If you’re looking for a more open, unenclosed 3D printer design than a cubic frame can accommodate, but don’t want to use a bed-slinger, you don’t have many options. [Boothy Builds] recently found himself in this situation, so he designed the Hi5, a printer that holds its hotend between two cantilevered arms. The hotend uses […]
Display technology has come a long way since the advent of the CRT in the late 1800s (yes, really!). Since then, we’ve enjoyed the Nixie tubes, flip dots, gas plasma, LCD, LED, ePaper, the list goes on. Now, there’s a new kid on the block — water. [Steve Mould] recently got his hands on an […]
If you’ve worked with germanium transistors, you’ll know that many of them have a disappointingly low maximum frequency of operation. This has more to do with some of the popular ones dating from the earliest years of the transistor age than it does to germanium being inherently a low frequency semiconductor, but it’s fair to […]
There are many ways to learn, but few to none of them compare to that of spending time standing over the shoulder of a master of the craft. This awesome page sent in by [JohnU] is a fantastic corner of the internet that lets us all peek over that shoulder to see someone who’s not […]
Sometimes, all you need to make something work is to come at it from a different angle from anyone else — flip the problem on its head, so to speak. That’s what [Keizo Ishibashi] did to create his Cantareel, a modified guitar that actually sounds like a hurdy-gurdy. We wrote recently about a maker’s quest […]
Few electronic ICs can claim to be as famous as the 555 timer. Maybe part of the reason is that the IC doesn’t have a specific function. It has a lot of building blocks that you can use to create timers and many other kinds of circuits. Now [Stoppi] has decided to make a 555 […]
Magnetic Core memory was the RAM at the heart of many computer systems through the 1970s, and is undergoing something of a resurgence today since it is easiest form of memory for an enterprising hacker to DIY. [Han] has an excellent writeup that goes deep in the best-practices of how to wire up core memory, […]
Recently AI risk and benefit evaluation company METR ran a randomized control test (RCT) on a gaggle of experienced open source developers to gain objective data on how the use of LLMs affects their productivity. Their findings were that using LLM-based tools like Cursor Pro with Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet reduced productivity by about 19%, with […]