UFO 50 Inspired LX System Looks Straight Out Of A Video Game

They simply don’t make them like they used to, and in the case of this retro LX system build, they only make what never existed in the first place. Earlier this year the long awaited video ga…

Minichord Wants To Help You Find Rad Chord Progressions

If you’re good at music theory, you can probably find all the chords and progressions you need just by using your fingers and a suitable instrument. For a lot of musicians, though, rememberin…

Chocolate-Coating Machine Mk. 2: The Merry-Go-Round

This holiday season, [Chaz] wanted to continue his family’s tradition of enrobing a little bit of everything in dark chocolate, and built an improved, rotating chocolate-coating machine. You …

The Japanese Console You Maybe Haven’t Heard Of

The games consoles which came out of Japan in the 1980s are the stuff of legend, with the offerings from Nintendo and Sega weaving themselves into global popular culture. Most of us can recite a li…

Homebrew Phosphorescence Detector Looks For The Glow In Everyday Objects

Spoiler alert: almond butter isn’t phosphorescent. But powdered milk is, at least to the limit of detection of this homebrew phosphorescence detector. Why spend a bunch of time and money on s…

Even Apple Get Their Parts Wrong Sometimes

There can be few among those of us who produce printed circuit boards, who have not at some point placed a component the wrong way round, or with the wrong footprint. Usually this can be rectified …

A Look Under The Hood Of Intermediate Frequency Transformers

If you’ve been tearing electronic devices apart for long enough, you’ll know that the old gear had just as many mysteries within as the newer stuff. The parts back then were bigger, of …

DIY Pipe Inspector Goes Where No Bot Has Gone Before

If you think your job sucks, be grateful you’re not this homebrew sewer inspection robot. Before anyone gets upset, yes we know what [Stargate System] built here isn’t a robot at all; i…

Would An Indexing Feature Benefit Your Next Hinge Design?

[Angus] of Maker’s Muse has a video with a roundup of different 3D-printable hinge designs, and he points out that a great thing about 3D printing objects is that adding printable features to…

FLOSS Weekly Episode 811: Elixir & Nerves – Real Embedded Linux

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Lars Wikman chat about Elixir and Nerves — a modern language that’s a take on Erlang, and an embedded Linux approach for running Elixir code on devices. …

Could Nuclear Be The Way To Produce Synthetic Fuel On The Cheap?

Fossil fuels can be a bit fussy to access, and geopolitics tends to make prices volatile. Burning them also takes carbon out of the ground and puts it into the atmosphere, with undesirable climate …

Retrotechtacular: The Deadly Shipmate

During World War II, shipboard life in the United States Navy was a gamble. No matter which theater of operations you found yourself in, the enemy was all around on land, sea, and air, ready to del…

Boss Byproducts: Corium Is Man-Made Lava

So now we’ve talked about all kinds of byproducts, including man-made (Fordite), nature-made (fulgurites), and one that’s a little of both (calthemites). Each of these is beautiful in i…

Life Found On Ryugu Asteroid Sample, But It Looks Very Familiar

Samples taken from the space-returned piece of asteroid Ryugu were collected and prepared under strict anti-contamination controls. Inside the cleanest of clean rooms, a tiny particle was collected…

Getting Started In Laser Cutting

If you were to walk into most of the world’s hackerspaces, it’s likely that the most frequent big-ticket tool you’ll find after a 3D printer is a laser cutter. A few years ago tha…

Massive Mural From Thermal Receipt Paper

Turning trash into art is something we undoubtedly all admire. [Davis DeWitt] did just that with a massive mural made entirely from discarded receipt paper. [Davis] got lucky while doing some light…

Your Undocumented Project May Also Baffle People Someday

What’s life without a little mystery? There’s one less rolling around after historians finally identified a donated mystery machine that had been in storage for years. The main pieces o…

A Robot Meant For Humans

Although humanity was hoping for a more optimistic robotic future in the post-war era, with media reflecting that sentiment like The Jetsons or Lost in Space, we seem to have shifted our collective…

A Laser With Mirrors Makes A CRT-like Display

Phosphor-based displays like CRTs rely on the phosphor to emit light for a set amount of time after being activated, allowing them to display a seemingly persistent image with one drawing beam per …

Alternatives Don’t Need To Be Bashed

By default, bash is the most popular command language simply because it’s included in most *nix operating systems. Additionally, people don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about …