High-capacity lithium batteries tend to make everything in life better. No longer must you interact with your fellow human beings if your car battery goes flat in the carpark. You can jump the car yourself, with a compact device that fits in your glovebox. [Big Clive] decided to pull one apart and peek inside, and […]
Sometimes it’s necessary to make do with whatever parts one has on hand, but the results of squashing a square peg into a round hole are not always as elegant as [Juan Gg]’s programmable DC load with rotary encoder. [Juan] took a design for a programmable DC load and made it his own in quite […]
Microcontrollers are wonderfully useful things, but programming them can be a little daunting if you’re used to the simplicity of compiling for regular PCs. Over time though, this has become easier. Communities have strayed away from assembly code and created higher-level languages such as Micropython, to allow these devices to be programmed in a more […]
We love to see projects revisited, especially when new materials or methods make it worth giving the first design another go around. This twin-turbine vacuum-powered Dremel tool is a perfect example of what better tools can do for a build. You may recall [JohnnyQ90]’s first attempt at a vacuum powered rotary tool. That incarnation, very similar […]
If you had asked us yesterday what peak nightlight technology looked like, we might have said one of those LED panels that you stick in the outlet. At least it beats one of those little wimpy light bulbs behind the seashell, anyway. But after looking at a detailed teardown of the “Glow Light” from Casper, […]
ToorCamp is a five-day open air tech camping event held every two years somewhere around the northwest corner of Washington state. Think of it as something like Burning Man, except you can survive for three hours without water, there aren’t a whole bunch of scenesters and Instagram celebs flying in on private planes, and everyone […]
Don’t get me wrong. Like most people, there’s nothing I enjoy more than solving a long, involved math problem by hand. But, sometimes, a few pages of algebraic scratches on paper is just a means to an end. I find this especially true during electronic design sessions, be it circuit design or PCB layout; I […]
We’ve all seen brightly-colored pieces of aluminum and can identify them as anodized. But what does that mean, exactly? A recent video from [Ariel Yahni] starring [Wawa] — a four-legged assistant — shows how to create pieces like this yourself. You can see [Wawa’s] new dog tag, below. [Ariel] found a lot of how to […]
We can make our 3D-printed parts even more capable when we start mixing them with some essential “mechanical vitamins.” By combining prints with screws, nuts, fasteners, and pins, we get a rich ecosystem for mechanism-making with capabilities beyond what we could simply print alone. Today I’d like to share some tips on one of my […]
Spoiler alert: No. To come to that conclusion, which runs counter to the combined wisdom of several recent YouTube videos, [Andrew McNeil] ran a pretty neat little experiment. [Andrew] has a not inconsiderable amount of expertise in this area, as an RF engineer and prolific maker of many homebrew WiFi antennas, some of which we’ve […]