Custom Hat Gives Vintage Mitutoyo Calipers A New Lease On Life

Metrology fans are usually at least a little bit in love with Mitutoyo, and rightfully so. The Japanese company has been making precision measuring instruments for the better part of 100 years, and…

Digitally Reading A Micrometer’s Output

If you’re instrumenting your machine tools, or if you’re just curious, you might want to get granular access to the output of a digital micrometer or the like. [Tommy] set his mind to f…

About Right

I really enjoyed reading Anne Ogborn’s piece on making simple DIY measurement devices for physical quantities like force, power, and torque. It is full of food for thought, if you’re building somet…

Flexures Keep This Printed Displacement Sensor In Line

When the job at hand is measuring something with micron-range precision, thoughts generally turn to a tool with a Mitutoyo or Starrett nameplate. But with a clever design and a little electronics k…

Over-the-Top Programmable Resistor Looks The Part And Performs

Every once in a while we get wind of a project that we’re reluctant to write up for the simple reason that it looks too good to be true. Not that projects need to be messy to be authentic, mi…

Hackaday Links: March 5, 2023

Well, we guess it had to happen eventually — Ford is putting plans in place to make its vehicles capable of self-repossession. At least it seems so from a patent application that was publishe…

New Metric Prefixes Get Bigger And Smaller

It always fascinates us that every single thing that is made had to be designed by someone. Even something as simple as a bag and box that holds cereal. Someone had to work out the dimensions, the …

Review: Lidl Parkside Micrometer

A couple of years ago we published a look at precision measurement tools, in particular vernier calipers and micrometer screw gauges. It featured a look at how they work and how they’re used,…

Digital Measuring Wheel Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

You may have seen surveyors (or maths students) running around with measuring wheels, counting the clicks to measure distances. [AGBarber]’s digital measuring wheel works in much the same way…

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…

Books You Should Read: The Perfectionists

After pulling late hours in my school machine shop for a few years, I couldn’t help but wonder, who measures the measurement tools? How did they come to be? I’d heard anecdotes from oth…

The HP3458A: King Of Multimeters For Three Decades

[Marco] looks at a lot of meters. However, he considers the HP3458A the best even though they were introduced more than 30 years earlier in 1989. Someone donated one to [Marco] but it presented som…

Sub-mm Mechanical 3D Scanner With Encoders And String

[Scott Rumschlag] wanted a way to precisely map interior spaces for remodeling projects, but did not want to deal with the massive datasets created by optical 3D scanning, and found the precision o…