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3D Printing, Retro, Olimex, and More
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Hackaday ☛ Bruteforcing Accidental Antenna Designs
Antenna design is often referred to as a black art or witchcraft, even by those experienced in the space. To that end, [Janne] wondered—could years of honed skill be replaced by bruteforcing the problem with the aid of some GPUs? Iterative experiments ensued.
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Hackaday ☛ LEGO Orrery Gets A Real-Time Drive Upgrade
The setup removes just five LEGO pieces from the original design, eliminating the hand crank from the mechanism. In its place, [Görkem] installed a NEMA 17 stepper motor, paired with a custom PCB mounted on the back. That carries an ESP32 microcontroller and a TMC2208 stepper motor driver set up for silent drive. Rigged up like so, the orrery can simulate the motion of the Earth and Moon around the Sun in real time. There’s also a knob to track back and forth in time, and a button to reset the system to the correct real-time position.
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Hackaday ☛ 3D Printed Jack Mixes Two Filaments For Great Performance
If you’re looking to jack up your car and you don’t have anything on hand, your 3D printer might not be the first tool you look towards. With that said, [Alan Reiner] had great success with a simple idea to create a surprisingly capable scissor jack with a multi-material print.
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Ruben Schade ☛ My childhood motherboard arrived
Today was a hard day for $reasons, so it was a tremendous joy to receive a notification from the local Australia Post parcel locker that my latest shipment from Ukraine arrived! I braved the midday Sydney summer sun, walked down to the post office, and scanned the QR code to pop open the appropriate locker.
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Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Filament Chicken
Printed a couple of card boxes for our new-found card game phase, and I had just enough filament for the final one! I didn't think I was going to make it and had already queued up a couple of offcuts from previous rounds of filament chicken to finish it off, but didn't even need them.
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Eliseo Martelli ☛ A Braun clock for a $30 handheld
What we got was the Y3506_V05_20251215 revision. It's a clone of a clone. If you've played with these cheap Chinese SBCs before, you know the drill: you flash a standard image, and the screen stays black because the driver is slightly different. It's a hardware lottery.
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Heliomass ☛ I See Colour Bars
There’s only so close you can get to analogue television hardware, without a tonne of expensive analogue signal generation equipment and a degree in electronic engineering, neither of which I’m in possession of.
However, I can try and get as close as possible to the signal generation process as possible with what I do have: A games console from the 1970s’ and the ability to code in assembly language.
Let’s race the beam and make some colours.
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Olimex ☛ ESP32-P4-PC Open Source Hardware Board – the most comprehensive and feature-rich ESP32-P4 board on the market
Built around the powerful dual-core ESP32-P4 RISC-V SoC, this board delivers serious performance and unmatched peripheral integration for advanced embedded and IoT development.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese scientists 3D print tiny items in half a second using holographic light fields — scientists precision fabricate complex millimeter-scale objects in record time
A team of scientists have revealed a new technique for the super-high-speed 3D printing of complex objects. The Tsinghua University-based team say they can 3D print complex millimeter-scale objects “within only 0.6s,” in an academic paper published by Nature earlier this week. The key advance behind this incredibly rapid feat of additive manufacturing has been dubbed the digital incoherent synthesis of holographic light fields (DISH).