A Bird Watching Assistant

November 25, 2025 by No comments

When AI is being touted as the latest tool to replace writers, filmmakers, and other creative talent it can be a bit depressing staring down the barrel of a future dystopia — especially since most LLMs just parrot their training data and aren’t actually creative. But AI can have some legitimate strengths when it’s taken under wing as an assistant rather than an outright replacement.

For example [Aarav] is happy as a lark when birdwatching, but the birds aren’t always around and it can sometimes be a bit of a wild goose chase waiting hours for them to show up. To help him with that he built this machine learning tool to help alert him to the presence of birds.

The small device is based on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an AI hat nested on top, and uses a wide-angle camera to keep an eagle-eyed lookout of a space like a garden or forest. It runs a few scripts in Python leveraging the OpenCV library, which is a widely available machine learning tool that allows users to easily interact with image recognition. When perched to view an outdoor area, it sends out an email notification to the user’s phone when it detects bird activity so that they can join the action swiftly if they happen to be doing other things at the time. The system also logs hourly bird-counts and creates a daily graph, helping users identify peak bird-watching times.

Right now the system can only detect the presence of birds in general, but he hopes to build future versions that can identify birds with more specificity, perhaps down to the species. Identifying birds by vision is certainly one viable way of going about this process, but one of our other favorite bird-watching tools was demonstrated by [Benn Jordan] which uses similar hardware but listens for bird calls rather than looking for the birds with a vision-based system.

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Boosting Antihydrogen Production Using Beryllium Ions

November 25, 2025 by 3 Comments

Antihydrogen forms an ideal study subject for deciphering the secrets of fundamental physics due to it being the most simple anti-matter atom. However, keeping it from casually annihilating itself along with some matter hasn’t gotten much easier since it was first produced in 1995. Recently ALPHA researchers at CERN’s Antimatter Factory announced that they managed to produce and trap no fewer than 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in less than seven hours using a new beryllium-enhanced trap. This is an eight-fold increase compared to previous methods.

To produce an antihydrogen atom from a positron and an antiproton, the components and resulting atoms can not simply be trapped in an electromagnetic field, but requires that they are cooled to the point where they’re effectively stationary. This also makes adding more than one of such atom to a trap into a tedious process since the first successful capture in 2017.

In the open access paper in Nature Communications by [R. Akbari] et al. the process is described, starting with the merging of anti-protons from the CERN Antiproton Decelerator with positrons sourced from the radioactive decay of sodium-22 (β+ decay). The typical Penning-Malmberg trap is used, but laser-cooled beryllium ions (Be+) are added to provide sympathetic cooling during the synthesis step.

Together with an increased availability of positrons, the eight-fold increase in antihydrogen production was thus achieved. The researchers speculate that the sympathetic cooling is more efficient at keeping a constant temperature than alternative cooling methods, which allows for the increased rate of production.

DIY Test Gear From 1981

November 25, 2025 by 2 Comments

We can’t get enough of [Bettina Neumryn’s] videos. If you haven’t seen her, she takes old electronics magazines, finds interesting projects, and builds them. If you remember these old projects, it is nostalgic, and if you don’t remember them, you can learn a lot about basic electronics and construction techniques. This installment (see below) is an Elektor digital voltmeter and frequency counter from late 1981.

As was common in those days, you could find the PCB layouts in the magazine. In this case, there were two boards. The schematic shows that a counter and display driver chip — a 74C928 — does most of the heavy lifting for the display and the counter.

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Build A High Voltage Supply For Vacuum Tube Work

November 25, 2025 by 4 Comments

If you work on simple digital projects, just about any bench supply will offer the voltage and current you’re looking for. However, if you’re working with valves, you’ll often find yourself needing much higher voltages that can be tricky to source. [Chappy Happy] has shared a design for a simple HV power supply that should prove useful to vacuum tube enthusiasts.

The build is fairly basic in nature, lacing together some commonly available parts to generate the necessary voltages for working with common vacuum tubes from a 12 volt DC input. Inside the supply is a UC3843A DC boost converter, set up to output high voltage up to around 300 volts DC, with a ripple filter added for good measure. The output can be adjusted with a knob, with a voltmeter on the front panel. There’s also a 12-volt output, and a LM2596 step down converter to produce 6.3 volts for the filament supply. The whole project is built in an old Heathkit project box, and he demonstrates the supply with a simple single-tube amplifier.

