Handling large volumes of physical media can be a bit of a chore, whether it’s about duplication or archiving. Fortunately this is a perfect excuse for building robotic contraptions, with the robots for handling optical media being both fascinating and mildly frustrating. When [Shelby Jueden] of Tech Tangents fame was looking at using these optical […]
Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing. The casting itself was inspired on the concept of the ouroboros, the snake which eats its own […]
Here’s a great hack sent in to us from [Simon]. He uses an e-paper photo frame as a weather map! By now you are probably aware of e-paper technology, which is very low power tech for displaying images. E-paper only uses energy when it changes its display, it doesn’t draw power to maintain a picture […]
An ongoing refrain with modern movies is “Why is all of this CG?”– sometimes, it seems like practical effects are simultaneously a dying art, while at the same time modern technology lets them rise to new hights. [Davis Dewitt] proves that second statement with his RC movie star “robot” for an upcoming feature film. The […]
Using USB for powering devices is wonderful, as it frees us from a tangle of incompatible barrel & TRS connectors, not to mention a veritable gaggle of proprietary power connectors. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that the obvious thing to do with power connectors is to introduce splitters, which can backfire horribly, especially since […]
On paper, electricity behaves in easy-to-understand, predictable ways. That’s mostly because the wires on the page have zero resistance and the switching times are actually zero, whereas in real life neither of these things are true. That’s what makes things like switch-mode power supplies (SMPS) difficult to build and troubleshoot. Switching inductors and capacitors tens […]
If you think sonic booms from supersonic aircraft are a nuisance, wait until the sky is full of planes propelled by up-scaled versions of this interesting but deafening audio resonance engine. Granted, there’s a lot of work to do before this “Sonic Ramjet” can fly even something as small as an RC plane. Creator [invalid_credentials] […]
The first attempt at replicating William McLellan’s miniature motor. (Credit: Chronova Engineering, YouTube) How small can an electric motor be without resorting to manufacturing methods like lithography? In a recent video, [Chronova Engineering] on YouTube tries to replicate the 1960 McLellan motor that fulfilled [Richard Feynman]’s challenge requirements. This challenge was part of [Feynman]’s 1959 […]
At Hackaday, we see community-driven open source development as the great equalizer. Whether it’s hardware or software — if there’s some megacorp out there trying to sell you something, you should have the option to go with a comparable open source version. Even if the commercial offering is objectively superior, it’s important that open source […]
Capacitive touch buttons are a great way to turn just about any (non-conductive) surface into a button, but people generally dislike the lack of tactile feedback. [KontinuumLab] apparently agreed and decided to experiment a bit with ways to make such buttons more springy. You can check out the results of those experiments in the video […]