Fresh hacks every day
When a project starts off by heating acid to its boiling point we say no thanks. But then again we're more for the projects that use ones and zeros or a hot soldering iron. If you're comfortable with the chemistry like [Michail] this might be right up your alley. He used boiling acid to expose and photograph the die from several integrated circuits. The title of our feature is a play on words. … [Read more...]
Copper bus bars are commonly used instead of wire for carrying high currents. [Dane] needed some bus bars for a project, but he was worried about corrosion. His solution was tin electroplating the bus bars to lower the risk of corrosion while keeping the conductivity high. The process requires only two chemicals: hydrochloric acid and tin. The electrolyte solution is made by dissolving tin … [Read more...]
For the few double-sided PCBs we've actually etched at home we simply soldered a piece of wire to either side of a via and clipped off the excess. But if you want to go the extra mile you can't beat electroplated through holes. The setup seen above is an electroplating tank build from simple materials which [Bearmos] has been working on. The two sets of copper structures are both used as … [Read more...]
A Brewster Angle Microscope (BAM) can run you around $100,000. If you don't have that lying around you could just use some LEGO pieces to build your own. Having been faced with no budget to buy the hardware, and needing the data to finish his PhD, [Matthew] figured out a way to build something passable on the cheap. These microscopes bounce a light source off of a pool of water and into the … [Read more...]
If you plan ahead a little bit you could have your own system of water purification to use in emergencies. Everyone needs clean drinking water and this gadget will let your produce your own purification drops quite easily. The solution contains chlorine, which is created through electrolysis. The PVC cap seen near the bottom of the image has two electrodes sticking out of it. These are titanium … [Read more...]
We are fascinated by the hybrid rocket engine which [Ben Krasnow] built and tested in his shop. It is actually using a hollow cylinder of acrylic as the fuel, with gaseous oxygen as an oxidizer. We're already quite familiar with solid rocket propellant, but this hybrid approach is much different. When a rocket motor using solid propellant is lit it continues to burn until all of the fuel is … [Read more...]
This cloud chamber is designed to keep the environment friendly for observing ionizing radiation. The group over at the LVL1 Hackerspace put it together and posted everything you need to know to try it out for yourself. A cloud chamber uses a layer of alcohol vapor as a visual indicator of ionizing particles. As the name suggests, this vapor looks much like a cloud and the particles rip though … [Read more...]
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