As somebody who loves technology and wildlife and also needs to develop an old farmhouse, going down the bat detector rabbit hole was a journey hard to resist. Bats are ideal animals for hackers to monitor as they emit ultrasonic frequencies from their mouths and noses to communicate with each other, detect their prey and […]
Leaving no stone unturned in his quest for alternative and improbable ways to generate lift, [Tom Stanton] has come up with some interesting aircraft over the years. But this time he isn’t exactly flying, with this unusual Coandă effect hovercraft. If you’re not familiar with the Coandă effect, neither were we until [Tom] tried to […]
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. At least that’s what the [Sprice Machines] thought when they decided to turn a house into the set of a 9-minute long Rube Goldberg machine to make lemonade. (Video embedded below.) The complex chain reactions runs across multiple rooms, using everyday objects like brooms and even a […]
Jibo, the adorable robot made by Jibo, Inc., was getting phased out, but that didn’t stop [Guilherme Martins] from using his robot companion for one last hack. When he found out that the company would be terminating production of new Jibos and shutting down their servers, he wanted to replace the brain of the robot […]
Transformers are deceptively simple devices. Just coils of wire sharing a common core, they tempt you into thinking you can make your own, and in many cases you can. But DIY transformers have their limits, as [Great Scott!] learned when he tried to 3D-print his own power transformer. To be fair, the bulk of the […]
Some 3D printers will give you prints with surfaces resembling salmon skin – not exactly the result you want when you’re looking for a high-quality print job. On bad print jobs, you can usually notice that the surface is shaking – even on the millimeter scale, this is enough to give the print a bumpy […]
Automakers continue to promise that fully autonomous cars are around the corner, but we’re still not quite there yet. However, there are a broad range of driver assist technologies that have come to market in recent years, with lane keeping assist being one of them. [raja_961] decided to implement this technology on an RC car, […]
Light painting has long graced the portfolios of long-exposure photographers, but high resolution isn’t usually possible when you’re light painting with human subjects. This weekend project from [Timmo] uses an ESP8266-based microcontroller and an addressable WS2812-based LED strip to paint words or custom images in thin air. It’s actually based on the Pixelstick, a tool […]
The may very well be the smallest homemade TTL CPU we’ve ever seen. Measuring at one square inch, this tiny chip boasts 40 connections, an 8-bit databus, a 16-bit address bus, a 64 kB memory space, reset and clock inputs, and 5 V power lines. TTL (transistor transistor logic) logic chips are pretty outdated today, […]