If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the […]
Remember Duracell’s PowerCheck? The idea was that a strip built into the battery would show if the battery was good or not. Sure, you could always get a meter or a dedicated battery tester — but PowerCheck put the tester right in the battery. [Technology Connections] has an interesting video on how these worked and […]
Most of us have made paper airplanes at one time or another, but rather than stopping at folded paper, [VirgileC] graduated to 3D printing them out of PLA. Then the obvious question is: can you cast one in cement? The answer is yes, you can, but note that the question was not: can a cement […]
If you’re looking for an intriguing aerial project, [DilshoD] has you covered with his unique twist on modular airships. The project, which you can explore in detail here, revolves around a modular airship composed of individual spherical bodies filled with helium or hydrogen—or even a vacuum—arranged in a 3x3x6 grid. The result? A potentially more […]
Flip digit clocks are a prized piece of consumer electrical ephemera, providing as they do a digital display without significant electronics. Making your own flip digit display involves some drudgery in the production of all those flip cards, but how would it seem if the complexity was reduced? Go from base 10 to base 2 […]
Tool changing 3D printers are hot. The idea is that instead of switching filament, you swap out hot ends or other tools. That isn’t a new idea. However, most tool changers are expensive. [Engineers Grow] has one that is simple and inexpensive, relying on the printer’s own motors and some clever mechanics. The first step […]
I recently wrote about using Klipper to drive my 3D printers, and one natural question is: Why use Klipper instead of Marlin? To some degree that’s like asking why write in one programming language instead of another. However, Klipper does offer some opportunities to extend the environment more easily. Klipper runs on a Linux host, […]
Using a STM32F429 Discovery board [Jan Zwiener] put together a Game Boy-compatible system called STM32Boy. It is based around the Peanut-GB Game Boy emulator core, which is a pretty nifty and fast single-header GB emulator library in C99. Considering that the average 32-bit MCU these days is significantly faster than the ~4 MHz 8-bit Sharp SM83 […]
Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we think of plastic as recyclable, too, that’s often not the case—while some plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are easily reused, others just aren’t. Indeed, the […]
ARM single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are great for some applications — if you need something that’s energy efficient or can fit into a tight space, they’re tough to beat. But sometimes you’re stuck in the middle: you need more computational muscle than the average SBC can bring to the table, but at the […]