Inside Dyson’s Over-Engineered ₤1000 Hand Dryer

May 27, 2026 by 53 Comments

It seems fair to say that Dyson sits at the intersection of impressive engineering and borderline ridiculous products. The Dyson Airblade 9KJ hand dryer that [ElectrArc240] recently took to bits would definitely seem to fall under the latter, combining an incredible amount of engineering all for the simple task of drying wet hands.

These hand dryers are rated for a cool 900 Watts, with an 0.5 W standby power consumption, though you can also switch it to a 650 W ‘eco mode’ when installing it. The air that gets sucked into the dryer first passes through a HEPA filter before it hits the heating element and then gets blown out of the handles onto one’s hands.

Both of these handles come with a presence sensor in the form of an ST VL53L3CX time-of-flight sensor, along with a path for the heated air towards the thin slits. Returning to the section just past the HEPA filter is the compressor, with a rather fancy airflow path that involves various stacked meshes. As can be seen in the video, where you’d expect basically a simple blower motor or so, there is a truly astounding amount of parts as the teardown progresses.

The motor disassembly is the first part where some desoldering and breaking of glue bonds is really necessary, but it gives full access to the driver board. The circuit used here is your typical IGBT-based driver, though with a mystery PIC MCU to do things. Following this the tear-down turns fully destructive, giving access to the motor internals.

Following an analysis of these internals we marvel at the carbon-fiber rotor that keeps the single magnet in one piece. This is another engineering choice that serves to justify the 1,000 quid price tag. All so that rest room visitors do not have to suffer the humility of using paper towels.

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AMOC And The Planet-Wide Impact Of Ocean Currents

May 27, 2026 by 16 Comments

Although it can be hard to tell from looking at the often placid waters of the Earth’s oceans, their currents carry immense amounts of water around the globe on a daily basis, underlying a dynamic system that – much like the Earth’s atmosphere – plays a major role in everything from weather systems to local climates and ecosystems.

Of all these ocean currents the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is perhaps the most famous, as it is basically the sole reason why Europe has the mild climate that it does today, courtesy of it carrying thermal energy from the equator all the way to the coast off Scandinavia.

Although collapsing an ocean current seems as improbable as stopping the jet streams in the upper atmosphere, it’s actually significantly easier due to how much ocean currents rely on factors that we can fairly easily influence. Over the past decades we have seen worrying signs that the AMOC is indeed weakening, with the million-dollar question being what scenario we’ll be looking at.

While collapsing the AMOC within a decade may be theoretically possible, current models seem to point towards a weakening by about half by the end of this century, with a recent research article by Valentin Portmann et al. in Science Advances going over the various statistical models to come to this conclusion.

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Three Arduinos Team Up To Make 80s-Style Computer

May 27, 2026 by 28 Comments

Back in the 80s, buying a home computer could easily mean an inflation-adjusted cost of thousands of dollars (or your equivalent currency unit of choice), and all for an 8-bit machine that might not have a hard drive and almost certainly didn’t connect to a network. Here in the future it’s easy to get spoiled by all the computing power and inexpensive devices practically falling into our laps, but using some modern low-cost microcontrollers can connect us to our early computing roots like [Joe]’s latest Arduino-based computer.

Taking design an engineering cues from computers like the Timex Sinclair 1000, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 MC-10, this computer uses a trio of Arduinos to accomplish what the best computer manufacturers once did with tons of integrated circuits. An Arduino Due handles all of the processing and traditional computing tasks, including a somewhat customized BASIC implementation, while an Uno performs audio processing duties. Taking care of the video processing is the much more capable Arduino Mega, outputting 40×25 monochrome NTSC composite video at 8×8 character resolution. There’s even WiFi courtesy of an ESP32 — certainly an upgrade compared to the source material.

After booting it up, the user gets a Commodore-like experience that replicates the 80s computing era quite well, and is even built inside its own keyboard case just like that era of computers usually were. [Joe] plans to release all three firmware images and the Python script used to get files onto the faux-retro machine, so keep an eye out for that.

In the event that you used rubles instead of dollars to pay for your expensive 8-bit machines back in the 80s, this computer might be more up your alley instead.

Hunting Submarines Via Gravity Is A Tough Errand

May 27, 2026 by 51 Comments

Among so many other technological advances, the Cold War saw the advent of the ballistic missile submarine. The concept was simple—pack enough nuclear warheads to destroy a small civilization into a compact metal tube, and then hide it underwater. The oceans would act as a cloak for your fleet of world-enders, and keep your enemies forever on their toes. A terrifying machine that could both start and end a war with the push of a button.

