Remove Wall Plugs Fast With A Custom Tool

The best thing about buying your own home is that you can hang things on the walls. It’s a human right all too often denied to renters the world over. Regardless, five years later, when you&#…

Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints At More

You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to hack the scope to play Breakout, sometimes plas…

Fail Of The Week: Can An Ultrasonic Cleaner Remove Bubbles From Resin?

[Wendy] asked a very good question. Could putting liquid resin into an ultrasonic cleaner help degas it? Would it help remove bubbles, resulting in a cleaner pour and nicer end product? What we lov…

Plasma Cutter On The Cheap Reviewed

If you have a well-equipped shop, it isn’t unusual to have a welder. Stick welders have become a commodity and even some that use shield gas are cheap if you don’t count buying the bott…

Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring

Last time, we looked into using a logic analyzer to decode SPI signals of LCD displays, which can help us reuse LCD screens from proprietary systems, or port LCD driver code from one platform to an…

No Lathe? Build Your Own

If you need to make round things, you probably need a lathe. Can you build one as nice as one you can buy? Probably not. But can you build one that will work and allow you to do more things than ha…

Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2

Soldering is easy, as long as you have one hand to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and another to hold the workpiece. For those of us not so equipped, there’s the new and improved Sold…

Adjustable Lights Help Peer Inside Chips With IR

If you’re used to working through a microscope, you’ve probably noticed that the angle of the light greatly affects how your workpiece looks. Most of us prefer the relatively flat light…

Squishy Miter Saw Shroud Spares You The Sneezy Bits

Let’s be honest. When it comes to operating miter saws, these tools kick dust out the back like a spray paint can. Most of us have accepted this quirk as-is, but not [Inspire Woodcraft] who&#…

Comparing Desoldering Tools

[Lee] has a Hakko FR301 desoldering gun and a Duratool knockoff. He freely admits that the Hakko is probably better, but he wonders if it’s good enough to justify being four times as expensiv…

A Simple Line Injector Shows You The Wonderful World Of PSRR

[limpkin] writes us to show a line injector they’ve designed. The principle is simple — if you want to measure how much PSU noise any of your electronic devices let through, known as PS…

Vibratory Rock Tumbler Bounces On Printed Spring

If you’re reading Hackaday, there’s a good chance you had a rock tumbler in your younger days. Hell, we’d put odds on a few of you having one rumbling away in the background as yo…

ESP-Prog-Adapter Makes Your ESP32 Tinkering Seamless

Did you ever struggle with an ESP32 board of yours, wishing you had exposed that UART, or seriously lacking the JTAG port access? If so, you should seriously check out [0xjmux]’s ESP-PROG-Ada…

Multiply Your Multimeter With Relays And USB

Multimeters are a bit like potato chips: you can’t have just one. But they’re a lot more expensive than potato chips, especially the good ones, and while it’s tempting to just go …

Modular Vacuum Table Custom-Fits The Parts

[enhydra] needed to modify a bunch of side inserts from some cheap ABS enclosures, and to save time and effort, he created a simple vacuum table with swappable inserts to precisely fit the parts. S…

SMD Soldering, Without The Blobs

Hand soldering of surface mount components is a bread-and-butter task for anyone working with electronics in 2024. So many devices are simply no longer available in the older through-hole formats, …

Night Vision The Old Way

Solid state electronics have provided lighter weight night vision units that work better than the old-fashioned gear that used photomultiplier tubes, but there was an even older technology as [Our …

Are Minimills Worth It?

These days, the bar for home-built projects is high. With 3D printers, CNC, and cheap service providers, you can’t get away with building circuits in a shoe box or an old Tupperware container…

AxxSolder 3.0 Now Takes USB Power Delivery

If you’re big into the soldering iron scene, you’ve probably heard of the AxxSolder project. Now, it’s been updated with a whole host of nifty new features. It’s AxxSolder 3…

Roll Your Own DRO With An Added Twist

When using a manual machine tool such as a lathe or milling machine, there can be a lot of pressure to read the position and feed the axes at the correct rate. That’s why modern machines typi…