Consumer-grade 3D printing is good for prototyping and making relatively soft plastic stuff. If you wanna make tough things, though, it’s really hard to beat the strength of metal. [Shake the Future] has produced a guide on using 3D printing in a process to produce solid parts out of actual cast iron. The concept is […]
One of the most common ways of comparing the processing power of some microcontroller or older smartphone in a fantastical way was to say that they had more processing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer. While this sounds impressive on the surface, the AGC was the first integrated circuit computer ever built and is predictably […]
One might think that [Da_Rius]’s mostly 3D printed wire stripper would count its insulation-shearing blades among the small number of metal parts required, but that turns out to not be the case. The blades are actually printed in PLA, seem to work just fine for this purpose. (We imagine they need somewhat frequent replacement, but […]
Check your tape for spider nests before rewinding. (Credit: Brady Brandwood, YouTube) Physical media has a certain amount of durability associated with it, a quality which is naturally determined by the way that they’re stored. Generally this does not involve being abandoned on the porch of a delipidated, abandoned house where the elements and any […]
Many people base huge swaths of their lives on foundational philosophical texts, yet few have read them in their entirety. The one that springs to the forefront of many of our minds is The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth. Full of many clever and outright revolutionary algorithms and new ways of thinking about […]
In the maker world, it’s the Arduino and ESP32 lines that get the lion’s share of attention. However, you can do fantastic things with PIC chips, too, if you put the dev time in—it’s just perhaps less likely another maker has done so before you. A great example is this VGA output project from [grecotron]. […]
Digital clock projects have been with us since the 1970s, when affordable LEDs and integrated circuits became available. In 2026 most of them use a microcontroller, but for the AliExpress fans there’s one that goes straight back to the ’70s with a pile of logic chips. You can make it on the supplied PCBs, but […]
This week Jonathan chats with Milo Schwartz about Pangolin, the Open Source tunneling solution. Why do we need something other than Wireguard, and how does Pangolin fix IoT and IT problems? And most importantly, how do you run your own self-hosted Pangolin install? Watch to find out! GitHub: https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin How Pangolin Works: https://docs.pangolin.net/about/how-pangolin-works Y Combinator: […]