DIY
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This DIY Wax Motor Held Its Position to Within 5 Microns for 12 Hours, Just by Melting Wax Wax motors are the quiet actuators inside washing machine door locks, radiator valves and car thermostats: heat a block of wax, it melts and expands, and that expansion pushes a piston. Nobody thinks of them as precision parts. BubsBuilds built his own "waxtuator" to find out how precise one could be, and with careful temperature control it held a gap of less than 5 microns for twelve hours.… |
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He Wouldn't Pay for a Smart Blood Pressure Monitor, So an ESP32-CAM Now Reads His Old One Smart blood pressure monitors that sync to an app usually cost more than plain ones, and many push your readings into somebody else's cloud account. Tomasz Burzy of Mellow_Labs wanted his readings in his own self-hosted health tracker instead, so he kept a basic A&D UA-611 monitor and taught it Wi-Fi from the outside. An ESP32-CAM on a 3D-printed arm looks at the LCD, reads systolic,… |
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This 10 cm Cube Is a Raspberry Pi 5 Camera That Shoots RAW Video and Takes C-Mount Lenses Most digital cameras are closed boxes: you get the buttons, menus and file formats the maker chose. Reddit user jpotter124 built the opposite. The R1 Mini is a 100 mm cube with a Raspberry Pi 5 inside, an interchangeable-lens HQ camera sensor at the front and real buttons for the settings photographers change most. It shoots RAW DNG stills and CinemaDNG video, runs for five to six hours while… |
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Your Sonicare Brush Head Has an NFC Chip That Logs Brushing Time, and It Can Unlock a Mac A toothbrush head is a plastic stick with bristles, so why does Philips put a microchip in it? YouTuber Circuit Helper wanted to know, so he built a small NFC reader, read what a Sonicare brush head stores about the person using it, rewrote that data, and finally used an old brush head as a key to unlock his Mac. The chip sits under a small brown dot near the base of the head and needs no… |
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Stuff Made Here Built an Arduino-Run Car Wash for His Muddy Dog, and the Dog Said No Anyone who has washed a muddy dog knows the real problem is not the mud on the dog. It is the shake that puts the mud on you. Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here tackled it the way he tackles everything: he built a machine. His new video shows a car-wash-style rig for dogs, with an arch of moving nozzles that scans along a platform and sprayers underneath for the parts a hose never reaches. It… |
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This 70 g Robot Butterfly Actually Flies, Flapping Two Servos From an ESP32-C3 Propellers make flying easy. Flapping wings do not. Maker Max Imagination still built ESP-FLUTTER, a 70 g remote-controlled butterfly that lifts off on its own wings, glows at night with LEDs along the wing edges, and can be flown from a phone browser. The firmware is open on GitHub, and the project was picked up by Hackster on 2 November. Two servos… |
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A Wheelchair Motor and a Raspberry Pi Turn an Old 8-Foot Dish Into a Satellite Ground Station Big satellite dishes from the 80s and 90s still sit in fields everywhere, usually rusting. YouTuber and fabricator Cranktown City found an eight-foot one and turned it into a working satellite ground station on his new plot of land, with a Raspberry Pi doing the aiming and the decoding. The build video has passed 220,000 views. Pointing an eight-foot dish… |
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Three Nickel Strips and a USB Adapter Get This Tamagotchi Running DOOM and Super Mario The Tamagotchi was the toy every 90s kid carried, and its newest version, the Tamagotchi Paradise, turns out to be very hackable. Maker Squalius has built a small USB-to-UART adapter that plugs into the toy's link contacts and connects it straight to a web browser. In the demo the Tamagotchi then runs DOOM and a Game Boy emulator playing Super Mario Land on its little colour screen. … |
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Instead of a $40,000 Electric Pickup, This Maker Bought a 100,000-Mile BMW i3 at Auction and Cut It Into a Mini EV Truck Small, cheap electric pickups barely exist yet, so Michael Pick made one. He bought a 2017 BMW i3 REx with more than 100,000 miles on it from an online auction, sight unseen, cut away the back half of its cabin and turned it into a two-seat electric pickup with a real load bed. His target was a usable electric truck for under $10,000 in total, with more than 300 miles of combined range from… |
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A 60-Euro Dish and a Coin-Sized Tag Pushed Bluetooth to About 13 km, Over 1,000 Times Its Usual Range Most of us give up on Bluetooth once we walk into the next room, so this result is worth a second look. The team behind the YouTube channel nktbuilds set out to make an ordinary coin-sized Bluetooth tag reach a receiver 12 km away, about 1,200 times the 10 m or so where a normal Bluetooth link gives up. They did it without adding a single milliwatt of transmit power. A 60-euro grid dish, a… |
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Seven Resistors and an ESP32-C5: This Open-Source FPV Receiver Uses the Wi-Fi Radio to Catch Analog Drone Video Analog FPV goggles normally need a dedicated 5.8 GHz receiver module, but Leon (Twotoz) has built one out of a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C5 and seven resistors. His open-source C5VRX-5 firmware uses the ESP32-C5's own dual-band Wi-Fi radio to pick up the FM video from a drone's analog VTX, demodulates it, and pushes composite PAL or NTSC video out of six GPIO pins into your goggles, a DVR or a… |
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Turning a Backyard into an 8-Foot Satellite Ground Station with Raspberry Pi to Capture Weather Images from Space Cranktown City has built a DIY satellite ground station that uses an 8-foot satellite dish to follow satellites as they move across the sky and receive the radio signals they transmit. Unlike a manually operated dish, this system can calculate a satellite's position and automatically move the dish to follow it. One of the project's biggest achievements is receiving full-disk weather images… |
