Over the eight-day, 3-hour Apollo 11 mission, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins stayed in constant communication with mission control and supporting teams. The back-and-forth conversations, which took place over what are called communication “loops,” were released to the media, because NASA is required to make its work public. But these fragile physical recordings had to be stored in special, climate-controlled vaults.
Now, thanks to a dedicated collaborative effort between NASA and the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), all 19,000 hours of audio recordings from the Apollo 11 mission have been converted into a digital format and are available online.
Eink, E-paper, Think Ink – Collin shares six segments pondering the unusual low-power display technology that somehow still seems a bit sci-fi – http://adafruit.com/thinkink
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
