Collaborate Disseminate
Before a spectrometer can do any useful work, it needs to be calibrated to identify wavelengths correctly. This is usually done by detecting several characteristic peaks or dips in a …read more Continue reading Building a Xenon Lamp for Spectroscopy
The earliest useful plastics were made out of natural materials like cellulose and casein, but since the Bakelite revolution, their use has dwindled away and left them mostly as curiosities …read more Continue reading Cooking Up Plastics in the Kitchen
Finely powdered aluminium can make almost anything more pyrotechnically interesting, from fireworks to machine shop cleanups – even ceramics, as [Degree of Freedom] discovered. He was experimenting with mixing aluminium …read more Continue reading Thermite Pottery Fires Itself
There are some times when a picture, or better yet a video, really is worth a thousand words, and [heinz]’s dual-disk polar 3D printer is one of those projects. Perhaps …read more Continue reading A Toolchanging Inverse SCARA 3D Printer
The spectrum of laser technologies available to hackers has gradually widened from basic gas lasers through CO2 tubes, diode lasers, and now fiber lasers. One of the newer entries is …read more Continue reading A New Way to Make (Almost) Holograms with Lasers
[Vik Olliver] has been extending the lower resolution limits of 3D printers with the RepRapMicron project, which aims to print structures with a feature size of ten micrometers. A molten …read more Continue reading Etching Atomically Fine Needle Points
As frustrating as having an atmosphere can be for physicists, it’s just as bad for astronomers, who have to deal with clouds, atmospheric absorption of certain wavelengths, and other irritations. …read more Continue reading Deforming a Mirror for Adaptive Optics
Perhaps the most surprising thing about shadowgraphs is how simple they are: you simply take a point source of light, pass the light through a the volume of air to …read more Continue reading Finding Simpler Schlieren Imaging Systems
Though threading is a old concept in computer science, and fabric computing has been a term for about thirty years, the terminology has so far been more metaphorical than strictly …read more Continue reading Weaving Circuits from Electronic Threads
If you need to create a high vacuum, there are basically two options: turbomolecular pumps and diffusion pumps. Turbomolecular pumps require rotors spinning at many thousands of rotations per minute …read more Continue reading Pulling a High Vacuum with Boiling Mercury