Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
Jokes aside, manually designing linkages that move along specific paths is no easy task. Whether we’re doodling paper sketches or constraining lines in a CAD program, we still need to do the work of actually “imagining” the linkage design. If only there were some sort of tool that would do …read more
You know me, I like to get my feet involved when I use my computer, which happens pretty much all day every day at this point. My cache of pedal inputs keeps growing like mushrooms in the darkness under my desk: every upper case letter in this post and dozens …read more
Hackaday Remoticon happens November 6-8 worldwide! The weekend will be packed with virtual activities, and most of them are hands-on workshops that you can participate in from the comfort of your home, lab, garage, basement, lair, or other socially distanced location of your choosing.
The news today is that everyone …read more
Tracked vehicles are cool, but can be quite complicated to build. [XenonJohn] wanted to skip the complexity, so he created Vector, an electric tracked motorcycle using only basic parts and tools. No machine tools required.
If it looks familiar, it’s because it was inspired by [Make It Extreme]’s monotrack motorcycle …read more
For those wishing to explore robot autonomy, there’s no better way then to learn by doing. [Greg] was in that camp, and decided to build an autonomous rover to roam his house, and learned plenty along the way.
[Greg]’s aims with the project were to build a robot that was …read more
There are a handful of relatively dirt cheap synths out there like the KORG Monotron, but many of them use ribbon controllers that aren’t very precise. Ribbon controllers basically slide pots that you operate with your finger or a stylus. They’re painted to look like piano keys in order to …read more
Classic motorcycles are the wild west of information displays. Often lacking even basic instrumentation such as a fuel gauge and sometimes even a speedometer, motorcycles have come a long way in instrument cluster design from even 20 years ago. There’s still some room for improvement, though, and luckily a lot …read more
Paper craft has been around almost as long as paper itself. It’s fun to mimic paper craft and origami with low-poly 3D prints, and [Stephen Hawes] wondered whether it could be done with copper-clad PCBs. Two years after the question arose, we have the answer in the form of a …read more
If you have more than one Linux computer, you probably use ssh all the time. It is a great tool, but I’ve always found one thing about it strange. Despite having file transfer capabilities in the form of scp and sftp, there is no way to move a file …read more
Join us on Wednesday, September 23 at noon Pacific for the Into the Plasmaverse Hack Chat with Jay Bowles!
Most kids catch on to the fact that matter can exist in three states — solid, liquid, and gas — pretty early in life, usually after playing in the snow a …read more
The hardware and software required to make DIY keyboards happen has gotten more and more accessible, and that means it’s easier than ever to make one’s ideal input device a reality from the ground up. For [Cameron Sun], his Ellipsis Split mechanical keyboard buildlog details his second effort, refining his …read more
FPGAs are somewhat the IPv6 of integrated circuits — they’ve been around longer than you might think, they let you do awesome things that people are intrigued by initially, but they’ve never really broke out of their niches until rather recently. There’s still a bit of a myth and mystery …read more
No matter what they’re flying, good pilots have a “feel” for their aircraft. They know instantly when something is wrong, whether by hearing a strange sound or a feeling a telltale vibration. Developing this sixth sense is sometimes critical to the goal of keeping the number of takeoff equal to …read more
Scale model engines are fascinating pieces of engineering, and RC cars are always awesome to play with, no matter your age. [Keith57000] has gone over the top on both, creating a seriously impressive hybrid RC car built around a custom 125 cc V10 engine.
[Keith57000] started building the V10 engine …read more
Traditionally, the useless machine is a simple one that invites passersby to switch it on. When they do, the machine somehow, some way, turns itself off; usually with a finger or finger-like object that comes out from the box in what feels like an annoyed fashion. Honestly, that’s probably part …read more
We like simulation software. Texas Instruments long offered TINA, but recently they’ve joined with Cadence to make OrCAD PSpice available for free with some restrictions. You’ve probably heard of PSpice — it’s widely used in academia and industry, but is usually quite costly. You can see a promotional overview video …read more
It’s not unheard of for those who tinker in the land of electronics to suddenly find themselves with a project on their hands and potential customers clamoring at the door. Of course, the road to shipping a product is a long one, and requires a unique set of skills quite …read more
It seems like many keyboard aficionados have been gravitating towards ever smaller boards, but not [Ren]. He’s mostly completed a 433% keyboard with a whopping 450 distinct keys. Using two off the shelf PCBs and Teensy to control it all, this keyboard means you’ll never need to strain to make …read more
[Irene Posch] has done some incredible work with knitted, crocheted, and fabric circuits — check out the crocheted ALUs and embroidered computer for starters. Now, it seems [Irene] is building up a how-to catalog of e-textile tools that can be easily connected to a multimeter.
So far, this toolbox includes …read more
Anti-static ESD straps are de rigueur in lab settings for those working with sensitive electronics. They’re a simple protective device, and one that generally doesn’t warrant a second thought. However, [Daniel Bogdanoff] figured they could stand to be a little more fashionable, and set to work on a fancier design. …read more