Collaborate Disseminate
Gears are usually the biggest contributors to backlash in a mechanical system, but they’re far from the only culprits. Ball bearings are a less obvious source of imprecision, since any …read more Continue reading Splitting a Ball Bearing to Cut Out Backlash
Lightning, despite being a common and readily-detected phenomenon, is nevertheless difficult to study. One reason is the difficulty of predicting when and where lightning will strike; tall structures do attract …read more Continue reading Triggering Lightning with a Rocket
[Jan] of [Roetz 4.0] has a unique approach to multi-material 3D printing: he’s designed an extruder which takes two different materials and extrudes one as a shell around the other. …read more Continue reading Continously Extruding 3D Printed Tubes with Compressed Air
If you’ve ever thought about the nomenclature of electrical components, potentiometer stands out as a strange name, etymologically suggesting something like a voltmeter. In fact, the component took its name …read more Continue reading Reading a Thermocouple with Mercury and a Potentiometer
As strong and light as carbon fiber-epoxy composites are, the same can’t always be said of carbon-fiber reinforced 3D printer filaments. Of those that do improve over stock filament, the …read more Continue reading Strengthening 3D Prints with a Carbon-Fiber Epidermis
Optical cavities – two mirrors arranged to reflect light multiple times between them – form the basis of lasers and certain optical filters. Since any angle between the two mirrors …read more Continue reading 2026 Frikkin Lasers Challenge: Measuring Nanometer-Scale Displacements with an Optical Cavity
Silicon-based CMOS camera sensors are cheap and plentiful, but they’re rarely used to their full potential: they can detect a greater range of wavelengths in the infrared spectrum than they …read more Continue reading Taking Tri-Camera True-Color Infrared Videos
Unlike most cutting lasers, femtosecond lasers don’t vaporize materials; rather, they produce such short, intense bursts of light that the affected region is ablated without having the chance to heat …read more Continue reading Cross-Sectioning Crickets with a Femtosecond Laser
In 1675, while transporting a barometer by night, the astronomer Jean Picard noticed a glow inside its glass tube, just above the mercury. As the mercury sloshed and splashed across …read more Continue reading A Sloshing-Mercury-Powered Neon Light
Preservationists usually take great care to prevent fungi from appearing the world of art, but in the case of [Kexin Wang]’s Funguy project, the fungus itself is the art. It …read more Continue reading Printing Fungal Art with Laser Control