Collaborate Disseminate
Some inventions are so simple that it’s hard to improve them. The magnetic compass is a great example — a magnetized needle, a bit of cork, and a bowl of …read more Continue reading Overcomplicating the Magnetic Compass for a Reason
With the popularity of robot dogs, many people have gotten on the bandwagon and tried building DIY versions. Most of them end up attaching a gearbox to an off-the-shelf brushless …read more Continue reading Compact Cycloidal Drive Lives Inside This Custom Brushless Motor
The number of interesting and innovative mechanisms that 3D printing has enabled always fascinates us, and it’s always a treat when one of them shows up in our feeds. This …read more Continue reading Magnetic Gearbox, Part 2: Axial Flux Improves Performance
You’ve got to hand it to [Carl Bugeja] — he comes up with some of the most interesting electromechanical designs we’ve seen. His latest project is right up there, too: …read more Continue reading Single Flex PCB Folds into a Four-Wheel Rover, Complete with Motors
A recent writeup by Tom Nardi about using the 6502-based NES to track satellites brought back memories of my senior project at Georgia Tech back in the early 80s. At our club station W4AQL, I had become interested in Amateur Radio satellites. It was quite a thrill to hear your …read more
For many of us who grew up in the 1970s, “VertiBird”, the fly-it-yourself indoor helicopter, was a toy that was begged for often enough that it eventually appeared under the Christmas tree. And more than a few of the fascinating but delicate toys were defunct by Christmas afternoon, victims of …read more
Continue reading Classic Toy Helicopter Flies Again as DIY Version
Electric motors are easy to make; remember those experiments with wire-wrapped nails? But what’s easy to make is often hard to engineer, and making a motor that’s small, light, and powerful can be difficult. [Carl Bugeja] however is not one to back down from a challenge, and his tiny “jigsaw” …read more
Continue reading Jigsaw Motor Uses PCB Coils For Radial Flux
We see our share of pitches for perpetual motion machines in the Hackaday tips line, and we generally ignore them and move along. And while this magnetic levitation motor does not break the laws of thermodynamics, it can be considered a perpetual motion machine, at least for certain values of …read more
Continue reading Magnetic Bearings Might Keep this Motor Spinning for Millennia
We love to see projects revisited, especially when new materials or methods make it worth giving the first design another go around. This twin-turbine vacuum-powered Dremel tool is a perfect example of what better tools can do for a build.
You may recall [JohnnyQ90]’s first attempt at a vacuum powered …read more
Continue reading Vacuum-Powered Rotary Tool Redux, This Time Machined
Some ideas are real head-scratchers from a design standpoint: Why in the world would you do it that way? For many of us, answering that question often requires a teardown, which is what [Ben Katz] did when this PCB motor-powered weed whacker came across his bench. The results are instructive on what it takes to succeed in the marketplace, or in this case, how to fail.
The unit in question comes from an outfit called CORE Outdoor Power. The line trimmer was powered by a big lithium-ion battery pack, but [Ben] concentrated on the unique motor for his teardown. After …read more
Continue reading Teardown Shows Why Innovative Designs Sometimes Fail