There’s a famous old story about [Charles Steinmetz] fixing a generator for [Henry Ford]. He charged a lot of money for putting a chalk X in the spot that needed repair. When [Ford] asked for an itemization, the bill read $1 for the chalk, and the balance for knowing where to draw the X. With […]
Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Yuchi] is building an STM32 BLDC motor winding machine. This machine is for winding brushless motors because manual winding is highly labor intensive. The machine in turn is made from four brushless motors. He is using the SimpleFOC library to implement closed-loop angle control. Closed-loop torque control is […]
The Franck–Hertz experiment was a pioneering physics observation announced in 1914 which explained that energy came in “packets” which we call “quanta”, marking the beginning of quantum physics. Recently, [Markus Bindhammer] wrote in to let us know he had redone the experiment for himself. In the original experiment a mercury vacuum tube was used, but […]
Balancing robots are always fun to see, as they often take forms we’re not used to, such as a box standing on its corner. This project, submitted by [Alexchunlin], showcases a cool single motor reaction cube, where he dives into many lessons learned during its creation. At the outset, [Alexchunlin] thought this would be a […]
Today in old school nostalgia our tipster [Clint Jay] wrote in to let us know about this rotary dial. If you’re a young whippersnapper you might never have seen a rotary dial. These things were commonly used on telephones back in the day, and they were notoriously slow to use. The way they work is […]
Our hacker [Valve Child] wrote in to let us know about his Back to the Future lunchbox cyberdeck. Great Scott! This is so awesome. We’re not sure what we should say, or where we should begin. A lot of you wouldn’t have been there, on July 3rd, 1985, nearly forty years ago. But we were […]
If you think of a 1960s mainframe computer, it’s likely that your mental image includes alongside the cabinets with the blinkenlights, a row of reel-to-reel tape drives. These refrigerator-sized units had a superficial resemblance to an audio tape deck, but with the tape hanging down in a loop either side of the head assembly. This […]
Over on Hackaday.io there’s a fun and playful write-up for a fun and playful project — the Piko, an ESP32 powered smartwatch. Our hackers [Iloke Alusala], [Lulama Lingela], and [Rafael Cardoso] teamed up to design and manufacture this wrist-worn fitness wearable. Made from an ESP32 Beetle C6 and using an attached accelerometer with simple thresholds […]
Here is a hacker showing off their engineering chops. This video shows successive design iterations for a LEGO vehicle which can cross increasingly large gaps. At the time of writing this video from [Brick Experiment Channel] has been seen more than 110,000,000 times, which is… rather a lot. We guess with a view count like […]