A General-Purpose PID Controller

For those new to fields like robotics or aerospace, it can seem at first glance that a problem like moving a robot arm or flying an RC airplane might be simple problems to solve. It turns out, howe…

A Compact SMD Reflow Hotplate Powered By USB-PD

When it comes to home-lab reflow work, there are a lot of ways to get the job done. The easiest thing to do perhaps is to slap a PID controller on an old toaster oven and call it a day. But if your…

Bigfoot Turns Classic Sewing Machine Into A Leather-Eating Monster

If you try to sew leather on a standard consumer-grade machine, more often than not you’ll quickly learn its limits. Most machines are built for speed, and trying to get them to punch through…

Solder Two Boards At Once With This Dual Reflow Plate

Homebrew reflow projects generally follow a pretty simple formula: find a thrift shop toaster oven or hot plate, add a microcontroller and a means to turn the heating element on and off, and close …

Start Your Semiconductor Fab With This DIY Tube Furnace

Most of us are content to get our semiconductors from the usual sources, happily abstracting away the complexity locked within those little epoxy blobs. But eventually, you might get the itch to ro…

Internal Heating Element Makes These PCBs Self-Soldering

Surface mount components have been a game changer for the electronics hobbyist, but doing reflow soldering right requires some way to evenly heat the board. You might need to buy a commercial reflo…

Stewart Platform Keeps Its Eye On The Ball

Although billed as a balancing robot, [Aaed Musa’s] robot doesn’t balance itself. It balances a ball on a platform. You might recognize this as something called a Stewart platform, and …

This Found-Sound Organ Was Made With Python And A Laser Cutter

Certain among our readership will no doubt remember attaching a playing card to the front fork of one’s bicycle so that the spokes flapped the card as the wheel rotated. It was supposed to so…

PET Bottles Diligently Turned Into Filament

While the price of 3D printers has come down quite a lot in the past few years, filament continues to be rather pricey especially for those doing a lot of printing. This has led to some people look…

Mini Falcon 9 Uses NASA Software

[T-Zero Systems] has been working on his model Falcon 9 rocket for a while now. It’s an impressive model, complete with thrust vectoring, a microcontroller which follows a predetermined fligh…

Building Reaction Wheels With Python And LEGO

Reaction wheels are useful things, typically used by satellites to keep themselves oriented the right way up in space. Turning the reaction wheel creates an equal and opposite torque in the spacecr…

Filament Dry Box Design Goes Way Over The Top

There’s a fine line between simple feature creep and going over the top when it comes to project design. It’s hard to say exactly where that line is, but we’re pretty sure that th…

Pico Does PID

If you wanted to, say, control a temperature you might think you could just turn on a heater until you reach the desired temperature and then turn the heater off. That sort of works, but it is subo…

Fail Of The Week: Magnetic Levitation

We are big fans of the little desktop magnetic levitation setups that float a small object on a magnet. As [3D Printed Life] points out, they look like magic. He was surprised that the commercial u…

Self Balancing Robot Needs A Little Work

A self-balancing robot isn’t a new idea, but we liked the aesthetics of [Maker ATOM’s] build. The use of a breadboard and a printed bracket looks good, as you can see in the video, belo…

Line Following Robot Uses PID For Speed

While a line-following robot may not be the newest project idea in the book, this one from [Edison Science] is a clean build using modern components and gets a good speed thanks to PID control feed…