How Much Thrust Is Your Prop Really Making?

The problem of components not conforming to their claimed specification is one that must challenge engineers in all fields, including it seems, that of multi-rotors and remote controlled aircraft. …

3D Printing Real Wood With Just Cellulose And Lignin

Although the components of wood – cellulose and lignin – are exceedingly cheap and plentiful, combining these into a wood-like structure is not straightforward, despite many attempts to…

R/C Smoke Grenade Rolls With The Changes

[Davis DeWitt] gets to do something that many of us only dream of — build cool working props for movies. This time, the director asked for a realistic smoke grenade that can roll up to a mark…

RP2040 Boot Loader Is A Worm

[Hunter Adams] has written a secondary bootloader for the RP2040 that uses an IR link and can be extended to behave like a polite worm virus. This allows the easy updating of a large cluster of co-…

CT Scan Reveals Secrets Of Heinz’s New Ketchup Cap

Ketchup bottles are a solved technology, right? Wrong! As it turns out, there is still great development being done in this space. Industrial imaging company Lumafield reveals to us the secrets of …

Using Gallium Oxide As A Resistive Memory Element

Resistive random-access memory (RRAM) is a highly attractive form of RAM, as it promises low-power usage with stable long-term storage, even in the absence of external power. Finding the right mate…

Double Fed Induction Motors: Clever Motor Control Through Frequency

Somewhere in most engineering educations, there’s a class on induction motors. Students learn about shaded-pole motors, two-phase and three-phase motors, squirrel cage motors, and DC-excited …

Piezo Transducers Could Turn Displays Into Speakers

Will piezoelectric-based speakers replace traditional speakers over the coming years in space-constrained devices? We have definitely seen the use of piezo transducers in e.g. high-end televisions …

High Caliber Engineering On A Low Torque PCB Servo Motor

Building a 3D motor printed motor is one thing, but creating a completely custom servo motor with encoder requires some significant engineering. In the video after the break [365 Robots] takes us t…

Low-Cost DSP For Scanning Probe Microscopy

A scanning probe microscope comes in a wide variety of flavors, they all produce a set of data points containing the measurements at each location. Usually these data points form a regular 2D grid,…

3D Printed Axial Compressor Is On A Mission To Inflate Balloons

[Let’s Print] has been fascinated with creating a 3D printed axial compressor that can do meaningful work, and his latest iteration mixes FDM and SLA printed parts to successfully inflate (an…

Skip The Radio With This Software-Defined Ultrasound Data Link

We know what you’re thinking: with so many wireless modules available for just pennies, trying to create a physical data link using ultrasonic transducers like [Damian Bonicatto] did for a sh…

Peltier Mini Fridge For Class By Class

How do you keep a few sodas in your classroom cool? Well, if you are teacher [Ethan Hunt], you have your students design and build a solid-state mini refrigerator that can beat his prototype fridge…

How Does A Sewing Machine Sew?

Like all Hackaday readers, we pride ourselves on having at least a passing acquaintance with how most things work. But we suspect to a lot of people, things we take for granted — computers, a…

Giant Demonstrator Explains How DLP Projectors Work

Texas Instruments developed digital mirror devices, and the subsequent digital light processing (DLP) projector, starting in the late 1980s. The technology is a wondrous and fanciful application of…

Forever Writing On Monofilament Fishing Line

Collectively, we have a long-term memory problem. Paper turns to mulch, dyes in optical disks degrade, iron oxides don’t last forever, and flash memories will eventually fade away. So what do…

Keypad Interface Module Reverse Engineers Pinouts So You Don’t Have To

If you’ve scavenged some random keypads and want to reuse them in a project without the hassle of figuring out the pinouts, then [Cliff Biffle] has an interface module for you. The Keypad Go …

Neat Soldering Station Design Has Workshop & Portable Versions

The warm and rather stinky heart of any hacker’s lair is the soldering station, where the PCB meets the metal (solder). A good soldering station lets you get on with the business of building …

Drop-In Upgrade PCB Brings USB-C To DualShock 4

Despite a somewhat shaky start, it seems like everyone is finally embracing USB-C. Most gadgets have made the switch these days, and even Apple has (with some external persuasion) gotten on board. …

Home Network Organization Gets Out Of Hand

[SpookyGhost] has a big home network, and has taken cable management and server organization to the extreme. He has written about individual components before, but this blog post brings it all toge…