Game Cube Hot Tub Animation Brought Into Real World

April 17, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

Unlike the current era where most consumer electronics are black rectangles, or the early 90s where most consumer electronics were black rectangles, we got a brief glimmer of color, light, and hope in the 2000s. Cell phones had all kinds of shapes and sizes, laptops came in bright colors, and even video game consoles got in on the fun. The Nintendo GameCube not only featured its namesake shape but came in several vibrant colors, most famously a bright purple. In fact, its design was such a hit that it continues to inspire artists and console modders alike. An animator named [kidd.gorgeous] recently envisioned a GameCube as a hot tub, and [BigRig Creates] set out to make this animation a reality.

Of course, this won’t be a life-sized hot tub capable of holding a human, but [BigRig Creates] did want it to be a usable, playable Game Cube with all of the features from the animation present in the final version. Since the lid won’t be operational with a hot tub model on the top lest all of the water spill out every time a game is changed, he’s modified it with some modern tools to hold his games inside the console itself. With the case open he’s also added the LED accent lighting featured in the animation as well as added the 3D-printed hot tub to the top. The hot tub is filled with mineral oil for electronics safety, and has a small pump built in to give the appearance of a working hot tub.

The buttons around the outside are functional as well, toggling the various lighting features and hot tub operation. And of course, the console diorama is fully playable, with the staircase railing able to easily detach in order to access the leftmost controller ports. It’s a faithful adaptation of the original animation, and [BigRig Creates] has a few games on queue that are properly themed for the new hot tub addition like Wave Race 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Pool Paradise.

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New Display For Old Multimeter

April 14, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

As a company, Fluke has been making electronic test equipment longer than the bipolar junction transistor has been around for. In that time they’ve developed a fairly stellar reputation for quality and consistency, but like any company they don’t support their products indefinitely. [ogdento] owns a Fluke meter that isn’t nearly as old as the BJT but still has an age well outside of the support window, and since the main problem was the broken LCD display they set about building a replacement for this retro multimeter.

Initially, [ogdento] had plans to retrofit this classic multimeter with a modern OLED, but could not find enough space for the display or a way to drive it easily. The next attempt to get something working was to build a custom one-off LCD using a drill press as an end mill, which didn’t work either. But after seeing a Charlieplexed display from [bobricius] as well as this video from EEVblog about designing custom LCDs, [ogdento] was able to not only design a custom PCB and LCD display to match the original meter, but was able to get a manufacturer in China to build them.

The new displays have a few improvements over the old; mostly they are more stylistically inspired by later Fluke models and have a few modern improvements to the LCD itself. There were are few issues during prototyping but nothing that was too hard to sort out, such as ordering the wrong size elastomeric strips initially. For anyone who needs to replace a custom LCD and can’t find replacement parts anymore, this project would be a great starting point for figuring out the process from the ground up.

Electric Truck Sets Racing Record

April 13, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

The 24 Hours of Le Mans races is an extremely prestigious endurance motorsport event which attracts the best cars and drivers from around the world. It’s one of the longest-running races too, taking place once a year since 1923 (with a few obvious understandable gaps). But, like most motorsports, it’s financially out of reach for most people. One of the more popular attempts to bring racing to the masses has been the 24 Hours of Lemons races, which have price limits on vehicles to keep the barrier to entry low, and an EV truck recently entered one of these races with some interesting results.

The group behind this vehicle is called Team Arcblast, who retrofitted an old Datsun pickup truck to the extreme to enter this race. The modestly sized electric motor is installed in between the cab and the bed for easy access to the driveshaft, with the engine bay repurposed for all of the cooling and radiators needed for endurance racing like this. They’ve also equipped the truck with plenty of efficiency-increasing spoilers and other aerodynamic parts, and rebuilt the cab with not only the required roll cage and other safety equipment, but a modified driving position with steering and other components from various Miatas.

The most impressive part of this build, however, is the battery. The team invented a method of swapping out batteries quickly to avoid having to fast charge the car in the pit area. The system lets a battery slide in to the middle of the truck above the motor and quickly connect to the electrical system allowing for very quick pit stops and the ability to charge other batteries while the race goes on. All of these modifications together allowed the team to break the EV record for a Lemons race.

For a Lemons race, though, even this truck stretches the original spirit that these races were started, however impressive the build. We published a primer to these types of races a while back which includes much more affordable internal combustion options.

Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!

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2001: An Air Quality Odyssey

April 8, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

2001: A Space Odyssey not only pushed the boundaries of filmmaking, but introduced us to one of the most enduring villains in all of media. The HAL 9000 artificial intelligence was human-like but inhuman, a singular uncanny red light on a wall, tasked not only with control of a spaceship and its inner workings but also with being a companion for its occupants. It’s gone on to be the inspiration and basis of many projects around here, where it is generally given much less scope than control of a space ship and instead is tasked with something like monitoring air quality in a home.

