Hackaday Prize 2022: DIY Brushless Hand Cranked Generator

A standard part of travel kit for the 2020s is now a battery pack — a hefty lithium-ion cell with onboard electronics for USB charging, that ensures all of our devices stay topped up while we…

What’s The Time? It’s Casino’clock!

As the saying goes, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and the never-ending inventiveness of clock hacks. No matter how tried and proven a concept is, someone will always find …

Automated Blinds Can Be A Cheap And Easy Build

Blinds are great for blocking out the sun, but having to get up to open and close them grows tiresome in this computationally-advanced age. [The Hook Up] decided to automate his home blinds instead…

Protect Your Drivers When The Motor Stalls

[Mark Rehorst] tells us about a tragic incident involving an untimely demise of $200 worth of motor driving hardware, and shares a simple circuit so that we can prevent such tragedies in the future…

Turning Old Plotter Parts Into A Smooth Camera Slider

Taking apart old stuff and re-using the parts to make something new is how many hackers first got started in the world of mechanical and electronic engineering. But even after years working in indu…

3D Printering: Don’t Tune To A Middle ‘C’ After All

3D printer belt tension seems like a simple thing to deal with — you set the tension and then check it’s good now and then. If it gets really loose, then the teeth can slip and you’ll g…

Silent Stepper Motors Make Electromechanical Clock Fit For A Living Room

Large mechanical seven-segment displays have a certain presence that you just don’t get in electronic screens. Part of this comes from the rather satisfying click-click-clack sound they make …

Minimalistic Doorbell Doesn’t Need An Internet Connection – Or Even A Power Supply

Doorbells are among those everyday objects that started out simple but picked up an immense amount of complexity over the years. What began as a mechanism to bang two pieces of metal together evolv…

Dummy The Robot Arm Is Not So Dumb

[Zhihui Jun] is a name you’re going to want to remember because this Chinese maker has created quite probably one of the most complete open-source robot arms (video in Chinese with subtitles,…

1960s Stereo Console Gets An Upgrade

Faced with an old console stereo from the 1960s that was barely functional, [Sherman Banks] aka W4ATL decided to upgrade its guts while keeping its appearance as close to the original as possible. …

PCB Stepper Motor Micro Robots

[Kevin Lynagh] is interested in tiny PCB stepper motors, and after reviewing the various projects and patents to-date, decided to give it a try himself. These are basically a stepper motor that&#82…

Teaching A DC Servo Motor To Act Like A Stepper

[Frank Herrmann] had an interesting idea to turn a geared DC motor into a servo motor assembly, but with a stepper motor-like interface. By stacking some small PCBs behind the motor body, it was po…

Arduino Drives Faux Spirograph

The holidays always remind us of our favorite toys from when we were kids. Johnny Astro, an Erector set, and — of course — a Spirograph. [CraftDiaries] has an Arduino machine that isn&#…

Cheap Big Servo For Robot Arm

[Skyentific] is looking to push the hobbyist robotics state of the art. Motors and their gears, the actuators, are typically the most expensive part. For his build, he realised he needed big servos…

Light Painting With An 19th Century Inspired Plotter

The geometric chuck was a device that stacked up multiple rotating wheels that could vary their speed and their offset to a central shaft, in order to machine ornate designs using a lathe. It&#8217…

Motorized Camera Slider Gives Your Shots Style

We’ve all seen those smooth panning shots, which combined with some public domain beats, are a hallmark of the modern YouTube tech video. Recreating that style in your own productions is as e…

Compact M&M Sorter Goes Anywhere

Let’s face it — eating different colored candy like M&Ms or Skittles is just a little more fun if you sort your pile by color first. The not-fun part is having to do it by hand. [Ja…

Perfecting A 3D Printed Camera Motion Control Rig

If you’ve ever watched one of those high production value YouTube videos and wondered how they’re able to get those smooth shots where the camera seems to be spinning around an object, …