Author Archives: Kristina Panos

Scooter Wheels Keep DIY Barn Doors on Track

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[MotoGeeking] built a giant spray booth and is in the process of making customized, air-filtering barn doors for it. When it came to buy hardware to move the doors, though, he found all the ready-made options to be prohibitively expensive. You know what comes next: he designed barn door hardware from the ground up, and did it as cheaply as possible.

After intensely studying many images of barn doors and hardware, [MotoGeeking] decided on the right wheels and went from there. Kick scooter wheels fit the bill nicely, since they are designed to support a lot of weight and come …read more

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Low-Vision Reading Through a Camera’s Eye

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Borescope cameras are great inspection tools. They’re flexible, they magnify on a variable scale, and they come with their own lighting. Oh, and they’re pretty cheap, too. Because of all this, these tiny cameras can serve a number of purposes. Doctors put them down your cake hole to look for ulcers and polyps, and mechanics probe pistons with them to check for buildup. [agulesin] used one to make a reading aid for his mom.

Mom suffers from macular degeneration, and can’t read print smaller than 1″ (2.5cm). This condition can cause issues ranging from blurred vision to complete loss of …read more

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The Tourbillon: Anti-Gravity for Watch Movements

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Do you know what time it is? Chances are good that you used a computer or a cell phone to answer that question. The time on your phone is about as accurate as chronometry gets these days. That’s because cell networks are timed from satellites, which are in turn timed from atomic clocks. And these days, it may be that atomic clocks are the only clocks that matter.

Before this modern era of quartz and atomic accuracy, though, timepieces were mechanical. Clocks were driven by heavy weights that made them impractical for travel. It wasn’t until the mainspring-driven movement came …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Staircane, a Walker That Takes the Stairs

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[Jim]’s aunt has lived in the same house for the last 50 years. She loves it there, and she wants to stay as long as possible. There’s a big problem, though. The house has several staircases, and they are all beginning to disagree with her. Enter Staircane, [Jim]’s elegant solution that adds extendable legs to any standard walker.

Most of the time, walkers serve their purpose quite well. But once you encounter uneven ground or a staircase, they show their limitations. The idea behind Staircane is a simple one: quickly extend the back or front legs of a walker depending …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Analyzing and Controlling Hand Tremors

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For the millions of people suffering from Parkinson’s and other causes of hand tremor, there is new hope in the form of [mohammedzeeshan77]’s entry into the Hackaday Prize: a glove that analyzes and controls the tremors.

The glove uses an accelerometer and a pair of flex sensors to determine the position of the hand as it oscillates. A Particle Photon crunches the raw data to come up with the frequency and amplitude of the tremors and uploads it to the cloud for retrieval and analysis by medical staff.

Hand tremors can vary in frequency and severity depending on the cause. …read more

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Retrotechtacular: Farming Implements in 1932

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Few people would deny that farming is hard work. It always has been, and it probably always will be no matter how fancy the equipment gets. In 1932, farming was especially grueling. There was widespread drought throughout the United States, which gave rise to dust bowl conditions. As if those two things weren’t bad enough, the average income of the American farmer fell to its lowest point during the Depression, thanks to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

Even so, crop farming was still a viable and somewhat popular career path in 1932. After all, knowing how to grow food is always …read more

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Retrotechtacular: Farming Implements in 1932

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Few people would deny that farming is hard work. It always has been, and it probably always will be no matter how fancy the equipment gets. In 1932, farming was especially grueling. There was widespread drought throughout the United States, which gave rise to dust bowl conditions. As if those two things weren’t bad enough, the average income of the American farmer fell to its lowest point during the Depression, thanks to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

Even so, crop farming was still a viable and somewhat popular career path in 1932. After all, knowing how to grow food is always …read more

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Souped-Up, Next Gen Wearables

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The biggest hurdle to great advances in wearable technology is the human body itself. For starters, there isn’t a single straight line on the thing. Add in all the flexing and sweating, and you have a pretty difficult platform for innovation. Well, times are changing for wearables. While there is no stock answer, there are some answers in soup stock.

A group of scientists at Stanford University’s Bao Lab have created a whisper thin co-polymer with great conductivity. That’s right, they put two different kinds of insulators together and created a conductor. The only trouble was that the resulting material …read more

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Teensy Laser Harp Has Big Sound

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[Johan] has slipped down the rabbit hole of making musical instruments. His poison? Laser harp MIDI controllers. Having never made one before, he thought he would start small and then iterate using what he learned. Fortunately for us, [Johan] documented the process over on .io, essentially creating a step-by-step guide for building a simple but powerful 16-note laser harp.

Laser Harp I is built around a Teensy 3.2 and, of course, lasers pointed at LDRs. [Johan] used fairly low-power laser modules, which are slightly less blinding if you accidentally look at them for a second, but should still be taken …read more

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