There are plenty of hard jobs out there, like founding your country’s nuclear program, or changing the timing chain on a BMW diesel. Making your own mechanical watch from scratch falls under that umbrella, too. And yet, [John Raffaelli] did just that, and prevailed! That’s a lot of work. Only a handful of components were […]
After extracting all the useful stuff from a mine, you are often left with a lot of empty subterranean space without a clear purpose. This was the case with the Bethany Falls limestone mine, near Kansas City, Missouri, which left a sprawling series of caverns supported by 16′ (4.9 meter) diameter pillars courtesy of the […]
Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking, when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates broke free from Alpha Genesis, a primate research facility in South Carolina. The monkey jailbreak seems to have occurred sometime on Wednesday, […]
Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape through the reader at a reasonable rate. This latter part can get somewhat tricky, as Usagi Electric‘s [David Lovett] discovered while adding […]
In the modern age, when you hear “component tester” you probably think of one of those cheap microcontroller-based devices that can identify components and provide basic measurements on an LCD screen. However, in the past, these were usually simple circuits that generated an XY scope plot. The trace would allow an experienced operator to identify […]
Before flat screen technologies took over, we associate TV with the CRT. But there were other display technologies that worked, they just weren’t as practical. One scheme was the Nipkow disk, and [Bitluni] decided to build a working demonstration of how such a system works. Essentially, there’s a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of […]
If you’ve ever been wondering what you should make next, it can be a daunting task to decide with the firehose of inspiration coming straight from the series of tubes that makeup the World Wide Web. Perhaps a more curated digital catalog of projects would help? Featuring “1000 Useful Things to Make,” [NODE]’s Make it […]
If you ever played an arcade game and wondered what was inside that joystick you were gripping, [Big Clive] can save you some trouble. He picked up a cheap replacement joystick, which, as you might expect, has a bunch of microswitches. However, as you can see in the video below, there are some surprising features […]
It is a fact of life that 3D-printed parts from an FDM (fused deposition modeling) printer have weaknesses where the layers join. Some of this is due to voids and imperfect layer bonding, but you can — as [Geek Detour] shows us — work around some of this. In particular, it is possible to borrow […]