Laser Theremin Turns Your Hand Swooshes Into Music

In a world where smartphones have commoditized precision MEMS Sensors, the stage is set to reimagine clusters of these sensors as something totally different. That’s exactly what [chronopoulo…

Mini Laser Engraver Could Carve Out A Place On Your Desk

Got a couple of old DVD-RW drives lying around, just collecting dust? Of course you do. If not, you likely know where to find a pair so you can build this totally adorable and fully dangerous laser…

Microwave Ovens: Need More Power? Use Lasers Instead!

You know how it is, you get in late from work, you’ve been stuck in traffic for what seems like an eternity, and you’re hungry. You reach for the microwave meal, and think, if only I di…

Columbia Decides 3D Printed Food Tastes Like Chicken

Researchers at Columbia have used multi-wavelength lasers to cook 3D-printed chicken. Apparently, it tastes like chicken. We were not overly surprised that 3D printed chicken protein cooked up to t…

DIY Laser Speckle Imaging Uncovers Hidden Details

It sure sounds like “laser speckle imaging” is the sort of thing you’d need grant money to experiment with, but as [anfractuosity] recently demonstrated, you can get some very imp…

Acousto-Optic Filter Uses Sound To Bend Light

We all know that light and sound are wave phenomena, but of very different kinds. Light is electromechanical in nature, while sound is mechanical. Light can travel through a vacuum, while sound nee…

Interactive Musical Art Installation Mixes Vintage, Modern, Lasers, And…Bubbles? Bubbles.

Acorn BBC Master. Apple IIe. Ampex 270 Terminal. Vectrex game console. You’d be hard pressed to find a more diverse hardware collection in the average hacker’s lab. When you add seven Raspberry Pi’…

Of Lasers And Lightning: Thwarting Thor With Technology

Most of us don’t spend that much time thinking about lightning. Every now and then we hear some miraculous news story about the man who just survived his fourth lightning strike, but aside fr…

Hackaday Links: July 11, 2021

Well, at least the acronym will stay the same. It looks like black is the new blue for Windows 11, as the BSOD screen gets its first makeover in years. It’s an admittedly minor change, since …

Lightwave Multimeter Teardown

You tend to think of test equipment in fairly basic terms: a multimeter, a power supply, a signal generator, and an oscilloscope. However, there are tons of highly-specialized test equipment for ve…

Fake: A Laser Display Board Of Your Very Own

Update 6/23/21: Many people have called this out as fake. When viewed at 1/4 speed, you can see the logos in the YouTube video are always full-off or full-on and never caught mid way through a scan…

Tiny Tesla Valves Etched In Glass

While it’s in vogue right now to name fancy new technology after Tesla, the actual inventor had plenty of his own creations that would come to bear his namesake, including Tesla coils, Tesla …

Repairing A 300W CO2 Laser, One Toasted Part At A Time

A couple months back, [macona] got his hands on a 300 watt Rofin CO2 laser in an unknown condition. Unfortunately, its condition became all too known once he took a peek inside the case of the powe…

Digital X-Ray Scanner Teardown Yields Bounty Of Engineering Goodies

We’ll just go ahead and say it right up front: we love teardowns. Ripping into old gear and seeing how engineers solved problems — or didn’t — is endlessly fascinating, even…

Adding A Laser Blaster To Classic Atari 2600 Games With Machine Vision

Remember the pistol controller for the original Atari 2600? No? Perhaps that’s because it never existed. But now that we’re living in the future, adding a pistol to the classic games of…

With A Big Enough Laser, The World Is Your Sensor

It’s difficult to tell with our dull human senses, but everything around us is vibrating. Sure it takes more energy to get big objects like bridges and houses humming compared to a telephone …

JavaScript App Uses Advanced Math To Make PCBs Easier To Etch

We all remember the litany from various math classes we’ve taken, where frustration at a failure to understand a difficult concept bubbles over into the classic, “When am I ever going t…

The Laser Power Record Has Been Broken

Lasers do all sorts of interesting things and — as with so many things — more is better. Korean scientists announced recently they’ve created the most powerful laser beam. 1023 wa…

Clever Gas Mixer Gets Just The Right Blend For Homebrew Laser Tubes

[Lucas] over at Cranktown City on YouTube has been very busy lately, but despite current appearances, his latest project is not a welder. Rather, he built a very clever gas mixer for filling his ho…