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DIY Dispenser Places Solder Paste Without The Mess
When doing surface-mount assembly you can certainly use a soldering iron in the traditional way, but it’s far more convenient to cover the pads with solder paste, place the components, and bake the...
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Hackaday Links: February 16, 2020
Have you heard the exciting news about Betelgeuse? It’s been hard to miss these days, with reports of the red supergiant star suddenly dimming, and speculation growing that the star will go supernova...
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Closed Ham Radio Peripheral Reveals Its Windows Secrets
The student radio society in Trondhjem owns a Flex 6500-radio, with its associated Maestro panel peripheral. This is a software defined radio, and the Maestro is a computer containing just enough of...
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Amp Volt Ohm Meter Model 8 Mark III from the 1960s
There’s hardly any piece of test equipment more fundamental than a volt ohm meter. Today you’re likely to have a digital one, but for most of history, these devices had real needle meters. The...
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Transparent LCD Makes Everything Look Futuristic
According to [Kelsey], transparent displays are guaranteed to make “everything feel like the future.” Unfortunately they’re hard to find, and the ones typically available are OLED and can’t make solid...
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Sherbet Custom Game Pad is Smooth and Sweet
When [Billiam]’s beloved Logitech G13 game pad went to that great spectate room in the sky, he decided to pay homage by designing a custom, more ergonomic replacement from the desk up. Grab a spoon and...
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Cable Operated Blast Door Needs No Power
Every well-equipped wood shop has a dust collection system, with blast gates at every tool to direct the suction power where you need it. If these gates are hard to reach they can be real pain to...
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What Does Your Necklace Say?
If we write about sound reproduction, there is a good chance we found a home-made amplifier or an upcycled speaker system. In this case, you don’t use your ears to appreciate the sound; you use your...
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Wearable Cone of Silence Protects You from Prying Ears
Careful, the walls have ears. Or more specifically, the smart speaker on the table has ears, as does the phone in your pocket, the fitness band on your wrist, possibly the TV, the fridge, the...
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Foxie Clock Works In Two Ways
Nixie tubes are a hacker favorite for their warm glow and elegant, mid-century numerals. They’re also a pain to drive, demand high voltages, and aren’t exactly cheap and easy to come by. Never mind,...
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MQTT And The Internet Of Conference Badges
Today, nearly every modern consumer device wants to connect to the Internet for some reason. From your garage door opener to each individual smart bulb, the Internet of Things has arrived in full...
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Adding A Digital Readout To A Wood Lathe
The benefit of living in the modern era is that there are plenty of affordable machine tools on the market for the budding maker. However, to meet lower price points, products often forgo some of the...
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Everything You Wanted to Know About 3D Printing Support but Were Afraid to Ask
At the dawn of 3D printing, support structures were something to avoid. ABS is a hard substance to clear off, and the slicers did a comparatively poor job of making structures that were easy to...
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MNIST Clock Uses Famous Training Database
When training neural networks to recognise things, what you need is a big pile of training data. You then need a subsequent pile of testing data to verify that the network is working as you’d expect....
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Machine Inside of a Chip: How Sprite_TM Built the FPGA Game Boy Badge
Kids of the 1990’s would call you a liar if you told them that within thirty years you’d go to a conference and be handed a Super Nintendo Entertainment System to wear around your neck. But that’s what...
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Lil’ ESP32 Bot Does Remote Surveillance, And It’s Easy
Digital cameras have been around for a long time, as have small remote control robotics platforms. However, combining the two has really only come into its own in the last decade or so, as more...
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The CarolinaCon 16 Badge Slithers Into Life
It’s something of an unwritten rule at this point that you can’t hold a hacking conference without providing a badge with at least a few LEDs on it. Not only can they be a great way to learn...
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Solid State Relay Simulation, Explained
[SaltyPuglord] needed a solid state relay for a project. We’d have just bought one, but he decided to design his own in LTSpice. Along the way he made the video below, which is pretty informative and...
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Password Keeper Uses Off-The-Shelf Formfactor
With every website these days demanding the creation of an account, it can become difficult to remember so many logins. Each password should ideally be unique, lest a leak from your fantasy football...
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DIY Power Station Puts Ryobi Batteries to Work
Anyone with a few cordless tools has probably amassed quite a collection of batteries for them. If you’re a professional contractor, having a fleet of batteries you can swap out during the day’s work...
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