Collaborate Disseminate
[Steve Chamberlin] has a spiffy solar-charged 12 V battery that he was eager to use to power his laptop, but ran into a glitch. His MacBook Pro uses Apple’s MagSafe 2 connector for power, but plugging the AC adapter into the battery via a 110 VAC inverter seemed awfully inefficient. …read more
Continue reading DIY Magsafe Charger Feeds Off 12 V Solar Battery
Tiny PCBAs and glowy VFD tubes are like catnip to a Hackaday writer, so when we saw [hamster]’s TubeCube tube segment driver we had to dig in to learn more. We won’t bury the lede here; let’s enjoy a video of glowing tubes before we go further:
The TubeCube is …read more
White LEDs were the technological breakthrough that changed the world of lighting, now they are everywhere. There’s no better sign of their cost-effective ubiquity than the dollar store solar garden light: a complete unit integrating a white LED with its solar cell and battery storage. Not content with boring white …read more
Continue reading Give Your Solar Garden Lights A Color Changing LED Upgrade
That first glimpse of a child in the womb as a black and white image on a screen is a thrilling moment for any parent-to-be, made possible by several hundred thousand dollars worth of precision medical instrumentation. This ultrasound machine cobbled together from eBay parts and modules is not that …read more
Continue reading Simple Ultrasound Machine Shows The Skeleton Lurking Inside Us All
The MT3608 is a popular boost converter, able to easily step up DC voltages in useful ranges, at an incredibly low cost. Modules can be sourced from eBay for less than $2, built on a PCB, ready to go. One drawback of these modules, particularly when working with batteries, is the idle current draw, on the order of 1 to 1.5mA. Fear not, however — there is a workaround, courtesy of [Aka Kasyan].
The trick is to modify the behavior of the converter when no load is connected. The enable pin of the boost converter is held low through a …read more
Continue reading Reworking MT3608 Boost Converters For Lower Idle Current Draw
Back when one of the best paths to desktop 3D printer ownership was building the thing yourself from laser cut wood with some string thrown in for good measure, just saying you had one at home would instantly boost your hacker street cred. It didn’t even need to work particularly well (which is good, since it probably didn’t), you just had to have one. But now that 3D printers have become so common, the game has changed. If you want to keep on the cutting edge, you’ve got to come up with a unique hook.
Luckily for us, [Thomas Sanladerer] …read more
Continue reading Building A 3D Printer That Goes Where You Do
The lengths the retrocomputing devotee must go to in order to breathe new life into old gear can border on the heroic. Tracing down long-discontinued parts, buying multiple copies of the same unit to act as organ donors for the one good machine, and when all else fails, improvising with current productions parts to get that vintage look and feel.
This LCD display backlighting fix for a vintage audio sampler falls into that last category, which was pulled off by [Inkoo Vintage Computer]. The unit in question is an Akai S1100 sampler, a classic from the late 1980s that had …read more
We are smack-dab in the middle of our Energy Harvesting Challenge, and [wasimashu] might have this one in the palm of his hand. Imagine a compact flashlight that doesn’t need batteries or bulbs. You’d buy a 10-pack and stash them everywhere, right? If there’s nothing that will leak or break or expire in your lifetime, why not have a bunch of them around?
Infinity uses nothing but body heat to power a single white LED. It only needs a five-degree temperature difference between the air and your hand to work, so it should be good in pretty much any environment. …read more
Continue reading A Flashlight Powered by Your Hot Little Hands
The principle is well understood: use a motor in reverse and you get a generator. Using this bit of knowledge back in 2001 is what kick-started [Ted Yapo]’s Hackaday Prize entry. At the time, [Ted] was searching for a small flashlight for astronomy, but didn’t like dealing with dead batteries. He quickly cobbled together a makeshift solution out of some supercapacitors and a servo-as-a-generator, hacked for continuous rotation.
A testament to the supercapacitors, 17 years later it’s still going strong – leading [Ted] to document the project and also improve it. The original circuit was as simple as a servo, …read more
Continue reading Supercapacitors In A Servo: The “Forever” Flashlight
It never fails — we post a somewhat simple project using a microcontroller and someone points out that it could have been accomplished better with a 555 timer or discrete transistors or even a couple of vacuum tubes. We welcome the critiques, of course; after all, thoughtful feedback is the point of the comment section. Sometimes the anti-Arduino crowd has a point, but as [Great Scott!] demonstrates with this microcontroller-less boost converter, other times it just makes sense to code your way out of a problem.
Built mainly as a comeback to naysayers on his original boost-converter circuit, which relied …read more
Continue reading The Pros and Cons of Microcontrollers for Boost Converters