During World War II, as the Allies planned the invasion of Normandy, there was one major hurdle to overcome—logistics. In particular, planners needed to guarantee a solid supply of fuel to keep the mechanized army functional. Tanks, trucks, jeeps, and aircraft all drink petroleum at a prodigious rate. The challenge, then, was to figure out […]
Assuming you’re not stuck in a prison cell without windows, you could feasibly keep track of the moon and tides by walking outside and jotting things down in your notebook. Alternatively, you could save a lot of hassle by just building this moon and tide clock from [pjdines1994] instead. The build is based on a […]
We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s just not working. You open it up to attempt a repair, but you could really use some information on what you’re […]
Connected devices are ubiquitous in our era of wireless chips heavily relying on streaming data to someone else’s servers. This sentence might already start to sound dodgy, and it doesn’t get better when you think about today’s smart glasses, like the ones built by Meta (aka Facebook). [sh4d0wm45k] doesn’t shy away from fighting fire with […]
Want to know if somebody is lying? It’s always so hard to tell. [dbmaking] has whipped up a fun little polygraph, otherwise known as a lie detector. It’s nowhere near as complex as the ones you’ve seen on TV, but it might be just as good when it comes to finding the truth. The project […]
Although it might seem like there was a sudden step change from analog to digital sometime in the late 1900s, it was actually a slow, gradual change from things like record players to iPods or from magnetic tape to hard disk drives. Some of these changes happened slowly within the same piece of hardware, too. […]
A mosquito has a very finely tuned proboscis that is excellent at slipping through your skin to suck out the blood beneath. Researchers at McGill University recently figured that the same biological structure could also prove useful in another was—as a fine and precise nozzle for 3D printing (via Tom’s Hardware). Small prints made with […]
[Aditya Sripada] and [Abhishek Warrier]’s TARS3D robot came from asking what it would take to make a robot with the capabilities of TARS, the robotic character from Interstellar. We couldn’t find a repository of CAD files or code but the research paper for TARS3D explains the principles, which should be enough to inspire a motivated […]
To those of us who live in the civilized lands where ~230 VAC mains is the norm and we can shove a cool 3.5 kW into an electric kettle without so much as a second thought, the mere idea of trying to boil water with 120 VAC and a tepid 1.5 kW brings back traumatic […]
Playing the drums requires a lot of practice, but that practice can be incredibly loud. A nice workaround is presented by [PocketBoy], in converting an acoustic kit to electronic operation so you can play with headphones instead. A sensor installed inside a floor tom. It might sound like a complicated project, but creating a basic […]