If you find yourself regularly whipping up tube circuits, you might like to have something like this on your workbench. Or, you might even consider cooking up your own tubes from scratch if you’re more adventurous like that. Video after the break.

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The Zen Must Flow From Arrakis Sand Table

November 25, 2025 by 5 Comments

In Dune, the Fremen people of Arrakis practice an odd future hybrid religion called “zensunni.” This adds an extra layer of meaning to the title of [Mark Rehorst]’s Arrakis 3.0 sand table, given that the inspiration for the robotic sand table seems to be Zen gardens from Japan.

The dunes on the tabletop version of Arrakis owe nothing to sand worms, but are instead created a rolling metal ball. With all workings happening below, it looks quite magical to the uninitiated, but of course it’s not magic: it’s magnets. Just beneath the tabletop and its sands, the steel ball is being dragged along by the magnetic field of a powerful neodynium magnet.

That magnet is mounted in a CoreXY motion system that owes more than a little bit to modern 3D printers. Aside from the geometry, it’s using the standard G6 belt we see so often, along with a Duet3D mainboard, NEMA 17 steppers, and many 3D printed parts to hold its aluminum extrusions together. Thanks to that printer-inspired motion system, the ball can whirl around at 2000 mm/s, though [Mark] prefers to run slower: the demo video below shows operation at 1000 mm/s before the sand has been added.

This build was designed for ease of construction and movement: sized at 2’x4′ (about 61 cm x 122 cm), it fits through doors and fits an off-the-shelf slab of coffee table glass, something that [Mark] wishes he’d considered when building version two. That’s the nice thing about jumping in on a project someone’s been iterating for a while: you’ve got the benefit of learning from their mistakes. You can see the roots of this design, and what has changed, from the one he showed us in 2020. 

Naturally you’re not limited to CoreXY for a sand table, though it is increasingly popular — we’ve seen examples with polar mechanisms and even a SCARA arm.

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Citizen Science By The Skin Of Your Teeth

November 25, 2025 by 9 Comments

If you are a schoolkid of the right age, you can’t wait to lose a baby tooth. In many cultures, there is a ritual surrounding it, like the tooth fairy, a mouse who trades your tooth for a gift, or burying the tooth somewhere significant. But in 1958, a husband and wife team of physicians wanted children’s teeth for a far different purpose: quantifying the effects of nuclear weapons testing on the human body.

A young citizen scientist (State Historical Society of Missouri)

Louise and Eric Reiss, along with some other scientists, worked with Saint Louis University and the Washington School of Dental Medicine to collect and study children’s discarded teeth. They were looking for strontium-90, a nasty byproduct of above-ground nuclear testing. Strontium is similar enough to calcium that consuming it in water and dairy products will leave the material in your bones, including your teeth.

The study took place in the St. Louis area, and the results helped convince John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

They hoped to gather 50,000 teeth in a year. By 1970, 12 years later, they had picked up over 320,000 donated teeth. While a few kids might have been driven by scientific altruism, it didn’t hurt that the program used colorful posters and promised each child a button to mark their participation.

Children’s teeth were particularly advantageous to use because they are growing and are known to readily absorb radioactive material, which can cause bone tumors.

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Heater Is Either A Miracle Or A Scam

November 25, 2025 by 17 Comments

[Big Clive] picked up a tiny heater for less than £8 from the usual sources. Would you be shocked to learn that its heating capacity wasn’t as advertised? No, we weren’t either. But [Clive] treats us to his usual fun teardown and analysis in the video below.

A simple test shows that the heater drew about 800 W for a moment and drops as it heats until it stabilizes at about 300 W. Despite that, these units are often touted as 800 W heaters with claims of heating up an entire house in minutes. Inside are a fan, a ceramic heater, and two PCBs.

The ceramic heaters are dwarfed by metal fins used as a heat exchanger. The display uses a clever series of touch sensors to save money on switches. The other board is what actually does the work.

[Clive] was, overall, impressed with the PCB. A triac runs the heaters and the fan. It also includes a thermistor for reading the temperature.

You can learn more about the power supply and how the heater measures up in the video. Suffice it to say, that a cheap heater acts like a cheap heater, although as cheap heaters go, this one is built well enough.

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