Collaborate Disseminate
Our homes are full of technological marvels, and, as a Hackaday reader, we are betting you know the basic ideas behind a microwave oven even if you haven’t torn one …read more Continue reading Tech in Plain Sight: Microwave Ovens
Shortly after the development of the electric light came the light switch, presumably. Of course, obvious switches are old-hat, and this neat lamp build from [Giovanni Aggiustatutto] goes with a …read more Continue reading Simple Plywood Lamp Has Neat Hidden Switch
Most people would be pretty upset it the lawn mower they spent $4,000 USD on had a major failure within the first year of owning it. But for [xxbiohazrdxx], it …read more Continue reading Riding Mower Repair Uncovers Miniature Culprit
Does it seem like everyone you game against can do everything faster than you? Chances are good that they have some kind of dedicated game pad or macro pad with a bunch of custom shortcuts. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, but why buy one when you can build …read more
Assuming you have a child and it’s no longer womb-bound, there’s a fairly high chance they’ve already had some experience with the glowing beauty that is the LCD display; babies of only a few months old are often given a tablet or smartphone to keep them occupied. But as the child gets to the age where they are capable of going outside or doing something more constructive, staring slack-jawed and wide-eyed at their tablet becomes a concern for many parents.
[Richard Garsthagen] is one such parent. He wanted a way to monitor and control how much time his children were …read more
[miroslavus] hasn’t had much luck with rotary encoders. The parts he has tested from the usual sources have all been problematic either mechanically or electrically, resulting in poor performance in his projects. Even attempts to deal with the deficiencies in software didn’t help, so he did what any red-blooded hacker would do — he built his own rotary encoder from microswitches and 3D-printed parts.
We know what you’re thinking: [miroslavus] hasn’t built a true encoder. There’s no attempt to encode the angular position of the shaft, nor is any information about the speed or direction of the shaft’s rotation captured. …read more
We’ve taken a few microswitches apart, mostly to fix those pesky Logitech mice that develop double-click syndrome, but we’ve never made a video. Luckily, [Julian] did, and it is worth watching if you want to understand the internal mechanism of these components.
[Julian] talks about the way the contacts make and break. He also discusses the mechanical hysteresis inherent in the system because of the metal moving contact having spring-like qualities
We always have trouble holding the little plunger in place, so we liked [Julian’s] idea of holding it in with a spot of putty. If you want to know …read more
You find them everywhere from 3D printers to jet airliners. They’re the little switches that detect paper jams in your printer, or the big armored switches that sense when the elevator car is on the right floor. They’re microswitches, or more properly miniature snap-action switches, and they’re so common you may never have wondered what’s going on inside them. But the story behind how these switches were invented and the principle of physics at work in the guts of these tiny and useful switches are both pretty interesting.
Microswitches have a long history, at least …read more
It seems [Pete Prodoehl] was working on a project that involved counting baseballs as they fell out of a chute, with the counting part being sensed by a long lever microswitch. Now we all know there are a number of different ways in which one can do this using all kinds of fancy sensors. But for [Pete], we guess the microswitch was what floated his boat — likely because it was cheap, easily available and replaceable, and reliable. Well, the reliable part he wasn’t very sure about, so he built a (not quite) Useless Machine that would conduct an endurance …read more
Continue reading Endurance Test Machine Is Not Quite Useless
It seems [Pete Prodoehl] was working on a project that involved counting baseballs as they fell out of a chute, with the counting part being sensed by a long lever microswitch. Now we all know there are a number of different ways in which one can do this using all kinds of fancy sensors. But for [Pete], we guess the microswitch was what floated his boat — likely because it was cheap, easily available and replaceable, and reliable. Well, the reliable part he wasn’t very sure about, so he built a (not quite) Useless Machine that would conduct an endurance …read more
Continue reading Endurance Test Machine Is Not Quite Useless
