Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Funny Keyboard

December 9, 2024 by Kristina Panos 19 Comments

What’s the most important keyboard macro you know? Honestly, it’s probably Ctrl-S. But do you use that one often enough? Chances are, you do not. What you need is a giant, dedicated Save keyboard that looks like a floppy disk.

A physical Save button that looks like a floppy disk and sends Ctrl-S over USB-C. — Image by [Makestreme] via Hackaday.IO

[Makestreme] recently started creating YouTube videos, but wasn’t pressing Save often enough. Couple that with editing software that crashes, and the result is hours of lost work.

Just like you’d expect, pressing the floppy icon triggers Ctrl-S when connected over USB-C. Internally, it’s a Seeeduino Xiao, a push button, and some wires.

The floppy disk itself is made of foam board, and everything is encased in a picture frame. If you want to make one for yourself, [Makestreme] has some great instructions over on IO.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Keyboard Mod

December 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Let’s face it, failed Kickstarters are no good. But they can spark good things, like real versions of technologies that might have actually been faked for the platform. A touchscreen mouse, for instance, with shortcuts that can be programmed for various applications.

A DIY mouse with a large touch screen. — Image by [Sam Baker] via Hackaday.IO

This story is one of scope creep, as [Sam Baker] says in the project details. At first, he thought he could just basically duct tape a touchscreen with shortcuts to an existing mouse. A couple of mouse teardowns later, [Sam] arrived at the conclusion that things would not be so simple.

After some digging around, [Sam] found a repository where someone created a way to communicate with the ADNS-5050 optical sensor, so [Sam] started by creating a breakout board for this sensor. By combining that with an ESP32 dev board and a touchscreen, [Sam] had his shortcut mouse.

Does it work? Yes. Is it useful? Well, yes. And also no. The beauty part of using a regular mouse is that you don’t have to look down at it to know where the buttons are. In the future, [Sam] would like to implement some kind of buttons for tactility. In the meantime, haptic feedback could be nice.

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A chocolate coating machine works in the round to enrobe mint Oreos.

Chocolate-Coating Machine Mk. 2: The Merry-Go-Round

November 28, 2024 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

This holiday season, [Chaz] wanted to continue his family’s tradition of enrobing a little bit of everything in dark chocolate, and built an improved, rotating chocolate-coating machine.

You may remember last year’s offering, aka the conveyor belt version. Although that one worked, too much chocolate was ultimately lost to the surface of the kitchen table. [Chaz] once again started with a standard chocolate fountain and bought a round wire rack that fits the circumference of the bowl at the bottom. He snipped a hole in the center large enough to accommodate the business part of the fountain and printed a collar with holes that he cleverly zip-tied to the rack.

[Chaz] also printed a large gear to go around the bowl, a small gear to attach to a six RPM motor, a motor mount for the bowl, and an air blade attachment for a portable Ryobi fan. The air blade worked quite well, doing the double duty of distributing the chocolate and thinning out the coating. Plus, it gives things a neat rumpled look on the top.

Want to make some special chocolates this year, but don’t want to build an enrober? Get yourself a diffraction grating and make some rainbow goodies with melted chocolate.

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Boss Byproducts: Corium Is Man-Made Lava

November 27, 2024 by Kristina Panos 19 Comments

So now we’ve talked about all kinds of byproducts, including man-made (Fordite), nature-made (fulgurites), and one that’s a little of both (calthemites). Each of these is beautiful in its own way, but I’m not sure about the beauty and merit of corium — that which is created in a nuclear reactor core during a meltdown.

A necklace made to look like corium. Image via OSS-OSS

Corium has the consistency of lava and is made up of many things, including nuclear fuel, the products of fission, control rods, any structural parts of the reactor that were affected, and products of those parts’ reaction with the surrounding air, water, and steam.

If the reactor vessel itself is breached, corium can include molten concrete from the floor underneath. That said, if corium is hot enough, it can melt any concrete it comes in contact with.

So, I had to ask, is there corium jewelry? Not quite. Corium is dangerous and hard to come by. But that doesn’t stop artisans from imitating the substance with other materials.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The TRON Keyboard

November 25, 2024 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

[Folaefolc] was craving a new keyboard build a few weeks ago and got inspired by the humble 3.5″ floppy disk. So much so that he decided to make a split keyboard with each half having the exact footprint of a floppy — 90 mm x 94 mm. And you know the PCBs have floppy details silkscreened on the back. Just check out the gallery.

A split keyboard with a 3.5" floppy disk footprint for each half. An actual floppy sits between the two halves. — Image via [Folaefolc] via reddit

This bad boy uses a pair of Liatris microcontrollers, which are made by splitkb and are designed to be drop-in replacements for Pro Micros and an alternative to the RP2040.

The other fun part of this build is that [Folaefolc] used RJ9 connectors to join the halves instead of something like TRRS.

Beneath those candy keycaps are 34 Kailh choc v1 switches shoved into hot swap sockets in case [Folaefolc] changes his mind. Gerbers are available if you want to build one of these cuties!

Via reddit

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 297: Prusa Eschews Open Source Hardware, The Lemontron Prints Upside-Down, And The Vecdec Cyberdeck Does Minority Report

November 22, 2024 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This week on the Podcast, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.

First up in the news: Elliot was at Electronica and spotted a wild Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. And just as excitingly, FreeCAD has finally reached version 1.0, which means it’s stable and ready for real work.

Kristina is getting tired of losing at What’s That Sound, so she’ll have to come up with some to stump you all. Can you get this week’s sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Then it’s on to the hacks and such, but first, there’s even more news and opinion to be had in Tom’s review of Prusa’s new printer, which happens to be closed-source. Then we’ll discuss another printer that prints upside-down, an elegant cyberdeck, and a cyberpunk pocket watch. Finally, we talk about the Great Redbox Cleanup, and take a look at man-made stalactites.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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A variety of LEGO and the damage they've done to cardboard.

Stepping On LEGO For Science

November 20, 2024 by Kristina Panos 34 Comments

You might say that the worst LEGO to step on is any given piece that happens to get caught underfoot, but have you ever thought about what the worst one would really be? For us, those little caltrops come to mind most immediately, and we’d probably be satisfied with believing that was the answer. But not [Nate Scovill]. He had to quantitatively find out one way or another.

And no, the research did not involve stepping on one of each of the thousands of LEGO pieces in existence. [Nate] started by building a test rig that approximated the force of his own 150 lb. frame stepping on each piece under scrutiny and seeing what it did to a cardboard substrate.

And how did [Nate] narrow down which pieces to try? He took to the proverbial streets and asked redditors and Discordians to help him come up with a list of subjects.

If you love LEGO to the point where you can’t bear to see it destroyed, then this video is not for you. But if you need to know the semi-scientific answer as badly as we did, then go for it. The best part is round two, when [Nate] makes a foot out of ballistics gel to rate the worst from the first test. So, what’s the worst LEGO to step on? The answer may surprise you.

And what’s more dangerous than plain LEGO? A LEGO Snake, we reckon.

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