The Fart Box, a Synthesizer Not Quite Like Others

[lookmumnocomputer] enjoys creating synthesizers, and early last year he created one called The Fart Box. It is an entirely analog synthesizer with which, according to its creator, it is difficult to make anything that doesn’t sound gassy. It’s not quite like any other synthesizer, and while it is capable of …read more

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Used Soda Stream Cylinder Becomes DIY Canned Air

Soda Stream machines use a cylinder of compressed CO2 to carbonate beverages, and cylinders that are “empty” for the machine’s purposes in fact still have a small amount of gas left in them. User [Graldur] shared a clever design for using up those last gasps from a cylinder by turning …read more

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3D Printed Tooling Punches Above Its Weight With Added Hardware

Reddit user [thetelltalehart] has been making brake press tooling with 3D printed PLA, and recently shared an interesting picture of a hybrid brake press punch, shown here on the right, in blue.

In a press, material such as sheet metal is formed into a shape by forcing the material around …read more

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See the Damage 250-Pound Combat Robots Get

Combat robots have been a thing for a while, but we don’t normally get a close look at the end results of the sort of damage they can both take and deal out. [Raymond Ma] spent time helping out with season four of BattleBots and wrote about the experience, as …read more

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Don’t Scrape Magnet Wire, Do This Instead

[Tom] doesn’t much like breadboarding. He prefers to wire up prototypes with perfboard and solder point-to-point with enameled magnet wire. That may sound troublesome to some of you, but [Tom] has come up with a few tips to make prototyping with perfboard and magnet wire easier and more effective, and …read more

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3D Printering: Getting Started Is (Still) Harder Than It Needs To Be

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You are interested in 3D printing but lacked a clear idea of what was involved. Every time you looked into it, it returned to the back burner because after spending your limited free time researching, it still looked like a part time job just …read more

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Lighting Up a Tiny Train Needs Tiny Tools

A tiny toy train that [voidnill] illuminated with a small LED strip fragment demonstrates several challenges that come with both modifying existing products, and working with small things in general. One is that it is hard in general to work around existing design choices and materials when modifying something. The …read more

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Gorgeous Clock, And Not A Line of Code in Sight

[Harry] dropped us a note to let us know about his completed CMOS clock project, and we’re delighted that he did because it’s gorgeous. It’s a digital clock satisfyingly assembled entirely from hardware logic, without a single line of code. There are three main parts to this kind of digital …read more

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Flashing Sonoff Devices With Tasmota Gets Easier

Tasmota is an alternative firmware for ESP boards  that provides a wealth of handy features, and [Mat] has written up a guide to flashing with far greater ease by using Tasmotizer. Among other things, it makes it simple to return your ESP-based devices, like various Sonoff offerings, to factory settings, …read more

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Ghost Frame Shows People (and Cats) That Don’t Exist

[Dan]’s project from last year slipped past us until now, but his Ghost Frame is a great example of tying some modern hackable hardware together with online resources into a clean result, and we like the clear idea behind it. The Ghost Frame is so named because its purpose is …read more

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