Draw On Your Lawn With This Autonomous Mower And RTK-GPS

The rise of open source hardware has seen a wide variety of laborious tasks become successfully automated, saving us humans a great deal of hassle.  Suffice to say, some chores are easier to automate than others. Take the classic case of a harmless autonomous vacuum cleaner that can be pretty …read more

Continue reading Draw On Your Lawn With This Autonomous Mower And RTK-GPS

Cheap And Effective Mosquito Trap Looks Like A Disco

Words cannot quite articulate the collective loathing humankind has for mosquitoes, and rightfully so! These parasite peddling, blood sucking little critters are responsible for a great deal of human suffering. Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria still account for a significant proportion of human mortality, especially in under-developed parts of the …read more

Continue reading Cheap And Effective Mosquito Trap Looks Like A Disco

Trick from 1903 Makes An Old Monochrome TV Spit Some Colours

Its safe to say that colour television is taken for granted nowadays. Consumed by the modern marketing jargon of colour dynamic range, colour space accuracy and depth, it is easy to overlook the humble beginnings of image reproduction when simply reconstructing an image with the slightest hint of colour required …read more

Continue reading Trick from 1903 Makes An Old Monochrome TV Spit Some Colours

Can A 3D Printer Print Better Filament For Itself?

3D printed parts are generally no way near the strength of an equivalent injection moulded part and techniques such as a sustained heat treatment, though effective usually distort the part beyond use.

[CNC Kitchen] was investigating the results of a recent paper, that described a novel ABS filament reinforced by …read more

Continue reading Can A 3D Printer Print Better Filament For Itself?

Reverse Engineering Teaches an Old Scope New Tricks

[PMercier] clearly loves his old Tektronix TDS3014 scope, which did however lack essentially modern connectivity such as an Ethernet port for control and a USB port for a convenient way to capture screenshots. So he decided to do some in-depth reverse engineering and design his own expansion card for it. …read more

Continue reading Reverse Engineering Teaches an Old Scope New Tricks

X-Ray Sleuthing Unveils The Fake In Your Adaptors

Lets face it, the knock-off variety of our favourite adaptors, cables and accessories are becoming increasingly challenging to spot. We would be the first to admit, to have at some point, been stooped by a carefully crafted counterfeit by failing to spot the tell-tale yet elusive indicators such as the …read more

Continue reading X-Ray Sleuthing Unveils The Fake In Your Adaptors

Interactive CNC Foam Cutter Churns Out Abstract Art

Foam is certainly an indispensable raw material for various craft and construction projects. Any serious sculptor however, inevitably grows tired of grinding through a foam block using a simple preheated utensil. The next step up, is to assemble a simple but thoroughly effective hot wire cutting contraption, formed out of …read more

Continue reading Interactive CNC Foam Cutter Churns Out Abstract Art

Milling Dies And Injection Moulding Some Acrylic Lenses

[Zach] over at his channel Breaking Taps has put up an extraordinary account on manufacturing some homemade acrylic lenses. In the end, not only does he produce some beautiful concave lenses, he also covers the complete manufacturing process, from milling the aluminium die used for injection moulding to tweaking the …read more

Continue reading Milling Dies And Injection Moulding Some Acrylic Lenses

iWings For The New Apple Power Adaptor

You might remember the old Apple MagSafe adaptor with the cute little fold out “wings” that served not only as a pragmatic cable management tool, but in our experience also expedited the inevitable and frayed end of your charger. Apple seems to have remedied the latter by opting for removable …read more

Continue reading iWings For The New Apple Power Adaptor

Custom Packet Sniffer Is A Great Way To Learn CAN

Whilst swapping out the stereo in his car for a more modern Android based solution, [Aaron] noticed that it only utilised a single CAN differential pair to communicate with the car as opposed to a whole bundle of wires employing analogue signalling. This is no surprise, as modern cars invariably …read more

Continue reading Custom Packet Sniffer Is A Great Way To Learn CAN