Great things happen when we challenge ourselves. But when someone else says ‘I bet you can’t’ and you manage to pull it off, the reward is even greater. After [WilkoL] successfully made a tuning fork oscillator, his brother challenged him to make one out of a wine glass. We’ll drink to that! First, [WilkoL] needed […]
One of the more popular ways of rolling out your own custom PCB is to simply create the model in your CAD program of choice and send it off to a board manufacturer who will take care of the dirty work for you. This way there is no need to deal with things like chemicals, […]
The concept behind non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging seems fairly easy to grasp: a laser bounces photons off a surface that illuminate objects that are within in sight of that surface, but not of the imaging equipment. The photons that are then reflected or refracted by the hidden object make their way back to the laser’s location, […]
We assume your office policy allows for reading Hackaday during work hours. But what about cruising reddit, or playing Universal Paperclips? There’s a special kind of stress experienced when attempting to keep one eye on your display and the other on the doorway; all the while convinced the boss is about to waltz into the […]
The basic technology of radio hasn’t changed much since an Italian marquis first blasted telegraph messages across the Atlantic using a souped-up spark plug and a couple of coils of wire. Then as now, receiving radio waves relies on antennas of just the right shape and size to use the energy in the radio waves […]
You could be forgiven for thinking that laser cutters and engravers are purely two dimensional affairs. After all, when compared to something like your average desktop 3D printer, most don’t have much in the way of a Z axis: the head moves around at a fixed height over the workpiece. It’s not as if they […]
An interferometer sounds like something complicated, and in a way, it is. But it is also pretty easy to build one with some common materials. [Let’s Innovate] has instructions for how to make an interferometer using a green laser pointer, some mirrors, and a CD case. one of the most mundane parts, though, might be […]
When you’re talking about optics, things are often happening on a nanometer scale. This means that even the slightest amount of vibration can spoil delicate work. [The Thought Emporium] is working on a long-scale project to produce chocolate holograms, and needed a stable surface to set up some optical components. Thus, he decided to build […]
This booth was easy to miss at Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 amidst tall professional conference signage erected by adjacent exhibitors. It showcased the work of [Dr. Victor Chaney] who enjoys his day job as a dentist and thus feels no desire to commercialize his inventions — he’s building fun projects for the sake of […]
The average FDM 3D printer is not so different from your garden variety laser cutter. They’re often both Cartesian-coordinate based machines, but with different numbers of axes and mounting different tools. As [Gosse Adema] shows, turning a 3D printer into a laser cutter can actually be a remarkably easy job. The build starts with an […]