Collaborate Disseminate
People making DIY controls to enhance flight simulators is a vibrant niche of engineering and hackery, and it sure looks like Microsoft Flight Simulator is doing its part to keep the scene lively. [akaki]’s latest project turns an Xbox One gamepad into a throttle-and-stick combo that consists entirely of 3D …read more
Continue reading Xbox Controller Gets Snap On Joystick from Clever 3D-Printed Design
Most of us have probably seen a video of a sand drawing table at work, in which a steel ball — magnetically-coupled to a gantry under a layer of sand — lazily draws geometric patterns with utter precision and zen-like calmness. That’s all well and good, but [Mark Rehorst] thinks …read more
Continue reading Watch a Fast Sand Plotter Plow Patterns at Speed
The hardware and software required to make DIY keyboards happen has gotten more and more accessible, and that means it’s easier than ever to make one’s ideal input device a reality from the ground up. For [Cameron Sun], his Ellipsis Split mechanical keyboard buildlog details his second effort, refining his …read more
Continue reading Custom Keyboard Goes Split, Gets Thin, Acquires Stained Wood
Most of us have bent a length of solder into a more convenient shape and angle when soldering, and just sort of pushed the soldering iron and work piece into the hanging solder instead of breaking out a third hand. Well, [yukseltemiz] seems to have decided that a solder dispenser …read more
Continue reading Whimsical Solder Stand Moonlights As Toy 3D Printer
Need to cut threads into a hole? A tool called a tap is what you need, and a hand-operated one like the one shown here to the side is both economical and effective. A tap’s cutting bit works by going into a pre-drilled hole, and it’s important to keep the …read more
Continue reading A Bit of DIY Helps Cut Straight and Happy Threads
Ever wonder what was inside a cell phone booster, or what it is like to set up or use one? If so, [Kerry Wong]’s got you covered with his teardown of a Cel-Fi Go X Cell Signal Booster by Nextivity. [Kerry] isn’t just ripping apart a cheap unit for laughs; …read more
Continue reading Cell Phone Signal Booster Gets Teardown and Demo
We have seen quite a few DIY joystick designs that use Hall effect sensors, but [Akaki]’s controller designs (YouTube video, embedded below) really make the most of 3D printing to avoid the need for any other type of fabrication. He’s been busy using them to enhance his Microsoft Flight Simulator …read more
[retrohax] has provided vintage computer guidance for years, and part of that guidance is this: sometimes using paint as part of restoration is simply unavoidable. But the days of tediously color-matching to vintage hardware are gone, thanks to [retrohax] offering custom-mixed spray paints in Amiga 500 Beige, C-64 Beige, and …read more
Continue reading Retrocomputing Spray Paints: Amiga Beige, Commodore, and ATARI Grey
Conductive filament isn’t an ideal electrical conductor, but it’s a 3D-printable one and that’s what makes [Hercemer]’s 3D-printed flashlight using conductive filament work. Every part of the flashlight is printed except for the 9 volt battery and LEDs. Electrically speaking, the flashlight is a small number of LEDs connected in …read more
Continue reading 100% Printed Flashlight: Conductive Filament and Melted-in Leads
Kotlin is a relatively new programming language; a derivative of Java with lots of little handy functional bits such as coroutines. [Foalyy] is porting an app to Android and learning Kotlin at the same time, and after wrapping their mind around coroutines, has written up a concise five-part tutorial …read more
Continue reading Grasp Kotlin’s Coroutines With This Short Tutorial