The Screwdriver You Don’t Need, But Probably Want

Screwdrivers are simple devices with a simple purpose, and there is generally little fanfare involved with buying yourself a new set. We’ve never seen one marketed as an object of desire, but we have to admit that [Gaico] managed to do precisely that. He created the Kinetic Driver, a fidget …read more

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Bringing Back the Fidget Toy Craze with the Magic Microcontroller Cube

[Rickysisodia] had a few dead ATmega128 chips laying around that he didn’t want to just throw away, so he decided to turn them into his own light-up fidget toy. The toy is in the form of a six-sided die so small that you can hang it on a keychain. He …read more

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What’s Your Fidget Spinner Say?

The persistence of vision (POV) optical illusion is pretty common in cheap toys nowadays, but how cool would it be to have your own programmable POV message board? German electronics grad student [Matej] has luckily created an open source fidget spinner with a fully customizable POV display that lets you …read more

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Weaponized Fidget Spinners

Fidget spinners were the hottest new craze at one point, but their 15 minutes of fame has well and truly passed. They’re great for fidgeting, and not a whole lot else. One of the main objectives around their use is to spin them as quickly as possible. After [Sushi Ramen] hurt himself after spinning one up with compressed air, however – a new and dangerous idea came to mind.

What you’re looking at is a fidget spinner sword, powered by compressed air. That alone is somewhat of a blessing, as it prevents this horrifying device from being easily man-portable. …read more

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Fidget Spinner Becomes a Brushless Motor; Remains Useless

Your grandmother means well. But by the time she figures out something’s a fad, it is old news. So maybe you got a fidget spinner in your stocking this year. Beats coal. Before you regift it to your niece, you could repurpose it to be a motor. Technically, [B.Aswinth Raj] made a brushless motor, although it isn’t going to fly your quadcopter anytime soon, it is still a nice demonstrator.

You can see a video below. The idea is to put magnets on the spinner and use an electromagnet to impart energy into the spinner which is on a piece …read more

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Finally, A Fidget Spinner We Can Love

We’ve been frankly mystified at the popularity of fidget spinners. After all, we can flip an ink pen around just fine. However, [MakersBox] just sold us on what he calls the geek spinner. The fact that the spinner is actually a PCB and has parts on it, would probably have been cool enough. However, the spinner also has a persistence of vision LED set up and can display 12 characters of text as it spins. Because the board is simple and uses through hole components, it would be a great project for a budding young hacker. You can see a …read more

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Fidget Spinner Shreds with Bass Guitar Pickup

Hackaday continues to embrace our implacable spinning overlords-of-the-heart.

[zazzazzero] posted a YouTube video showing him fidgeting one of those spinners that had been hooked up to a bass guitar pickup. It makes a rather awesome rumbling sound as the pickup registers the bearings rolling around, and when hooked up to a Digidelay effects pedal he moved it beyond the rumble to more of an industrial growl like a factory hum. He also got interesting sounds by tapping on the spinner with a screwdriver.

Then he switched up to using an iPad audio app called Shaper to modify the resulting sound …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: The Arduino Powered LED Persistence Of Vision Rechargeable 3D Printed Fidget Spinner

It had to come to this. For his entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize, [Sean Hodgins] created a persistence of vision fidget spinner. This isn’t just any PoV fidget spinner — this is the ultimate in fidget spinner technology. It’s rechargeable, and there’s an Arduino inside. The enclosure is 3D printed. It improves morale. It is everything you ever wanted in a fidget spinner, and it’s the last fidget spinner project [Sean] will ever make.

We’ve seen electronic fidget spinners before, but never to this degree of polish. The fidget spinner that teaches coding is fantastic, but it’s not quite …read more

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Fidget Spinner Slash Drone is Both

So Hackaday loves fidget spinners and we don’t care who knows it. Apparently so does [Jeremy S Cook], who decided to mash up a spinner and a cheap quadcopter. To what end? Is that even a question? Spinners are the bearing-studded equivalent to the Rubik’s Cube craze of the ’80s and all we can do is embrace it.

[Jeremy] designed a quadcopter shape with a hole in the center matching a VCB 22 mm ceramic bearing he had on hand. He CNCed out the design from a sheet of Lexan resin. Then he detached the electronics amd motors from a …read more

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Customize Forstner Bits For Fidget Spinner Explosions

[Matthias Wandel] is a woodworker par excellence. He’s the guy behind all those wooden gear contraptions, he made cove molding on a table saw, and if the phrase, ‘don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing’ applies to anyone, it applies to [Matthias]. Now he’s getting into the fidget spinner craze, but there’s a problem in the workshop: [Matthias] couldn’t find the right sized drill bit, so he modified a Forstner bit to contain the heart of a spinner.

[Matthias] has a few roller skate bearings, which are 22mm in diameter. However, the closest drill to this size …read more

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