History is full of engineers making (or attempting to make) things out of the wrong stuff, from massive wooden aircraft to boats made of ice and sawdust. [PeterSripol] is attempting to make an ultralight aircraft out of a rather wrong material: cardboard. In the previous installment of the project, a pair of wings was fabricated. […]
[Miroslav Hancar] wasn’t satisfied with abusing just a single component for our Component Abuse Challenge. He decided to abuse a whole assembly, in particular, some LED candles. In this project, LEDs are abused as temperature sensors. When the temperature gets hot enough for long enough, the microcontroller will turn on its LEDs. How? A diode’s […]
Anything with a laser has undeniable hacker appeal, even if the laser’s task is as pedestrian as sending data over a fiber optic cable. [Shahriar] from [The Signal Path] must agree, and you can watch as he tears down and investigates a fiber optic link made from old HP equipment in the video below. He […]
The eccentric shaft and rotor of the Mazda 12A rotary engine. (Credit: Baked Beans Garage, YouTube) In theory, Wankel-style rotary internal combustion engines have many advantages: they ditch the cumbersome crankcase and piston design, replacing it with a simple, single-chamber design and a thick, plectrum-shaped chunk of metal that spins around inside that chamber to […]
There is a point where taking technology for granted hides some of the incredible capabilities of seemingly simple devices. Optical mice are a great example of this principle, using what are more or less entirely self-contained cameras just for moving the cursor across your screen. Don’t believe us? Check out this camera made from an […]
Most of us know that a neon bulb requires a significant voltage to strike, in the region of 100 volts. There are plenty of circuits to make that voltage from a lower supply, should you wish to have that comforting glow of old, but perhaps one of the simplest comes from [meinsamayhun]. The neon is […]
While it sounds like the start of a joke, Australian shipmaker Incat Tasmania isn’t kidding around about electric ships. Hull 096 has started charging, although it has only 85% of the over 5,000 lithium-ion batteries it will have when complete. The ship has a 40 megawatt-hour storage system with 12 banks of batteries, each consisting […]
Old parts such as EPROMs will often find themselves for sale on sites such as eBay, where they are sometimes snapped up by retrocomputing enthusiasts in search of interesting code. Vintage Computer Federation forum member [GearTechWolf] picked up a clutch of IBM-labelled chips, and as int10h reports, stumbled upon a previously unknown PC-AT BIOS version […]
Over on Hackaday.IO our hacker [bornach] has his entry into the Component Abuse Challenge: Inductors are Wireless Power Sources. Some time back [bornach] was gifted a Qi wireless charging base station but didn’t own any compatible devices. He had a dig around in his junk box for inductors to attempt coupling to the wireless charger […]