Author: Ian Bos

70 Articles

Flight Sim Tracking From Spatial Audio

July 6, 2026 by 9 Comments

Flight sims are wonderful to play around with to get immersed in the position of a pilot. Racing sims can give you a thrill that can only be beaten by the real thing. However, most of this tech is on the more expensive side, so it would be great if you could use some of the hardware already found in your house. Many Sony headphones already have rotation and movement data built in for spatial audio, so why not start there?

[Nicholas Slattery] had this very idea and has produced an open-source application to connect your headphones straight to your sim. There’s a surprising amount of support built into many headsets that use a known protocol called the Android Head Tracker HID protocol. This allowed [Nicholas] to connect a family of Sony headphones straight into OpenTrack, which is often used with flight sims. The best part is you can still use the headphones as normal with a Bluetooth connection.

If you want to give this a try with your own rig, check out [Nicholas]’s GitHub here. While flight and driving sims might be expensive to put together, it’s never too hard to hack together something to lower that barrier! Whether it’s a flight sim force-feedback joystick or driving sim hand-breaks we got you!

Goddard The Robot Dog Brought To Life

June 8, 2026 by 2 Comments

There’s not much more nostalgic for many than good ole’ Jimmy Neutron. This was true for [Kiara], who saw the gorgeous pupper Goddard and wanted him for herself. Of course, there was no solution other than to make an animatronic version of the robot dog.

Starting with some files ripped from a Jimmy Neutron GameCube game, Goddard was designed digitally before being printed in life size. Of course, for a true reproduction of the robot dog, the parts had to be prepped and painted in the iconic chrome and purple. A real plasma ball was used for the brain, and linear actuators were used for the legs. The head was able to be moved around similarly to professional animatronics using fishing line and servos. Put together the entire finished pup, looks incredible.

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Fixing The Failure Of The Reevo

June 8, 2026 by 41 Comments

There are a lot of traditional features of a bike that rarely change. The spokes, the chain, and the inability for it to take off like a rocket, to mention a few. None of these are features of the Reevo, a bike that tried, and mostly failed, to innovate the traditional electric bike. [Berm Peak], an individual with more time on two wheels than the entire Reevo team ever had, tried his hand at fixing the Reevo’s many problems.

[Berm Peak] has had a go at the Reevo before, but this time he had to go a lot deeper. Before any real work could be done on the Reevo, the controller needed to be jailbroken since the only way to use most features required an app that wasn’t available. Surprisingly, the controller boards were found to be well labeled, and with some trial and error, the protocols could be reverse-engineered.

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Emergency Bolt-Action Launcher For EpiPens

April 16, 2026 by 32 Comments

Imagine you and your friend are enjoying a nice sunny day, and BAM — they start to have a severe allergic reaction to who knows what. You have an EpiPen, but your friend is on the other side of a field! The solution? Obviously [Emily The Engineer] has only one option: build an entire EpiPen launcher!

Starting off the life-saving project, [Emily] prototyped with a 3D printed blank and a simple solenoid-controlled glorified potato cannon. This proved effective, as one would expect of such a project after successful tests on a human subject. However, there was one simple problem: what if you missed your initial shot?

To ensure no possible failed missions, a bolt-action magazine was retrofitted onto the device. Additionally, an air compressor placed in a mobile backpack carrier allows for repeated mobile use. Official testing was done on ballistic gel before a “war game” scenario played out involving an anaphylactic friend. As one would assume, this went perfectly, ignoring the time delay of having to wait for the compressor to build up enough pressure…

Anyways, even if you won’t be using this EpiPen launcher anytime soon, there are some actual DIY medical miracles you can look into! Something that’s a tad less insane to hack together than an EpiPen gun would be a splint. That is exactly what you can learn about here!

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MotoGP Rubber = Better Climbing?

April 14, 2026 by 15 Comments

Walking on grass, it’s easy, no matter the shoe. How about an inclined trail? Some hiking shoes or nice tennis shoes will do the trick. How about climbing a mountain? Now we are gonna need something special. [Magnus Midtbø] is a professional climber with an acute awareness of this fact and has used shoes of all kinds; however, today is something special.

Imagine if you could use the technology of MotoGP to give you the same grip as a 1-liter bike. That is exactly what he tried out. RAToM is a company that has started to market a unique product, recycled MotoGP tires. Viral vids of this rubber being used have been going around with shoes even being able to stick to themselves. He decided to put it to the test by requesting some of this special rubber stock and applying it to his own shoes.

After extensive, though simple, testing along the bouldering wall he admitted to the effectiveness of the special soled shoes. This shouldn’t be too surprising with MotoGP’s intensive material science innovations involving their tire material. These tires include a variety of additives, from silicone dioxide to the traditional carbon black. What has not been able to be tested to its required extent is the durability of the material over long periods of bouldering.

Even though most of this specialized rubber material is primarily supplied by one company, the source material is recycled from any used MotoGP tire. This could mean DIY alternatives better than the current leading shoes could be possible with sufficient care if you get a hold of a tire or two… While this would not be an easy process, don’t be too scared to try! Maybe you could learn a thing or two from this case study on homebrewing a running shoe!

Ski Slopes For Laser Imaging

April 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

Lasers are cool and all, but they can be somewhat difficult to control at times. This is especially true when you have hundreds, thousands, or millions of lasers you need to steer. Fortunately, the MITRE Corporation might have created exactly what’s needed to accomplish this feat. While you might expect this to be done in a similar fashion as a DLP micro mirror array, these researchers have created something a bit different.

A ski slope like a MEMS array is used to contort light as needed. Each slope is able to be controlled in such a way so precise that entire images are able to be displayed by the arrays. This is done by using a “piezo-opto-mechanical photonic integrated circuit” or (POMPIC). Each slope is constructed from SiO2, Al, AlN, and Si3N4. All of these are deposited in such a way to allow the specific bending needed for control.

While quantum computing hasn’t hit these slopes yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t look into the other puzzles needed for the quantum revolution. Quantum computing is something that people have been trying for a long time to get right. Big claims come from all the big players. Take Microsoft, for example, with claims of using Majorana zero mode anyons for topological quantum computing.

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From Lunar Dust To Breathable Air

April 13, 2026 by 28 Comments

Moon missions are hot again for the first bit since the space race. While the previous period had us land on the big lunar rock, the missions of tomorrow have us living on it. The initial problem of landing in one piece has been solved, but there are many more puzzles to solve. One major issue of living in the vacuum of space is the lack of breathable air, because, ya know, it’s space.

This brings us to today, where [Blue Origin] has announced a prototype method of turning Moon dust into the valuable gas we call oxygen. [Blue Origin] hasn’t posted much about the actual process behind this feat, terming the system “Air Pioneer”. What we do know is that it requires melting the regolith and then passing current through to release the O2 molecules from their rocky prison.

While some publications on this matter have been calling this a first in its entirety, this isn’t entirely true. NASA has worked on this technology for the past couple of years, called “Gaseous Lunar Oxygen from Regolith Electrolysis”, or (GaLORE). What [Blue Origin] has done, however, is complete the task under a for-profit motive. Perhaps this can introduce the drive needed to accelerate the development of the tech? (If anyone knows any more detail about the Blue Origins system, please let us know.)

Private space is certainly an exciting and quickly moving space in nearly all regards. It’s important to see how far we have come from the initial moon missions. If you want to check out some of the wackier lessons from that era, be sure to read up on the fight for moon cockroaches!