Author Archives: Steven Dufresne

Wooden Domino Laying Machine

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[Matthias Wandel]  has come up with another awesome machine, this time a machine that sets up neat rows of dominos. If you’ve followed [Matthias]’s work over the years then you’ll know that this is a wooden version of one he made out of LEGO® back in 2009.

In true [Matthias] fashion he uses just the one motor both for moving the machine along and for pushing the dominos in place. Not satisfied with that efficient use of parts, the rubber band belts that transfer rotation from the motor shaft to the wheels (bearings) double as the rubber surfaces for those …read more

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Decoding Enigma Using A Neural Network

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[Sam Greydanus] created a neural network that can encode and decode messages just as Enigma did. For those who don’t know, the Enigma machine was most famously used by the Germans during World War II to encrypt and decrypt messages. Give the neural network some encrypted text, called the ciphertext, along with the three-letter key that was used to encrypt the text, and the network predicts what the original text, or plaintext, was with around 96-97% accuracy.

The type of neural network he used was a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM ) network, a type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) …read more

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Hackaday Prize Best Product Finalist: Shape Shifting Structures For Space

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While [Elon Musk] and [Jeff Bezos] are working on getting us to Mars and the Moon, [Ronald Jaramillo] is working on building structures once we get there. To that end, he’s been developing the ZBeam, two rolls of links that zip together like a zipper to form a rigid beam.

Initially stored in a compact cube targeted to eventually fit in a CubeSat’s dimension’s, 100 mm x 100 mm x 100 mm, the beam emerges from within the cube and will be able to connect with other cubes to form rigid structures. His hope is that they can one day …read more

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Super Simple Hydraulics Using Syringes

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When making a toy excavator arm, or any robotic arm, the typical approach is to put motors at the joints, or if there isn’t room, to put the motors somewhere else and transfer the force using fishing line and pulleys. [Navin Khambhala] chose instead to do it more like the real excavators, with hydraulics using syringes. And we have to admit, the result it pretty elegant in its simplicity.

The syringes do the job of single-acting hydraulic actuators, one at the motor and the other where the force is needed. In between them, what appears to be clear vinyl tubes …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Powered Running Stroller Keeps You Running

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Types of strollers called ‘running strollers’ exist to make it possible to bring your toddlers along for your run but try it with two four-year old, 38 lb young ones, against the wind, and up enough hills and you’ll quickly lose steam. [Andrew Clink]’s and his wife’s solution? Modify the stroller to be a self-powered roadrunner.

[Andrew]’s hackaday.io build logs are detailed, including design, calculations, schematics, 3D printing files, fails and retries, and more. Power is provided by a bank of lithium-ion batteries that drive a brushless motor. The motor turns the stroller’s front wheel using a toothed belt around …read more

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Earth Ground And The Grid

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The electrical grid transmits power over wires to our houses, and our Bryan Cockfield has covered it very well in his Electrical Grid Demystified series, but what part does the earth ground play? It’s commonly known to be used for safety, but did you know that in some cases it’s also used for power transmission?

Typical House Grounding System

A pretty typical diagram for the grounding system for a house is shown here, along with a few of the current carrying conductors commonly called live and neutral. On the far left is the transformer outside the house and on the …read more

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How To Turn An Animation Into A Soap Bubble Machine

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Post an animation on Reddit of a workable machine that looks neat and does something cool and the next day someone will have built it. That’s what happened when [The-Big-Ship] uploaded an animation of a clever bubble making machine — though we had to look twice to convince ourselves that it wasn’t real. The next day [Over_Engineered_2] posted a video of his working one.

We often hear that you need precision CAD software such as Solidworks and AutoCAD to design a functional machine but the animation was done using Cinema 4D, used for films such as Iron Man 3 and …read more

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Raspberry Pi Trackpad From Salvaged Trackpad Plus Arduino

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Old laptops are easy to find and many have a trackpad with a PS/2 interface hardwired into the guts of the laptop. [Build It] wanted one of those trackpads for use in the DIY Raspberry Pi laptop he’s working on. But the Raspberry Pi has no PS/2 input, and he read that a PS/2 to USB adapter wouldn’t be reliable enough. His solution? Wire the trackpad to an Arduino and have the Arduino convert the trackpad’s PS/2 to USB.

After removing a few screws, he had the trackpad free of the laptop. Looking up the trackpad’s part number online he …read more

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Conventional Current Vs. Electron Current

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Electric current comes in many forms: current in a wire, flow of ions between the plates of a battery and between plates during electrolysis, as arcs, sparks, and so on. However, here on Hackaday we mostly deal with the current in a wire. But which way does that current flow in that wire? There are two possibilities depending on whether you’re thinking in terms of electron current or conventional current.

In a circuit connected to a battery, the electrons are the charge carrier and flow from the battery’s negative terminal, around the circuit and back to the positive terminal.

Conventional …read more

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Bicycle Racing In Space Could be a Thing

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It’s 2100 AD, and hackers and normals live together in mile-long habitats in the Earth-Moon system. The habitat is spun up so that the gravity inside is that of Earth, and for exercise, the normals cycle around on bike paths. But the hackers do their cycling outside, in the vacuum of space.

How so? With ion thrusters, rocketing out xenon gas as the propellant. And the source of power? Ultimately that’s the hackers legs, pedaling away at a drive system that turns two large Wimshurst machines.

Those Wimshurst machines then produce the high voltage needed for the thruster’s ionization as …read more

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