Author Archives: Adam Fabio

Bringing Back the iPhone7 Headphone Jack

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Plenty of people bemoaned Apple’s choice to drop the 1/8″ headphone jack from the iPhone 7. [Scotty Allen] wasn’t happy about it either, but he decided to do something about it: he designed a custom flex circuit and brought the jack back. If you don’t recognize [Scotty], he’s the same guy who built an iPhone 6 from parts obtained in Shenzhen markets. Those same markets were now used to design, and prototype an entirely new circuit.

The iPhone 7 features a barometric vent, which sits exactly where the headphone jack lived in the iPhone 6. The vent helps the barometric …read more

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Wood Finish from old Records

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Next time you’re working on a project that needs a durable wood finish, don’t grab the polyurethane. Follow [Victor Ola’s] advice and raid your grandparent’s record cabinet for some old 78 records. Modern records are made from vinyl. The stiff, brittle old 78’s from the 1960’s and earlier were made from shellac. Shellac is a natural material secreted by the female lac bug. It can be thought of as a natural form of plastic and was used as such for years until man-made plastics became commodity items.

Older 78 RPM phonograph albums are usually made entirely from shellac. [Victor] started …read more

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Fake Ram: Identifying a Counterfeit Chip

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[Robert Baruch‏] had something strange on his hands. He had carefully decapped 74LS189 16×4 static RAM, only to find that it wasn’t a RAM at all. The silicon die inside the plastic package even had analog elements, which is not what one would expect to find in an SRAM. But what was it? A quick tweet brought in the cavalry, in the form of chip analysis expert [Ken Shirriff].

[Ken] immediately realized the part [Robert] had uncovered wasn’t a 74 series chip at all. The power and ground pins were in the wrong places. Even the transistors were small CMOS …read more

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Amphibious Houseboat Hits the Open Road

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What’s better than having your own houseboat? How about an amphibious houseboat? That’s exactly what [Theon Parseghian] is building in his driveway. It all started with a derelict 32-foot long houseboat. A 1967 model with a rusted steel hull, [Theon] originally bought it as a guest house.

[Theon] couldn’t let the boat rust away in his back yard though. Quickly decided to get it back on the open water…. and on the road. An amphibious houseboat. While looking for large tractor tires, [Theon] found an entire crop sprayer which hadn’t been used in years. This crop sprayer was a giant …read more

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Amphibious Houseboat Hits the Open Road

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What’s better than having your own houseboat? How about an amphibious houseboat? That’s exactly what [Theon Parseghian] is building in his driveway. It all started with a derelict 32-foot long houseboat. A 1967 model with a rusted steel hull, [Theon] originally bought it as a guest house.

[Theon] couldn’t let the boat rust away in his back yard though. Quickly decided to get it back on the open water…. and on the road. An amphibious houseboat. While looking for large tractor tires, [Theon] found an entire crop sprayer which hadn’t been used in years. This crop sprayer was a giant …read more

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Wearable Superconductors

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What do you do with a discarded bit of superconducting wire? If you’re [Patrick Adair], you turn it into a ring.

Superconducting wire has been around for decades now. Typically it is a thick wire made up of strands of titanium and niobium encased in copper. Used sections of this wire show up on the open market from time to time. [Patrick] got ahold of some, and with his buddies at the waterjet channel, they cut it into slices. It was then over to the lathe to shape the ring.

Once the basic shape was created, [Patrick] placed the ring …read more

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DC Motor Whirligig Generates Power

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Everyone knows that if you spin the shaft of a DC motor, it will generate power. [Vapsvus] has found a novel way to do this with no direct mechanical connection to the shaft. He simply taped a loop of string around to the motor can. This effectively turns the motor into a whirligig. Flip the motor to give the string a few twists, then pull on the two loops. The string unwinds and then winds back up, just like the toy we all grew up with.

The interesting thing is that the motor generates usable power when being spun like …read more

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Charge Your Phone on an Iron Throne

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Game of Thrones season 7 is finally here! [Hoecrux] is celebrating by building a GoT inspired cell phone charger. No, this isn’t a 3D print, nor is it vacuum molded. This iron throne was hand made from hundreds of cocktail swords. The frame of the chair is made from medium density fiberboard (MDF). The frame is covered with upholstery foam, then a layer of thin gray foam which forms the surface of the chair.

[Hoecrux] then began the painstaking process of hot gluing 600 cocktail swords to her creation. Each sword had to be modified by cutting off the loop …read more

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Books you should read: The Bridge

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A few weeks ago, Amazon’s crack marketing AI decided to recommend a few books for me. That AI must be getting better because instead of the latest special-edition Twilight books, I was greeted with this:

“The asteroid was called the Hand of God when it hit.”

That’s the first sentence of The Bridge, a new Sci-Fi book by Leonard Petracci. If you think that line sucks you in, wait until you read the whole first chapter.

The Bridge is solidly in the generation ship trope. A voyage hundreds or even thousands of years long, with no sleep or stasis …read more

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eMMC to SD Hack Rescues Data from a Waterlogged Phone

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How do I get the data off this destroyed phone? It’s a question many of us have had to ponder – either ourselves or for friends or family. The easy answer is either spend a mint for a recovery service or consider it lost forever.  [Trochilidae] didn’t accept either of those options, so he broke out the soldering iron and rescued his own data.

A moment’s inattention with a child near a paddling pool left [Trochilidae’s] coworker’s wife with a waterlogged, dead phone. She immediately took apart the phone and attempted to dry it out, but it was too late. …read more

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