Simple Stack Of Ferrites Shows How Fluxgate Magnetometers Work

Have you ever wondered how a magnetometer works? We sure have, which was why we were happy to stumble upon this article on simple homebrew fluxgate magnetometers. As [Maurycy] explains, clues to ho…

Analog Shift Register Revealed

Nowadays, if you want to delay an audio signal for, say, an echo or a reverb, you’d probably just do it digitally. But it wasn’t long ago that wasn’t a realistic option. Some devi…

Making A Unique Type Of Wind Gauge For Home Assistant Use

Sometimes, it’s nice to know how windy it is outside. Knowing the direction of the wind can be a plus, too. To that end, [Sebastian Sokołowski] built himself an unusual anemometer—a wind gaug…

DIY Lock Nuts

If you have a metal lathe just looking for some work, why not make your own lock nuts? That’s what [my mechanics insight] did when faced with a peculiar lock nut that needed replacing in a ca…

Check Your Clip Leads

[Matthias] bought cheap clip leads online and, wisely, decided to check them. We’ve had the same experience that he’s had. Sometimes, these cheap leads are crimped and don’t make …

Clever Circuit Makes Exercise Slightly Less Boring

We say this with the greatest respect, but [Joel] — your exercise routine is horrible! Kudos for getting up and doing something, but 108 trips up and down the stairs? That sounds like torture…

Measuring Temperature Without A Thermometer

If you need to measure the temperature of something, chances are good that you could think up half a dozen ways to do it, pretty much all of which would involve some kind of thermometer, thermistor…

3D Printed Hardware Sorter Keeps It Simple

If you’re like us, you’ve got at least one bin dedicated to keeping the random hardware you just can’t bear to part with. In our case it’s mostly populated with the nuts and…

Building A Hydrogen-Powered Foam Dart Cannon

Nerf blasters are fun and all, but they’re limited by the fact they have to be safe for children to play with. [Flasutie] faced no such restrictions when building his giant 40 mm foam dart la…

Cataract Surgery For An Old TV

TVs used to be round, and the GE M935AWL is a great example of that. [bandersentv] found one of these ancient sets, but found it had a “cataract”—a large ugly discoloration on the tube.…

Word Of The Day Calendar Is Great Use Of E-Paper

If you’re trying to learn a new language, there are always a lot of words to learn. A word-of-the-day calendar can help, and they’re often readily available off the shelf. Or, you can g…

A Wobble Disk Air Motor With One Moving Part

In general, the simpler a thing is, the better. That doesn’t appear to apply to engines, though, at least not how we’ve been building them. Pistons, cranks, valves, and seals, all opera…

DIY Air Bearings, No Machining Required

Seeing a heavy load slide around on nearly frictionless air bearings is pretty cool; it’s a little like how the puck levitates on an air hockey table. Commercial air bearings are available, o…

Ideal Diodes And How To Build Them

[Julian] knows that real diodes you can buy don’t work exactly like we say they do. That’s actually pretty common. We routinely ignore things like wire resistance and source resistance …

Power Supply PCB Redesign

We’ve often heard you should do everything twice. The first time is to learn what you need to do, and the second time is to do it right. We bet [Ian Carey] would agree after taking his old li…

Little RC Car Project Takes Inspiration From Mario Kart

RC cars used to be pretty simple. They’d go forwards, backwards, and steer if you got a full-function toy. However, with modern technology, it’s pretty trivial to make them more advance…

Alphabet Soup: Haskell’s Single-Letter Naming Quirks

When you used punch cards or tape to write a computer program, brief variable names were the norm. Your compiler or assembler probably only allowed six letters, anyway. But times change, and people…

How To Make Conductive Tin Oxide Coatings On Glass

Glass! It’s, uh, not very conductive. And sometimes we like that! But other times, we want glass to be conductive. In that case, you might want to give the glass a very fine coating of tin ox…

Dot-Matrix Printer Brings Old School Feel To Today’s Headlines

If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you&…

Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry

Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. …