Collaborate Disseminate
It’s safe to say that most of us have at least one Raspberry Pi hanging from a USB cable someplace, silently hammering away at some unglamorous task that you’d rather not do on a “real” computer. With as cheap as they are, it’s not like there’s a big concern about …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi NAS Makes Itself at Home In Donor PC
The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, means we have screwed ourselves out of performance. Continue reading Thinner and Lighter Laptops Have Screwed Us All
With few exceptions, it seemed like every 3D printer at the first inaugural East Coast RepRap Festival (ERRF) was using a hotend built by E3D. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; E3D makes solid open source products, and they deserve all the success they can get. But that being said, competition drives innovation, so we’re particularly interested anytime we see a new hotend that isn’t just an E3D V6 clone.
The Mosquito from Slice Enginerring is definitely no E3D clone. In fact, it doesn’t look much like any 3D printer hotend you’ve ever seen before. Tiny and spindly, the look …read more
Continue reading ERRF 18: Slice Engineering Shows off the Mosquito
For off-grid renewable electricity, solar seems to make sense. Just throw some PV panels on the roof and you’re all set to stick it to the man, right? But the dirty little secret of the king of clean energy is that very few places on the planet get the sort of sunshine needed to make residential PV panels worth their installation cost in the short term, and the long-term value proposition isn’t very good either.
The drearier places on the planet might benefit from this high-power thermoelectric generator (TEG) developed and tested by [TegwynTwmffat] for use on a wood burning …read more
Continue reading Thermoelectric Generator Shines Where the Sun Doesn’t
At first glance, [Dean Gouramanis]’s stepper driver module for 3D printers looks like just another RAMPS-compatible stepper board. Except, what could that brass peg sticking out of the PCB possibly be? That would be [Dean]’s PowerPeg Thermal Management System that he built and entered in the Hackaday Prize competition for 2015, where it rocked its way into the Finals. It’s a thermal connector peg that attaches to a variety of heatsinks so you can swap in whatever sink fits the bill.
In the case of this project, [Dean] created a custom PCB that accommodates the PowerPeg connector, onto which the …read more
Continue reading Stepper Driver Module with Swappable Heatsinks
[Eric]’s camera has a problem. It overheats. While this wouldn’t be an issue if [Eric] was taking one picture at a time, this camera also has a video mode, which is supposed to take several pictures in a row, one right after the other. While a camera that overheats when it’s used is probably evidence of poor thermal engineering, the solution is extremely simple: strap a gigantic heat sink to the back. That’s exactly what [Eric] did, and the finished product looks great.
The heatsink chosen for this application is a gigantic cube of aluminum, most likely taken from an …read more
[Eric]’s camera has a problem. It overheats. While this wouldn’t be an issue if [Eric] was taking one picture at a time, this camera also has a video mode, which is supposed to take several pictures in a row, one right after the other. While a camera that overheats when it’s used is probably evidence of poor thermal engineering, the solution is extremely simple: strap a gigantic heat sink to the back. That’s exactly what [Eric] did, and the finished product looks great.
The heatsink chosen for this application is a gigantic cube of aluminum, most likely taken from an …read more
