It’s an sad scene: your alarm clock starts blaring at 7am. You’re groggy and trying to rub the final remnants of a dream from your eyes. You know you need to climb out of bed soon in order to have the time to drink some coffee and still get to…

Before we all ended up with smartphones consisting of nothing more than a giant touchscreen, we had dumb phones with just a sufficient number of physical keys to make a phone call. Yet, we were able to quickly type out text messages — often without even looking at the screen…

IoT (Internet of Things) and home automation systems promise to simplify your daily routines by automatically performing repetitive tasks. For example, you can set your coffee maker to turn on at a specific time in the morning so your caffeinated bean juice is hot and ready when you get out…

It can be hard to know where to start if you’re interested in learning about robotics. You want something simple enough to not be overwhelming, but with enough versatility and capability to provide the depth for real learning. That’s particularly true if you want to learn about more complex kinds…

The term “augmented reality” usually describes technology that lays virtual graphics on top of the real world. Pokémon Go, for example, uses augmented reality to display virtual Pokémon in the environment that your phone’s camera is pointed at. But what if you reversed that, and used augmented reality to display…

Autism is a spectrum, and many people with the spectrum spend their lives without ever even being diagnosed. That was especially true in the past, which is part of the reason for the apparent rise of autism in recent years. Others, however, have more severe symptoms that can have a…

You can build a complex robot or animatronic with many motors and degrees of freedom, but that’s only half of the battle. You also need a way to control or program their motions. At the lowest level, you can explicitly program motor movement commands. However, that quickly becomes a laborious…

The Matrix was a hit, and now a favorite among hackers, for a lot of reasons. One of the most intriguing plot devices in the movie was the characters’ ability to download new skills. For instance, Neo is able to instantaneously learn advanced martial arts techniques — at least within…

All hardware and software that is developed can be categorized as either open source or proprietary. If something is proprietary, that means the resulting product can be sold or be given away for free , but that the underlying code or design isn’t made accessible. While specific licenses do vary…