Most nation states are populated by humans with the will to live. Thus, there has been a great incentive to find ways to keep tabs on these sunken doombringers. Great efforts have gone into improving sonar and magnetic detection methods over the decades, which are the bread and butter of sub hunting to this day. However, military researchers have also explored the prospect of whether submarines could be detected via their effect on the gravitational field alone.

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So Long, CHU, And Thanks For All The Time Signals

May 27, 2026 by 56 Comments

In the long ago, pre-internet days when your clock project wasn’t an ESP32 getting its timing via NTP over WiFi, it was still possible to build a wirelessly-updating clock. All you needed was a shortwave receiver tuned to a time signal — perhaps like the National Research Council of Canada’s CHU, found on the dial at 3330, 7850, and 14 670 kHz. At least, it can be found at those frequencies until June 22nd, 2026, when the station will finally go dark.

Depending where you were on Earth, it might have been easier to tune into CHU than the United States based WWVB, or one of the various European signals like DCF77 or the UK’s MSF. If you’re not into radio, all these time signals have essentially the same job, if you hadn’t guessed: tell the time. This can be done in a variety of ways, and CHU has made use of more than one of them since its establishment in 1923.

Initially, the time was sent in Morse code, but later they added a speaking clock for easier human listening in both Canadian French and English. For synchronizing radio clocks, a series of pulses is given in DUT1 format using 0.3s pulses — which is what older clocks would have been listening to — and nowadays a digital FSK time code for more modern equipment. You can have a listen through the video by [Shortwave Listener] embedded below.

It’s not our place to judge the Government of Canada for trying to save money where they can. It wasn’t so long ago that WWVB was in danger of shutting down for similar reasons. But we’re still going to miss those beeps. If you do tune in before the station goes dark, CHU should still be giving out QSL cards. Get yours before it’s gone forever.

If you do have a clock that relies on this time signal, don’t worry. You can make your own, perhaps with a GPS time source.

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See Aerodynamics In Action With A Desktop Wind Tunnel

May 27, 2026 by 9 Comments

While most of us don’t design aircraft or racing cars, it’s likely that we’re still fascinated by some of the aerodynamic studies behind them. But a full-sized wind tunnel is going to cost a small fortune, so how can we experiment? Never fear, because [luisengineering] is here with a 3D printable desktop wind tunnel.

There’s a build video that we’ve embedded below, and if you can sit through the continuous shilling of random tools, it’s an interesting watch. It’s an open design in that air is not recirculate through it, instead it passed through the machine from left to right. On the right is the fan, on the left the intake with a rectifier to ensure laminar flow. Then a constriction compresses and speeds up the air past the stage for the model under test, and an expansion slows it down again for the fan.

A wind tunnel needs a smoke generator to easily spot turbulence, and in this case a vape is called into action. The result is surprisingly effective, as we see with a demonstration using a small model car. Meanwhile if you’re interested in wind tunnels at this size, it’s not the first one we’ve brought you.

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A Bicycle Built On An Italian Renaissance Tech Base

May 26, 2026 by 29 Comments

There is a drawing of a bicycle in one of Leonarda DaVinci‘s sketchbooks– except it wasn’t drawn by DaVinci, and dates long after his death, so we can’t say the old master invented the bicycle. We can, however, wonder what it would have looked like if he did– and so did the [How To Make Everything] YouTube channel. As you might expect, they investigated the question of a Renaissance Bicycle in the best possible way: they built one.

In some ways the device looks like the first, primitive hobby-horse proto-bicycle of the early 19th century, which is not without reason. From the renaissance to the dawn of the industrial era, there wasn’t a huge change in how europeans worked with wood, and in both eras wood is the obvious choice. Where this bike differs from [Karl Drais]’s invention is that it has both pedals and brakes– both of them using drawings from DaVinci’s sketchbook.

You might be surprised to learn that ball-bearings are period-appropriate, and weren’t even invented by DaVinci. The drum brake, on the other hand, is right out of the Old Master’s notes: a steel band wraps around a drum on the rear break, and is tighened by a lever. With iron rims, no brake would stop on a dime, and this probably works as well as anything while being quite simple to make.

The chain is also based on one in DaVinci’s notes, and honesty it’s a weak point of the design; they’d likely have been better off with a leather belt, or perhaps a stack of gears as we’ve seen before. The hand-made chain just isn’t able to get the bike up to riding speed. Still, this is recognizably a bicycle and entertaining content for anyone who plans on violating the temporal prime directive or wants to get around after the apocalypse.

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