table and even the small force exerted by the power/communications tether.

Read Random Robot Makes Random Art via hack a day

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When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked via JSTOR Daily

The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late nineteenth century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation.

Read When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked via JSTOR Daily

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The TMD-1 is a Turing machine demonstrator via Arduino Blog [Arduino]

According to Michael Gardi, although you can find numerous stunning Turing machine implementations on the Internet, their complexity tends to detract from the simplicity of what a Turing machine actually does. In order to easily show how they work, he decided to create a demonstrator with the actual calculations handled by an Arduino Mega.

The console, dubbed TMD-1, displays a “tape” state on the top of the device using eight servo-controlled flip tiles that write 1s or 0s, while a series of lighted arrows indicate the program’s position. On the bottom surface, users can program instructions with magnetic tiles, and read the current machine state via LEDs.

Read The TMD-1 is a Turing machine demonstrator via Arduino Blog

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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

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How to stop Amazon Echo from asking you to buy stuff via CNBC

• In a thread on Reddit over the weekend, some Amazon Echo owners complained about unwanted commercial messages from Alexa.
• Sometimes if you ask Alexa a question, like the time, it’ll follow up with asking if you want recommendations for things to buy.
• Here’s how to stop Alexa from doing that.

Read How to stop Amazon Echo from asking you to buy stuff via CNBC

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How Binary Search Makes Computers Much, Much Faster via Tom Scott on YouTube [Video]

Sinclair BASIC For Today via Hackaday

If you are of a certain age, your first exposure to computer programming was probably BASIC. For a few years, there were few cheaper ways to program in BASIC than the Sinclair ZX series of computers. If you long for those days, you might find the 1980-something variant of BASIC a little limiting. Or you could use SpecBasic from [Paul Dunn].

SpecBasic is apparently reasonably compatible with the Spectrum, but lets you use your better hardware. For example, instead of a 256×192 8-color screen, SpecBas accommodates larger screens and up to 256 colors. However, that does lead to certain incompatibilities that you can read about in the project’s README file.

Read Sinclair BASIC For Today via Hackaday

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