Author Archives: Kristina Panos

Print a Plywood Bending Jig

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Ever wanted to bend plywood but don’t have the equipment or the space to use it? Whatever the issue, dust off those project ideas and take a look at [Ryo Kosaka]’s experimental bending jig.All you need are some boards, a couple of fasteners, and [Ryo]’s 3-D printed connectors.

This is quite the elegant solution for bending in a small space with little noise. The main departure from standard bending methods is that instead of making the bend by clamping the veneers between a pair of positive and negative mold halves, most of the clamping pressure comes from air pumped into …read more

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Modified Uke Keeps the Beat with a Solenoid

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A classic one-man band generally features a stringed instrument or two, a harmonica in a hands-free holder, and some kind of percussion, usually a bass drum worn like a backpack and maybe some cymbals between the knees. The musician might also knock or tap the sound-boards of stringed instruments percussively with their strumming hand, which is something classical and flamenco guitarists can pull off with surprising range.

The musician usually has to manipulate each instrument manually. When it comes to percussion, [JimRD] has another idea: keep the beat by pounding the soundboard with a solenoid. He built a simple Arduino-driven …read more

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Purely Functional Selfies: Thermal Printer Speaks Haskell

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[Dan] recently got a cheap POS thermal printer to chooch remotely over ESP32. Having conquered that project, he decided to see what else he could get the printer to do. Why not use it to print pictures? Sure, it’s been done, but not with Haskell. And yeah, the pictures will be grainy and weird-ish and limited to black and white, but hey, we love black and white around here as much as the idea of doing something simply because you can.

In the first project, [Dan] had to figure out how to talk to the printer since the RS422 …read more

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Car-Cade Build Drives Unthrottled Determination

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Remember those dashboard-shaped racing games from the ’80s, like Tomy Turnin’ Turbo? [Daniel] has long wanted to bring one of those into the modern age. After finding that someone beat him to it, he went in another direction and built his own mini-cabinet from the ground up, dedicated to Dirt Rally.

The idea was to build the smallest possible computer than can run SteamOS and fit inside of a cabinet printed on a Prusa clone. At first, [Daniel] tried driving a MinnowBoard around. The frame rate was atrocious, so he switched to an ASUS mini-STX board and went from there. …read more

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Rage Against the Dying of the Light with a Raspi Night Vision Camera

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One of the most interesting things about hacking is the difference between the vision we have at the beginning and the reality of we’ve built at the end. What began as a simple plan to build a night vision VR headset turned into a five-month adventure for [facelessloser] that culminated in this great-looking camera. He thought it would be easy, but almost every aspect presented some kind of challenge. The important thing is that he kept at it.

One of the major issues [facelessloser] encountered was power. He found that the Pi (Zero W), the screen, and the IR LEDs …read more

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Roll Your Own Rotary Tool

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Rotary tools are great little handheld powerhouses that fill the void between manual tools and larger shop machines. They’re also kind of expensive for what they are, which is essentially a power circuit, a switch, and a high-RPM motor with a tool coupling on the shaft. If your tooling needs are few and you have the resources, why not make your own?

[DIY King 00] built himself a cordless rotary tool for less than $10 out of commonly-available parts. It doesn’t run nearly as fast as commercial rotary tools, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He made the body …read more

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Joan Feynman Found Her Place in the Sun

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Google ‘Joan Feynman’ and you can feel the search behemoth consider asking for clarification. Did you mean: Richard Feynman? Image search is even more biased toward Richard. After maybe seven pictures of Joan, there’s an endless scroll of Richard alone, Richard playing the bongos, Richard with Arline, the love of his life.

Yes, Joan was overshadowed by her older brother, but what physicist of the era wasn’t? Richard didn’t do it on purpose. In fact, no one supported Joan’s scientific dreams more than he did, not even their mother. Before Richard ever illuminated the world with his brilliance, he shined …read more

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Distributed Air Quality Monitoring via Taxi Fleet

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When [James] moved to Lima, Peru, he brought his jogging habit with him. His morning jaunts to the coast involve crossing a few busy streets that are often occupied by old, smoke-belching diesel trucks. [James] noticed that his throat would tickle a bit when he got back home. A recent study linking air pollution to dementia risk made him wonder how cities could monitor air quality on a street-by-street basis, rather than relying on a few scattered stations. Lima has a lot of taxis, so why wire them up with sensors and monitor the air quality in real-time?

This taxi …read more

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Your Next Wearable May Not Need Electricity

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What if you could unlock a door with your shirtsleeve, or code a secret message into your tie? This could soon be a thing, because researchers at the University of Washington have created a fabric that can store data without any electronics whatsoever.  The fabric can be washed, dried, and even ironed without losing data. Oh, and it’s way cheaper than RFID.

By harnessing the ferromagnetic properties of conductive thread, [Justin Chen] and [Shyam Gollakota] have  proved the ability to store bit strings and 2D images through magnetization. The team used an embroidery machine to lay down thread in dense …read more

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Get You an E-Textiles Sensor That Can Do Both

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[Admar] is a software developer who was introduced to e-textiles in 2011. The bug firmly took hold, and these days he gives e-textile workshops at Eindhoven University of Technology. Here, students learn to build a single e-textile sensor that detects both presence and pressure. The workshop presentations are available on his site, which is itself a window into his e-textile journey.

Over the years, [Admar] has discovered that any e-textile project requiring more than a few connections is ripe for some kind of textile-friendly multi-point connector. Through trial and error, he designed a robust solution for use with an embroidery …read more

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