A multitool that weighs less than a penny? Yes, it exists. This video by [ToolTechGeek] shows his titanium flat-cut design tipping the scales at only 1.9 grams—lighter than the 2.5-gram copper penny jingling in your pocket. His reasoning: where most everyday carry (EDC) tools are bulky, overpriced, or simply too much, this hack flips the […]
In a recent video our hacker [Electronic Wizard] introduces the 74HC595 shift register and explains how to use it to drive 7-segment displays. [Electronic Wizard] explains that understanding how to apply the 74HC595 can increase the quality of your projects and also help keep the demands on the number of pins from your microcontroller to […]
Over on his YouTube channel [Ryan Inis] has a video about how electrostatic motors are breaking all the rules. He explains that these days most motors are electromagnetic but suggests that may be changing as the age-old principles of electrostatics are being explored again, particularly due to the limited supply of rare-earth magnets and other materials […]
As you may have guessed given our name, we do love hacks around here, and this one is a great example of making some common, everyday things work in uncommon ways. [Nathan] sent in his hack to detect the door lock position in his basement. Having a house that dates back to the 1890s, much […]
Designing a circuit is a lot easier on paper, where components have well-defined values, or lacking that, at least well-defined tolerances. Unfortunately, even keeping percentage tolerances in mind isn’t always enough to make sure that circuits work correctly in the real world, as [Tahmid] demonstrates by diagnosing a buck converter with an oddly strong voltage […]
Normally when you think solar projects, you think of big photovoltaic cells. But a photodiode is just an inefficient, and usually much smaller, PV cell. Since [Pocket Concepts]’s Solar_nRF has such a low power budget, it can get away with using BPW34 photodiodes in place of batteries. (Video, embedded below.) The BPW34 silicon PIN photodiode […]
Over on Hackaday.io our hackers [Angelo] and [Oscarv] are making a replica of the PDP-1. That is interesting in and of itself but the particularly remarkable feature of this project is its novel use of printed circuit boards for casing and instrument panels. What does that mean in practice? It means creating a KiCad file […]
Our hacker [Avi Gupta] has sent in their submission for the One Hertz Challenge: the LoRaSense RGB Pi HAT. This “HAT” (Hardware Attached to Top) is for any Raspberry Pi with 40-pin header. The core of the build is the custom printed circuit board which houses the components and interconnects. The components include an SHT31 […]
Fermentation is a culinary art where tiny organisms transform simple ingredients into complex flavors — but they’re finicky about temperature. To keep his brewing setup at the perfect conditions, [Ken] engineered the Fermenter, a DIY insulated chamber controlled by Home Assistant for precision and remote monitoring. The Fermenter build starts with an insulated chamber constructed […]
Sometimes, there are too many choices in this world. My benchtop function generator can output a sine, square, or saw wave anywhere from 0.01 Hz up to 60 MHz? Way too many choices. At least, that’s what we suspect [Phil Weasel] was thinking when he built this Analog 1 Hz Sinewave Generator. A KiCad rendering […]