Author Archives: Kristina Panos

We Couldn’t Resist this CNC Batik Bot

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Batik is an ancient form of dyeing textiles in which hot wax is applied to a piece of cloth in some design. When the cloth is submerged in a dye bath, the parts covered with wax resist the pigment. After dyeing, the wax is either boiled or scraped away to reveal the design.

[Eugenia Morpurgo] has created a portable, open-source batik bot that rolls along the floor and draws with wax, CNC-style, on a potentially infinite expanse of cloth. The hardware should be familiar: an Arduino Mega and a RAMPS 1.4 board driving NEMA 17 steppers up and down extruded …read more

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Smartwatch Fights Anxiety with Action

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In our fast-paced modern world, it’s no wonder that so many suffer from anxiety and panic attacks. There are several time-worn techniques for dealing with the symptoms of these attacks. But as anyone who’s ever suffered such an attack can tell you, it can be difficult to sense one coming on until it’s too late. By then, rational thinking has been supplanted by intrusive thoughts. For this year’s Hackaday Prize, [Austin Marandos] is doing his part by using technology to help us check ourselves before we wreck ourselves with worry.

Similar smartwatches exist to detect oncoming attacks, but they don’t …read more

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Hurricane Simulator Buoys Research

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They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In this case, 38,000 gallons of seawater is worth an un-quantifiable amount of knowledge about hurricanes. At the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, [Brian Haus] and his colleagues study hurricanes using a simulator–an enclosed glass tank about the size of a lap-swimming pool. With the flip of a switch, a 1700 hp fan can create winds up to 200 miles per hour—stronger than a baseline category 5 hurricane.

Although there’s currently no cure for hurricanes, understanding how they work goes a long way …read more

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How to Put the ‘Pro’ in Prototype

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It’s easy to get professional-quality finishes on your prints and prototypes if you take the right steps. In the final installment of his series about building with Bondo, product designer [Eric Strebel] shows us how it’s done no matter what the substrate.

How does he get such a smooth surface? A few key steps make all the difference. First, he always uses a sanding block of some kind, even if he’s just wrapping sandpaper around a tongue depressor. For instance, his phone holder has a round indent on each side. We love that [Eric] made a custom sanding block by …read more

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Former Smoker Now Pats Pockets for Motivation

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It’s hard to quit smoking. Trust us, we know. Half the battle is wanting to quit in the first place. Once you do, the other half is mostly fighting with yourself until enough time goes by that food tastes better, and life looks longer.

[Danko] recently quit smoking. And because idle hands are Big Tobacco’s tools, he kept himself busy through those torturous first few days by building a piece of pocket-sized motivation. This little board’s main purpose is to help him root for himself by showing the time elapsed since his final cigarette, the number of cigarettes he has …read more

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Émilie du Châtelet: An Energetic Life

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Émilie du Châtelet lived a wild, wild life. She was a brilliant polymath who made important contributions to the Enlightenment, including adding a mathematical statement of conservation of energy into her French translation of Newton’s Principia, debunking the phlogiston theory of fire, and suggesting that what we would call infrared light carried heat.

She had good company; she was Voltaire’s lover and companion for fifteen years, and she built a private research institution out of a château with him before falling in love with a younger poet. She was tutored in math by Maupertuis and corresponded with Bernoulli and …read more

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Remote Control of Clocks is Easy as Pi

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[Fatjedi007] recently acquired three programmable boxing gym-type clocks to help his developmentally disabled clients manage their time. The plan was to have timers of varying lengths fire at preset times throughout the day, with the large displays providing a view from anywhere. Unfortunately, the clocks were not nearly as programmable as he needed them to be.

Since he’d spent enough money already, [Fatjedi007] turned to the power of Raspberry Pi to devise an affordable solution. Each clock gets a Pi Zero W and a simple IR transmit/receive circuit that operates using LIRC. The clocks came with remote controls, so it …read more

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Roomba-Riding Beer Butlers Will Serve Us All

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[Josh] isn’t one to refuse a challenge, especially when robots are involved. The latest dare from friends and family? Build a beer robot that can bring beverages at everyone’s beck and call.

The build consists of two main parts: the refrigerated cooler and the butler part, which comes courtesy of a Roomba Discovery from a fellow roboticist. [Josh] is basing the design on double-walled and insulated restaurant coolers. He built the refrigerated beverage hold from two stainless steel trash cans, sized an inch or so apart in diameter, and filled the gap with expanding foam insulation. He then cut away …read more

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DIY Drill-Powered Water Pump

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Whether you need to pump water out of your basement this spring, or just want to have fun shooting water around in the yard this summer, here’s a way to build a pump instead of buying one. This is a simple but ingenious build, and [NavinK30] did everything shy of machining his own hardware and making his own tools. Well, it looks as if he might have made that drill.

As you’ll see in his how-to after the break, this centrifugal pump is mostly acrylic, PVC, and fasteners. [Navin] cut two sides and a base for the paddles from acrylic, …read more

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Beatrice Tinsley and the Evolution of Galaxies

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It seems almost absurd now, but cosmologists once assumed that galaxies of a given type were all the same and didn’t change. Because of this assumption, galaxies were used as a redshift or light-based yardstick to measure distances in the universe. But what if some galaxies were intrinsically redder than others? Little to no thought was given to their origins, compositions, or evolution until Beatrice Tinsley came along.

Beatrice saw galaxies as changing bodies of stars. She believed that they grew, evolved, and died because they’re made of stars, and that’s what their star populations did. To lump all galaxies …read more

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