Commodity bearings are a a boon for makers who to want something to rotate smoothly, but what if you don’t have one in a pinch? [Cliff] of might have the answer for you, in the form of 3D printed bearings with filament rollers. With the exception of the raw filament rollers, the inner and outer […]
What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or orange of sodium or the greenish-white of mercury, most municipalities have moved to energy-saving LED streetlights, with a bright white light that’s generally superior in […]
This week Jonathan Bennett and and Dan Lynch chat with Anthony Annunziata about Open Source AI and the AI Alliance. We get answers to our burning AI questions, and talk about the difficulty of defining what Open Source means for these large models. https://thealliance.ai/ Did you know you can watch the live recording of the […]
The Braun TS2 radio was a state-of-the art tube set in 1956. Today it still looks great, but unsurprisingly, the one that [Manuel Caldeier] has needed a little tender loving care. The table radio had a distinct style for its day and push-buttons. However, the dial glass and the speaker grill needed replacement. Even more […]
Visualization of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points. Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account lest one’s spacecraft ends up performing a sudden lithobraking maneuver into a planet or other significant collection of matter […]
If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the […]
Remember Duracell’s PowerCheck? The idea was that a strip built into the battery would show if the battery was good or not. Sure, you could always get a meter or a dedicated battery tester — but PowerCheck put the tester right in the battery. [Technology Connections] has an interesting video on how these worked and […]
Most of us have made paper airplanes at one time or another, but rather than stopping at folded paper, [VirgileC] graduated to 3D printing them out of PLA. Then the obvious question is: can you cast one in cement? The answer is yes, you can, but note that the question was not: can a cement […]
If you’re looking for an intriguing aerial project, [DilshoD] has you covered with his unique twist on modular airships. The project, which you can explore in detail here, revolves around a modular airship composed of individual spherical bodies filled with helium or hydrogen—or even a vacuum—arranged in a 3x3x6 grid. The result? A potentially more […]
Flip digit clocks are a prized piece of consumer electrical ephemera, providing as they do a digital display without significant electronics. Making your own flip digit display involves some drudgery in the production of all those flip cards, but how would it seem if the complexity was reduced? Go from base 10 to base 2 […]