Collaborate Disseminate
Air raid sirens have an important job to do, and have been a critical piece of public safety infrastructure in times of geopolitical turmoil. They sound quite unlike anything else, …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Air Raid Siren Sounds Just Like The Real Thing
Before the digital age, when transistors were expensive, unreliable, and/or nonexistent, engineers had to use other tricks to do things that we take for granted nowadays. Motor positioning, for example, …read more Continue reading Investigating Electromagnetic Magic in Obsolete Machines
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