Called the PAL 8000 by its creator [Arnov], this uses a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at its core which monitors a volatile organic compound (VOC) sensor to take air quality measurements. The device features a custom 3D printed enclosure with glowing LEDs and plays contextual audio responses based on air quality levels, completing the HAL 9000 theme. The project also includes a local web dashboard which reports on its data, allowing users to see information in real time rather than relying on HAL’s voice reports alone.

For those looking to build other HAL-inspired projects, [Arnov] has made many of the printing files available on the project’s site. It’s a well-polished build faithful to the source material and could be a great addition to any home automation system for many other tasks beyond air quality monitoring. Perhaps something like a more general-purpose voice assistant, minus the megalomania.

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Chicken Coop Door Performs In Harsh Environment

April 3, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

One of the pitfalls of modern engineering is that it’s entirely possible to end up in a situation where a product or solution has been designed by someone who has never left a desk. Which wouldn’t be a problem if things didn’t have a tendency to work differently in real life than they do in theory.

One of those things is automatic chicken coop doors, which have to operate reliably in not only a wide range of climates but with a number of possible physical limitations as well. [Vinnie] has taken on the challenge of building one which actually accomplishes all of these tasks, after realizing that the off-the-shelf solutions were victims of design over practicality.

[Vinnie] designed this door to be operated by the one thing that’s always 100% reliable: gravity. A linear actuator lifts the door at the beginning of the day, and then at night it’s allowed to fall back down in its track. A latch secures it against smarter intruders like raccoons. [Vinnie] has found that this lifting mechanism holds up much better in mud, snow, ice, and other difficult conditions than any other method he’s tried so far.

The system is built around a ATmega1284P, and calculates the sunrise and sunset times each day to know when to open or close the door. He’s built the system as a state machine which makes it more robust during power outages, which is a necessity since his chicken coop is mobile and is frequently out of range of WiFi and is battery powered.

The approach [Vinnie] takes to automation is something that has application outside of his own farmstead. Using state machines instead of schedules, ensuring the design is as simple as possible and works within its environment, and minimizing reliance on electric and data infrastructure can go a long way to solving problems that might not appear when designing something on paper.

He’s been automating many other things on his farm as well, and it’s worth checking it out if you haven’t seen it already.

Battery Tester Outperforms Cheaper Options

April 1, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 1 Comment

Batteries are notoriously difficult pieces of technology to deal with reliably. They often need specific temperatures, charge rates, can’t tolerate physical shocks or damage, and can fail catastrophically if all of their finicky needs aren’t met. And, adding insult to injury, for many chemistries, the voltage does not correlate to state of charge in meaningful ways. Battery testers take many efforts to mitigate these challenges, but often miss the mark for those who need high fidelity in their measurements. For that reason, [LiamTronix] built their own.

The main problem with the cheaper battery testers, at least for [LiamTronix]’s use cases, is that he has plenty of batteries that are too large to practically test on the low-current devices, or which have internal battery management systems (BMS) which can’t connect to these testers. The first circuit he built to help solve these issues is based on a shunt resistor, which lets a smaller IC chip monitor a much larger current by looking at voltage drop across a resistor with a small resistance value. The Pi uses a Python script which monitors the current draw over the course of the test and outputs the result on a handy graph.

This circuit worked well enough for smaller batteries, but for his larger batteries like the 72V one he built for his electric tractor, these methods could draw far too much power to be safe. So from there he built a much more robust circuit which uses four MOSFETs as part of four constant current sources to sink and measure the current from the battery. A Pi Zero monitors the voltage and current from the battery, and also turns on some fans pointed at the MOSFETs’ heat sink to keep them from overheating. The system can be configured to work for different batteries and different current draw rates, making it much more capable than anything off the shelf.

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A Better Jogging Stroller

April 1, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

Although the jogging stroller is a fixture of suburban life, allowing parents the opportunity to get some exercise while letting their young children a chance for some fresh air, it would seem like the designers of these strollers have never actually gone for a jog. Requiring a runner to hold their hands at fixed positions can be incredibly uncomfortable and disrupts most people’s strides and cadence — so [John] attempted to solve the problem after finding one of these strollers on the secondhand market.

While there are some purpose-built strollers that attempt to address these issues, they can be pricey. Rather than shell out for a top-dollar model, [John] got to work with his 3D printer and created a prototype device that allows him to attach the stroller at his waist while leaving his hands free. There were a few problems to overcome here, the first of which would cause the device to buckle under certain loading situations. This was solved with some small pieces of rope which act as flexible bump stops, keeping the hinge mechanism from binding up. Another needed to be solved with practice, which was that it took some time to be able to steer the stroller without using one’s hands.

As an added bonus, [John] also included a system that tracks the distance the stroller has traveled. Using a hall effect sensor and a magnet attached to the wheel, a small microcontroller is able to quickly calculate distance and display it on a tiny screen mounted near the handlebars. Although smartphones are handy, their GPS systems can be surprisingly inaccurate, so a system like this can be a better indicator since it’s being directly measured. All in all, not a bad few upgrades to a secondhand stroller.

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