Running out of filament mid-print is a surefire way to ruin your parts and waste a lot of time. [LayerLab] was sick of having this problem, and so sought to find a proper solution. Unfortunately, between off-the-shelf solutions and homebrew attempts, he was unable to solve the problem to his satisfaction. [LayerLab] had a simple […]
Having owned an Amiga microcomputer is apparently a little bit like having shaken hands with Shoggoth: no one can escape unchanged from the experience. Thirty-two years on, [Neil] at The Retro Collective remains haunted by the memories — specifically, the memory of BlitzBasic 2, an Amiga-specific programming language he never found the time to use. […]
These days, if you want to flash some LEDs, you’d probably grab a microcontroller. Maybe you’d go a little more old-school, and grab a 555. However, [Jacob] is even more hardcore than that, as evidenced by this chunky electromechanical flasher build. [Jacob] goes into great detail on his ancillary write-up, describing how the simple building […]
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 […]
There are plenty of conventional timepieces out there in the world; we’ve also featured a great many that are aesthetically beautiful while being unreadably esoteric. This neat “shadow clock” from [Smart Solutions for Home] is not conventional, but it’s still a clock you could use every day. The display is made of four seven-segment digits, […]
If you want to save a little money on a thermal camera, or if you just enjoy making your own, you should have a look at [Evan Yu’s] GitHub repository, which has a well thought out project built around the MLX90640 and an ESP32. The cost is well under $100. You can watch it do […]
We can’t throw stones. [Leaded Solder] picked up a SparcStation 1+ in 2018 and found it only produced illegal instruction errors. We’re sure he’s like us and meant to get back to it, and, instead, it sat on the bench, taking up space. You eventually have to move it, though, so seven years later, it […]
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 […]