Make 3D-Modeling Child’s Play with a Can of Play-Doh
You need to replicate a small part on a 3-D printer, so you start getting your tools together. Calipers, rulers, and a sketch pad at a minimum, and if you’re extra fancy, maybe you pull out a...
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Biasing That Transistor: The Common Emitter Amplifier
If you open up the perennial favourite electronics textbook The Art Of Electronics and turn to the section on transistors, you will see a little cartoon. A transistor is shown as a room in which...
View ArticleHacked Fitness Trackers Aim to Improve Mental and Physical Health
We all know that the mind can affect the body in dramatic ways, but we tend to associate this with things like the placebo effect or psychosomatic illnesses. But subtle clues to the mind-body...
View ArticleSuper Simple, Super Cheap FPV Drone Tracking
What’s more disruptive to the drone first-person view (FPV) experience than dropouts in your video feed when you’re in the middle of a race? Probably nothing, and there’s probably also not much you can...
View ArticleGiving An LED Bulb Some Smarts
How many of your projects been spawned purely out of bored daydreaming? For want of something more productive to do, [dantheflipman] hacked a standard LED bulb from Wal-Mart into a smart bulb. After...
View ArticleSimple Home-built Projection Clock Projects Time
There are plenty of cheap projection clocks available, but as [Thomas Pototschnig] points out in this project, where’s the fun in just buying something? He set out to build a cheap projection clock...
View ArticleHardware Acceleration in the Cloud
Computers are great at a lot of things. However, general-purpose computers can benefit from help on certain tasks, which is why your video card and sound card both have their own specialized hardware...
View ArticleFail Of The Week: Never Assume All Crystals Are Born Equal
You should be used to our posting the hacks that didn’t quite go according to plan under our Fail Of The Week heading, things that should have worked, but due to unexpected factors, didn’t. They are...
View ArticleCrawling a Dungeon, 64 Pixels at a Time
The trend in video games is toward not being able to differentiate them from live-action theatrical releases, and games studios are getting hard to tell from movie studios. But quality graphics don’t...
View ArticleGlow In The Dark Globe On A Spherical Screen
Terrestrial globes are almost a thing of the past in an era of Google Earth, but they can still be an exciting object worth hacking together, as [Ivan Miranda] shows with his glow-in-the-dark globe....
View ArticleHam Reviews MiniVNA
[KB9RLW] wanted to build a vector network analyzer (VNA), but then realized he could buy a ready-made one without nearly the cost it would have been only a few years ago. The network in this case, by...
View ArticleA Home Network, Security System, And A Hidden Room Behind A Bookcase
Ok, now this is something special. This is a home network and security system that would make just about anyone stop, and with jaw hanging agape, stare, impressed at the “several months of effort” it...
View ArticleHurricane Simulator Buoys Research
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In this case, 38,000 gallons of seawater is worth an un-quantifiable amount of knowledge about hurricanes. At the University of Miami’s...
View Article3D Printed Bicycle Tire Not Full of Hot Air
To show off its new TPU filament called PRO FLEX, BigRep GmbH posted a video showing a 3D printed bike tire that uses a flexible plastic structure instead of air. The video shows them driving the bike...
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The Aluminum Wiring Fiasco
Someone who decides to build a house faces a daunting task. It’s hard enough to act as the general contractor for someone else, but when you decide to build your own house, as my parents did in the...
View ArticleDouble The Resolution, From An Arduino ADC
Analog-to-digital converters, or ADCs, are somewhat monolithic devices for most users, a black box that you ask nicely for the value on its input, and receive a number in return. For most readers, they...
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Printed It: Toolbag Essentials
While complex devices assembled from 3D printed components are certainly impressive, it’s the simple prints that have always held the most appeal to me personally. Being able to pick an object up off...
View ArticleSmartwatch Fights Anxiety with Action
In our fast-paced modern world, it’s no wonder that so many suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. There are several time-worn techniques for dealing with the symptoms of these attacks. But as anyone...
View ArticleAlexa, Attack Intruders
If our doom at the hands of our robot overlords is coming, I for one welcome the chance to get a preview of how they might go about it. That’s the idea behind Project Icarus, an Alexa-enabled...
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How to Build Anything Out of Aluminum Extrusion and 3D Printed Brackets
The real power of 3D printing is in infinite customization of parts. This becomes especially powerful when you combine 3D printing with existing materials. I have been developing a few simple tricks to...
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