Spinning Magnets Do Your Dice Rolling For You

Dice are about the simplest machines possible, and they’ve been used since before recorded history to generate random numbers. But no machine is so simple that a little needless complexity ca…

Using The Wind And Magnets To Make Heat

On the face of it, harnessing wind power to heat your house seems easy. In fact some of you might be doing it already, assuming you’ve got a wind farm somewhere on your local grid and you hav…

Tattoo-Removal Laser Brought Out Of Retirement For A Megawatt Of Fun

We’ve got to say that [Les Wright] has the most fun on the internet, at least in terms of megawatts per dollar. Just look at his new video where he turns a $30 eBay tattoo-removal laser into …

Magnetic Gearbox, Part 2: Axial Flux Improves Performance

The number of interesting and innovative mechanisms that 3D printing has enabled always fascinates us, and it’s always a treat when one of them shows up in our feeds. This axial flux magnetic…

Hall Sensors Offer Drop-In Replacement For Drifting Game Console Joysticks

No bananas were harmed in the making of this Hall effect drift-proof joystick replacement. OK, not really — two bananas were turned to mush. But it’s OK, they’re just bananas, aft…

Exploring The Hall Effect For Haptic Feedback PS4 Joysticks

Modern gaming console controllers aren’t without their annoyances — Joy-Con drift, anyone? The problems might stem from design deficiencies, but we suspect that user enthusiasm and the …

Clever Mechanism Makes A Linear Control From A Rotary Hall Sensor

Every once in a while we stumble across something so simple yet so clever that we just have to call it out. This custom linear Hall effect sensor is a perfect example of this. By way of backstory, …

Fifteen Flat CRTs And A Bunch Of Magnets Make For Interactive Fun

If you were a curious child growing up when TVs were universally equipped with cathode ray tubes, chances are good that you discovered the effect a magnet can have on a beam of electrons. Watching …

Faceless Clock Makes Your Think Twice About How It Works

We love projects that make you do a double-take when you first see them. It’s always fun to think you see one thing, but then slowly realize everything is not quite what you expected. And thi…

Magnetic Gearbox Design Improvements Are Toothless But Still Cool

Any project that contains something called a “flux modulator” instantly commands our attention. And while we’re pretty sure that [Retsetman] didn’t invent it after hitting h…

Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements

Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny …

Falling Down The Labyrinth With Wooden Microphone Design

It used to be that when we featured one of [Frank Olson]’s DIY ribbon microphone builds, it was natural to focus on the fact that he was building them almost exclusively from wood. But despit…

Attack Of The Magnetic Slime Robots

[Li Zhang] and his colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have developed a blob of goo that can navigate complex surroundings, grow an ‘arm’, grasp a wire and move it,…

A New Wrinkle On Wooden Ribbon Microphones

Not too many people build their own microphones, and those who do usually build them out of materials like plastic and metal. [Frank Olson] not only loves to make microphones, but he’s also g…

One Stepper Plus A Whole Bunch Of Magnets Equals A Unique Seven-Segment Display

Sometimes the cost of simplicity is extra complexity. It seems counterintuitive, but it seems to be true. And this single-motor mechanical seven-segment display seems to be a perfect example of thi…

Magnetic Bearings Put The Spin On This Flywheel Battery

[Tom Stanton] is right about one thing: flywheels make excellent playthings. Whether watching a spinning top that never seems to slow down, or feeling the weird forces a gyroscope exerts, spinning …

Wood Enclosure Lends Warmth To This DIY Ribbon Microphone

We love it when someone takes an idea they’ve seen on Hackaday and runs with it, taking it in a new and different direction. That’s pretty much what we’re here for, after all, and…