TMD-2: A Bigger, Better, More Collaborative Turing Machine

One of the things we love best about the articles we publish on Hackaday is the dynamic that can develop between the hacker and the readers. At its best, the comment section of an article can be a model of collaborative effort, with readers’ ideas and suggestions making their way …read more

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Tritium Tesseract Makes A Nifty Nightlight

As the cube is to three dimensions, the tesseract is to four. Mortals in this universe find it difficult to contemplate four-dimensional geometry, but there are methods of making projections of such heretical shapes in our own limited world. [Sean Hodgins] was interested in the geometry, and decided to build a tesseract featuring everyone’s favourite isotope of hydrogen, tritium.

The build starts with a 3D printed inner and outer frame, sourced in this case from Shapeways in nylon. Both frames have holes which are designed as a friction fit for off-the-shelf tritium vials. These vials use the radioactive decay of …read more

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DIY Text-to-Speech with Raspberry Pi

We can almost count on our eyesight to fail with age, maybe even past the point of correction. It’s a pretty big flaw if you ask us. So, how can a person with aging eyes hope to continue reading the printed word?

There are plenty of commercial document readers available that convert text to speech, but they’re expensive. Most require a smart phone and/or an internet connection. That might not be as big of an issue for future generations of failing eyes, but we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we have small, cheap computers and plenty of open source …read more

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Tesseract Infinity Desk

We’ve all seen infinity mirrors. Even Mr. Spock had one in the Star Trek movies. Usually, these aren’t very large and hang on the wall. [QuackMasterDan] decided (after watching another movie, Interstellar) to try making a desk using the same idea. We aren’t sure it will make you more productive, but if you want to up your office cool factor, consider building his tesseract infinity desk. In fact, we imagine it would be pretty distracting. Sure to be a conversation starter, though.

Unlike a regular two-plate infinity mirror, [Dan’s] desk has six plates. He used metal for the structural parts …read more

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