Push For On, Hold For Off, AC Edition

A common theme in modern consumer electronics is having a power button that can be tapped to turn the device on, but needs to be held down when it’s time to shut it off. [R. Jayapal] had noti…

Do 3D Printers Dream Of LEGO Sheep?

Imagine the power to clone your favorite LEGO piece—not just any piece, but let’s say, one that costs €50 second-hand. [Balazs] from RacingBrick posed this exact question: can a 3D scanner re…

VNAs And Crystals

Oscillators may use crystals as precise tuned circuits. If you have a vector network analyzer (VNA) — or even some basic test equipment — you can use it to learn the parameters of a cry…

A Hundred Year Old Solid State Amplifier

Conventional wisdom has it that the solid state era in electronics began in 1948 with the invention of the transistor, or if you wish to split hairs, with the 1930s invention by the Russian [Oleg L…

From Cans To Sheet Metal, With Ease

Aluminium drinks cans make a great source of thin sheet metal which can be used for all manner of interesting projects, but it’s safe to say that retrieving a sheet of metal from a can is a h…

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 …

OLED Screen Mounting, Without The Pain

There was a time when no self-respecting electronics engineer would build a big project without at least one panel meter. They may be a rare part here in 2024, but we find ourselves reminded of the…

Gear Up: A 15-Minute Intro On Involute Gears

If you’re into CNC machining, mechanical tinkering, or just love a good engineering rabbit hole, you’re in for a treat. Substack’s [lcamtuf] has written a quick yet insightful 15-minute intro…

Hands On With A Giant Nixie Tube

[Sam Battle] is no stranger to these pages, nor is his Museum is not Obsolete. The museum was recently gifted an enormous Nixie tube created by Dalibor Farný, a B-grade (well, faulty) unit that cou…

3D Printed Tires, By The Numbers

What does it take to make decent tires for your projects? According to this 3D printed tire torture test, it’s actually pretty easy — it’s more a question of how well they work wh…

Approximating An ADC With Successive Approximation

[Igor] made a VU meter with LEDs using 8 LEDs and 8 comparators. This is a fast way to get one of 8 bits to indicate an input voltage, but that’s only the equivalent of a 3-bit analog to digi…

Have You Heard Of The Liquid Powder Display?

Over the decades the technology behind flat panel displays has continuously evolved, and we’ve seen many of them come and go. Among the popular ones there are a few that never quite made the …

Photochromic Dye Makes Up This Novel Optical Memristor

Despite being much in the zeitgeist lately, we have to confess to still being a bit foggy about exactly what memristors are. The “mem” part of their name seems to be the important bit, …

Need High-Power Li-Ion Charging? How About 100 W

Ever want a seriously powerful PCB for charging a Li-Ion pack? Whatever you want it for, [Redherring32] has got it — it’s a board bearing the TPS25750D and BQ25713 chips, that lets you …

Makerpipe Turns Conduit Into Structures

At the risk of stating the obvious, building big things can be difficult. Sure, parts that fit on the bed of a 3D printer are easy to make, if not particularly fast, and scaling up from there is po…

Supercon 2024: Last Call For Display Tech Exhibit

During this year’s Hackaday Supercon, the Supplyframe DesignLab will be playing host to a unique exhibit that catalogs the evolution of display technology. That means showcasing the best and …

Why Have Seven Segments When You Can Have 21?

IO user [monte] was pointed towards an 1898 display patent issued to a [George Mason] and liked the look of the ‘creepy’ font it defined. The layout used no less than 21 discrete segmen…

This Tiny Steam Engine Takes A Watchmaker’s Skill To Build

When your steam engine build requires multiple microscopes, including those of the scanning electron variety, you know you’re building something really, really tiny. All of the usual tiny sup…

The Science Of Coating Steel

[Breaking Taps] has a look at “parkerization” — a process to coat steel to prevent rust. While you commonly see this finish in firearms, it is usable anywhere you need some protec…

Multi-Material Printing Enables Low Cost Silicone Prototypes

While it’s the ideal choice for mass production, injection molding is simply no good for prototyping. The molds are expensive and time-consuming make, so unless you’ve got the funding t…