A Tiny Chemistry Lab

While advances in modern technology have allowed average people access to tremendous computing power as well as novel tools like 3D printers and laser cutters for a bare minimum cost, around here w…

Most Powerful Laser Diodes, Now More Powerful

Many hobbies seem to have a subset of participants who just can’t leave well enough alone. Think about hot rodders, who squeeze every bit of power out of engines they can, or PC overclockers,…

EXPLAINING OPTICAL RADIATION LED 5G WEAPONS - KEEP WAKING PEOPLE UP

ANY PHOTONICS SCIENTIST WILL CONFIRM BUT DON'T ASK AN ACADEMIC THEY ARE JUST LIARS

Interesting Optical Journey Results In Hybrid Viewfinder For Smartphones

Fair warning: if you ever thought there was nothing particularly interesting with optical viewfinders, prepare to have your misconception corrected by [volzo] with this deep-dive into camera-aiming…

Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card

This year’s Hackaday Supercon, the first since 2019 thanks to the pandemic, was a very similar affair to those of the past. Almost every hardware-orientated hacker event has its own custom el…

Homebrew Optical Sensor Helps Your Diesel Pass The Smoke Test

We’ve all heard of the smoke test, and we know that it’s the lowest possible bar for performance of an electronic device. If it doesn’t burst into flames when power is applied, yo…

Growing Silver Nanoprisms With Light

Nanoparticles sound a bit like science fiction to minds of your average hacker — too esoteric and out of reach to be something we might get to work with in our own lairs — but [Ben Krasnow] of [App…

Paper Tape Reader Self-calibrates, Speaks USB

Input devices consisting of optical readers for punched paper tape have been around since the earliest days of computing, so why stop now? [Jürgen]’s Paper Tape Reader project connects to any…

Old Printer Becomes Direct Laser Lithography Machine

What does it take to make your own integrated circuits at home? It’s a question that relatively few intrepid hackers have tried to answer, and the answer is usually something along the lines …

Beautiful Engineering In This Laser Unit From A Tornado Jet Fighter

Those of use hailing from the UK may be quite familiar with the Royal Air Force’s Tornado fighter jet, which was designed to fight in a theoretical nuclear war, and served the country for ove…

A Soft Thumb-Sized Vision-Based Touch Sensor

A team from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany have developed a novel thumb-shaped touch sensor capable of resolving the force of a contact, as well as its direction, over …

All About Dichroic Optical Filters

[IMSAI Guy] presents for your viewing pleasure, a nice video on the topic of optical filters and mirrors. (Video, embedded below) The first optical device is a simple absorption filter, where incom…

Is Your Flashlight A Lumen Liar? Build A DIY Integrating Sphere

A lamp used to be simple thing: just stick a filament in a glass bulb, pass a current through it and behold! Let there be light. A bigger lamp meant a larger filament, taking more power and a large…

Cannonball Mold Makes A Dandy Integrating Sphere For Laser Measurements

It’s an age-old riddle: if you have a perfect sphere with a perfectly reflective inner surface, will light bounce around inside it forever? The answer is pretty obvious when you think it thro…

Quantum Atomic Interferometer For Precision Motion Sensing

The current state of the art of embedded motion sensing is based around micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices. These miracles of microfabrication use tiny silicon structures, configured to…