Collaborate Disseminate
[Evan Monsma], the prolific experimenter with cameras, found himself with an issue: he had a small Sony action camera with good performance in every respect but battery life, which was …read more Continue reading Upgrading an Action Camera with an External Battery
They may not deliver the highest efficiency, but absorption refrigerators have earned a persistent place in camper vans and industrial plants thanks to a few distinct advantages: they can operate …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator Cools with Fire
A helicopter blade uses a swash plate and a set of linkages to change the angle of the blades. Not only does it vary the collective pitch to increase or …read more Continue reading Building a Swashplate-less Helicoper Rotor
Anyone who’s ever built their own motors knows how tedious winding the coils soon becomes; in [Larry]’s case, the issue was even worse. He’s building his own flip-dot matrix display, …read more Continue reading Automatic Coil Winder Takes the Tedium out of Actuators
As electronic components grow ever smaller, a microscope has become an increasingly indispensable tool for any fine work; when inspecting electronics, though, especially solder joints, [Corebb] found a top-down view …read more Continue reading Building a Microscope with a 3D View
Since the discovery of an undocumented I/Q sampling feature in ESP32 chips about two weeks ago, there’s been a flood of similar features being found in other wireless chips, including …read more Continue reading Turning a Wi-Fi Adapter into an SDR
Despite the recent leaps forward in other forms of computer-driven design, the reliability of PCB autorouters remains questionable; on the positive side, though, the lack of massive training data makes …read more Continue reading Improving an Autorouter with a Hexagonal Grid
Finding inexpensive broken hardware for sale, buying it, and restoring it to working condition is a long-standing tradition for hackers on a limited budge. But there are some devices that …read more Continue reading Restoring an Altimeter Watch to Former Heights
Most of the time, assuming nothing’s gone wrong with them, we take our hands so much for granted that it’s easy to forget what remarkable pieces of engineering they are: …read more Continue reading Building a Cheap, Dexterous Robot Hand
One fascinating thing about a pulsed laser is that, though the average power may be measured in watts or milliwatts, the peak power can easily reach millions of times that. …read more Continue reading Upgrading a Benchtop Laser for Megawatt Power