Category Archives: reuse

DIY Designer Wallet From Designer Bag

Posted on by

Why do people drop hundreds of dollars on designer goods? The easy answer is that, in theory, the goods are worth the expense. The materials, craftsmanship, and attention to detail are all top-notch and culminate in the finest finery money can buy.

So, would you spend hundreds of dollars on a designer wallet? If you have leather crafting skills and a thrift store nearby, you could just follow [Corter Leather]’s example and make your own. He found a diamond in the rough—a genuine, well-loved Louis Vuitton bag languishing in a secondhand shop. The leather bottom and handles were dry and …read more

Continue reading DIY Designer Wallet From Designer Bag→

Soda Can Lamp Pinpoints Your Interests

Posted on by

We’ve said it a million times before: 3D printing will expand your horizons. The more you print, the more you think about things you could print and new ways to use printing in the process of building projects. [AHNT] knows all about this phenomenon, because he thought of a way to use soda cans as canvases for customizable pixel art lamp shades.

[AHNT] designed a printable sleeve that fits perfectly over 250mL cans. It provides a sturdy grid for poking tiny holes with a medical needle, and can be reused indefinitely with any pattern imaginable. He created two different printable …read more

Continue reading Soda Can Lamp Pinpoints Your Interests→

From Plastic Bottle to Plastic Brush

Posted on by

We first saw someone turn a plastic bottle into plastic ribbon about four years ago. Since then, we’ve wondered what this abundant, sturdy material could be used for besides just tying things together.

[Waldemar Sha] has answered that question with his excellent brush made from scrap wood and plastic bottle rope. Turning seven 1-litre bottles into curly bristle fodder was easy enough, but they have to be straight to brush effectively. No problem for [Waldemar]. He wound it all up on a  spinning homemade jig that’s anchored in a bench vise. The jig is designed to slide into a small …read more

Continue reading From Plastic Bottle to Plastic Brush→

An ADS-B Antenna Built From Actual Garbage

Posted on by

With the advent of low-cost software defined radio (SDR), anyone who’s interested can surf the airwaves from the FM band all the way up to the gigahertz frequencies used by geosynchronous satellites for about $20 USD. It’s difficult to overstate the impact this has had on the world of radio hacking. It used to be only the Wizened Ham Graybeards could command the airwaves from the front panels of their $1K+ radios, but now even those who identify as software hackers can get their foot in the door for a little more than the cost of a pizza.

But as …read more

Continue reading An ADS-B Antenna Built From Actual Garbage→

Military Surplus Repurposed for High Energy Physics

Posted on by

Performing high-energy physics experiments can get very expensive, a fact that attracts debate on public funding for scientific research. But the reality is that scientists often work very hard to stretch their funding as far as they can. This is why we need informative and entertaining stories like Gizmodo’s How Physicists Recycled WWII Ships and Artillery to Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe.

The military have specific demands on components for their equipment. Hackers are well aware MIL-SPEC parts typically command higher prices. That quality is useful beyond their military service, which lead to how CERN obtained large quantities …read more

Continue reading Military Surplus Repurposed for High Energy Physics→

Turning Broken Toy Into Laser Target Practice

Posted on by

[Mathieu] wrote in with his laser target practice game. It’s not the most amazing hack in the history of hackery, but it’s an excellent example of the type of simple and fun things you can do with just a little bit of microcontrollering.

First off, the gun is a broken toy gun that used to shoot something other than red collimated light beams. The Arduino knockoff inside reacts to a trigger pull and fires the laser for around 200 milliseconds. The gun also has a “gas gauge” that fills up with repeated shots and cools down over time. And therein …read more

Continue reading Turning Broken Toy Into Laser Target Practice→

Baby Monitor Rebuild is also ESP8266 Audio Streaming How-To

Posted on by

[Sven337]’s rebuild of a cheap and terrible baby monitor isn’t super visual, but it has so much more going on than it first seems. It’s also a how-to for streaming audio via UDP over WiFi with a pair of ESP8266 units, and includes a frank sharing of things that went wrong in the process and how they were addressed. [Sven337] even experimented with a couple of different methods for real-time compression of the transmitted audio data, for no other reason than the sake of doing things as well as they can reasonably be done without adding parts or spending extra …read more

Continue reading Baby Monitor Rebuild is also ESP8266 Audio Streaming How-To→