Last year, we brought you a story about the BhangmeterV2, an internet-of-things nuclear war monitor. With a cold-war-era HSN-1000 nuclear event detector at its heart, it had one job: announce to everything else on the network than an EMP was inbound, hopefully with enough time to shut down electronics. We were shocked to find out […]
Depending who you ask, 3D pens are silly toys or handy tools. Those who use them as tools find them handy to fill gaps in printed assemblies or to use them as a PLA or PETG-based hot glue gun for their prints. [half-baked-research] on YouTube is in the second category, but knows that welding is […]
Out of all of Batman’s massive array of tools which turn a relatively ordinary person into a superhero, perhaps his most utilitarian is his grappling gun — allowing him the ability to soar around his city like Spiderman or Superman. [John Boss] isn’t typically fighting crime, but he did develop his own grappling gun of […]
Picture this: you have an irregular opening you need to fabricate a piece to fill. Maybe it’s the stonework of a fireplace; maybe it’s the curved bulkhead of a ship. How do you get that shape? The most “Hackaday” answer would be to 3D scan the area, create a CAD model based on the point […]
MRI machines come with a variety of safety warnings. Perhaps most importantly, you have to be very careful not to take ferrous metal objects anywhere near them, since strong magnetic fields can send them flying, causing damage and injuries. To that end, you might find yourself in need of magnetically-safe tools when working on such […]
Even entry-level oscilloscopes today have simple math functions such as adding or subtracting two channels. But as [Arthur Pini] notes, more advanced scopes can now even do integration and differentiation. He writes about using these tools to make measurements on capacitors and inductors. The post in EDN is worth a read, even if your scope […]
Magnet placement tools are great because they remove finger fumbling while ensuring correct polarity every time. [EmGi] has made a further improvement by making a version that auto-feeds from an internal stack of magnets. A stack of magnets auto-feeds with every press of the plunger. That is a trickier task than one might imagine, because […]
Despite the best efforts of the manufacturers, there are folks out there that try to repair power tools, with [Dean Doherty] being one of them. Recently he got a Milwaukee M18 cordless planer in for repairs, which started off with just replacing some dodgy bearings, but ended up with diagnosing a faulty controller. Consequently the […]
[Michigan Rocks] says he avoided making rock spheres for a long time on account of the time and cost he imagined was involved. Well, all that is in the past in light of the fabulous results from his self-built Rock Sphere Machine! Turns out that it’s neither costly to make such a machine, nor particularly […]
Sometimes the simplest objects need some overthinking. This is exactly what [Chris Borge] realized when using his 3D scanner and finding that the included rotation table left quite a bit to be desired — providing him the perfect excuse to build a new one. One of the main features of a rotation stage is the, […]