Use your ears as an oscilloscope

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When work on an engine control circuit [Scott] found himself in need of a way to compare the performance of two control circuits at once. The hobby quality oscilloscope he owns wasn’t up to the task. After thinking about it for a bit he ended up using his ears as the oscilloscope.

The signals he was measuring are well … Read the rest

Rigol DS1022C hack brings it up to 100MHz speed

rigol-1022c-100MHz-hack

[Andreas Schuler] has been playing around with his Rigol DS1022C digital storage oscilloscope. It’s an older model which can capture samples at up to 25MHz, but [Andreas] claims to have quadrupled that using a service menu hack. His technique changes the settings to use the DS1022C at 100Mhz.

Usually a hack like this includes some test measurements that confirm … Read the rest

Trashed LCD monitor turned into a light box

light-box-from-lcd-monitor[x2jiggy] was given a non-functioning LCD monitor. He made a small effort to trouble-shoot its inability to display anything on the screen but couldn’t get it working again. When that failed he decided to repurpose it as light box instead of just sending it off for recycling.

Monitor manufacturers put in a lot of effort to make sure the back … Read the rest

Hot plate stirrer dissolves support material in 3D printed objects

Hot_plate_stirrer

When you want to print a 3D object you run into problems if there is a part that has nothing below it. The hot, soft filament coming out of the extruder will droop with gravity if not given something to rest on while it hardens. The solution is to use a second material as a support. But then you’ve got … Read the rest

Foot-powered lathe is a tour de force of joinery techniques

foot-powered-lathe

Meet [Quetico Chris]. He’s a master woodworker who likes to find his own alternatives to using power tools. Most recently, he was inspired by a fly-wheel from an old factory. He used it to build this foot powered wood lathe.

It works something like a foot powered sewing machine. There’s a lever for your foot which converts the downward … Read the rest

Semi-automatic pick and place machine

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This is a fascinating take on building your own pick and place machine. It does an amazing job of automating the hardest parts of hand assembly, while relying on human dexterity to achieve the hardest parts of automation. It’s a semiautomatic pick and place machine driven by an Arduino and controlled by an Android tablet.

The machine is built in … Read the rest

Stapler hack fastens infinitely large sheets of paper

infinity-stapler

It’s not called the infinity stapler, but we think it should be. This magnetic hack allows you to use a plain old stapler to fasten very large pieces of paper.

The limiting factor has always been the distance between the stapler’s hinge and where the staples come out. To get around this, the crimped connections between the base and … Read the rest