Navarre Bartz – Page 22 – WindowsTechs.com

What Happened to Sweden’s Slot Car EV Road?

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

A grey car sits in the background out of focus, its front facing the camera. It sits over an asphalt roadway with a metal rail extending from the foreground to behind the car in the distance. The rail has a two parallel slots and screws surrounding the slots running down the rail.

Many EVs can charge 80% of their battery in a matter of minutes, but for some applications range anxiety and charge time are still a concern. One possible solution is …read more Continue reading What Happened to Sweden’s Slot Car EV Road?→

A More Expressive Synth via Flexure

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

A man sits in front of a wooden table. There is a black box with a number of knobs hand-labeled on blue painter's tape. A white breadboard with a number of wires protruding from it is visible on the box's left side. An oscilliscope is behind the black box and has a yellow waveform displaying on its screen.

Synthesizers can make some great music, but sometimes they feel a bit robotic in comparison to their analog counterparts. [Sound Werkshop] built a “minimum viable” expressive synth to overcome this …read more Continue reading A More Expressive Synth via Flexure→

Challenging the Limits of 3D Printing with Cymbals

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

A series of five cymbals sitting on white and black speckled carpet in front of a green loveseat. Each cymbal is assembled from four printed sections. Their colors from left to right are yellow and grey, red and black, black, teal and black, and white and black. A sixth, grey and black cymbal is sitting in the middle of the loveseat cushion.

We’re big believers in 3D printing here at Hackaday, but it’s important to recognize that there are plenty of applications where additive manufacturing (at least, from a desktop machine) just …read more Continue reading Challenging the Limits of 3D Printing with Cymbals→

DIY Tool Makes Wrapping Wiring Harnesses a Breeze

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

A person holds a bundle of white, black, and blue wires. The left hand side of the wires are wrapped with black tape. The wires are inside a wire wrapping machine with a grey plastic "C" which rotates inside seven small pulleys. A large pulley in the background drives three of the pulleys to rotate the "C" around and wrap the wires with tape from the spool attached to the "C."

If you’re making a lot of wiring harnesses, wrapping them can become a bit of a drag. [Well Done Tips] wanted to make this process easier and built a wiring …read more Continue reading DIY Tool Makes Wrapping Wiring Harnesses a Breeze→

Sofa Armrest is a Nifty Storage Spot

Posted on February 26, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

A dark grey couch with a white pegboard on a drawer slide protruding from its arm. The pegboard has a magazine holder, pen holder, and several other miscellaneous bins holding odds and ends on it.

If you’re like us, you’re always in need of a little more space to store things. [Javier Guerrero] realized his sofa wasn’t living up to its full storage potential and …read more Continue reading Sofa Armrest is a Nifty Storage Spot→

Producing a Pair of Parallel Pliers

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

Two pairs of steel parallel pliers sit on a rough wooden benchtop. The pair on the left is open and the pair on the right is closed, demonstrating the parallel nature of the pliers' jaws over their entire range of motion. There are three brass pins flush with the steel surface of the handles and you can just barely make out the brass and copper filler material between the steel outer surfaces of the handles.

A regular pair of pliers is fine most of the time, but for delicate work with squarish objects you can’t go wrong with a pair of parallel pliers. [Neil Paskin] …read more Continue reading Producing a Pair of Parallel Pliers→

Supersized Laptop Laughs in the Face of Portability

Posted on February 24, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

Two people lounge over a wooden tabletop to lean on a large black laptop. It has a green leaf on its 43" LCD desktop and RGB lighting around its edge is glowing a slightly deeper shade of green.

Sometimes a project needs to go big, and [Evan and Katelyn] threw portability to the wind to build the world’s biggest laptop. Stretching the believability of “bigger is better,” this …read more Continue reading Supersized Laptop Laughs in the Face of Portability→

OpenStructures is a Modular Building System for the RepRap Age

Posted on February 22, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

Modular construction toys like LEGO and Meccano are great for prototyping, but they aren’t so great for large builds. OpenStructures promises to be a modular building system for projects large …read more Continue reading OpenStructures is a Modular Building System for the RepRap Age→

Precious Plastic Prosthetics

Posted on February 20, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

A man with dark skin in a red shirt and khaki shorts sits in a chair. His left leg has a prosthetic below the knee. The upper half of the prosthethic is an off white plastic socket with flecks of different off white plastic throughout hinting at the recycled nature of the plastic. The lower half is a metal tube attached to an artificial foot in black sandals.

Plastic waste is a major problem, but what if you could turn the world’s trash into treasure? [Yayasan Kaki Kita Sukasada (YKKS)] in Indonesia is doing this by using recycled …read more Continue reading Precious Plastic Prosthetics→

Phase Change Materials for Flexible and Strong Robots

Posted on February 19, 2023 by Navarre Bartz

Top left of image shows a picture of a purplish-grey sea cucumber. Above the cucumber is the word "bio-inspiration." Arrows come from the cucumber to anthropomorphized cartoons of it saying "rigid" at the top with a cartoon sea cucumber standing straight up with spikes and the arrow captioned "soft" pointing down showing a crawling sea cucumber that looks more like a slug. To the right of the cucumber images is a set of three images stacked top to bottom. The top image is of a silver sphere with a zoomed-in atomic diagram with aligned magnetic poles next to it saying "solid state." The middle image shows arrows going up and down next to a snowflake and an artistic rendering of magnetic fields labeled "transition." The bottom image of this section shows a reddish sphere next to a zoomed-in atomic diagram where the magnetic poles are not aligned labeled "liquid state."

Shape shifters have long been the stuff of speculative fiction, but researchers in China have developed a magnetoactive phase transitional matter (MPTM) that makes Odo slipping through an air vent …read more Continue reading Phase Change Materials for Flexible and Strong Robots→