Author: Lewin Day

3455 Articles

Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright

January 21, 2026 by 4 Comments

[Brainiac75] is a fan of fiber optic lamps, except for one thing—they’re often remarkably dim. Thus, they set out to hack the technology to deliver terrifying amounts of light while still retaining their quirky charm.

Older fiber optic lamps use a dim filament lamp or halogen lamp to light them up. They also often feature a spinning color disk to vary the light patterns, which does have the side effect of absorbing some of the already-limited light output.

When it came to upgrading his own decades-old lamp, [Braniac75] decided to initially stick within the specs of the original halogen lamp. The fixture was rated for 12 volts at 5 watts, with a GU4/GZ4 compatible base, and white light was desired so the color wheel could still do its thing.  Swapping out the original 5 W halogen for a 2.5 W LED unit brought a big upgrade in brightness, since the latter is roughly equivalent to a 20 W halogen in light output. Upgrading to a 4.2 W LED pushed things even further, greatly improving the look of the lamp.

The video also explores modding a modern fiber optic lamp, too. It was incredibly cheap, running off batteries and using a single color-changing LED to illuminate the fibers. [Braniac75] decided to try illuminating the plastic fibers with an RGB stage lighting laser rig—namely, the LaserCube Ultra 7.5 W from Wicked Lasers. With this kind of juice, the fiber lamp is eye-searingly bright, quite literally, and difficult to film. However, with the laser output dialed way down, the lamp looks amazing—with rich saturated colors dancing across the fiber bundle as the lasers do their thing.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a fiber lamp that doesn’t look like a cheap gimmick, now you know how. We’ve looked at weird applications for these lamps before, too.

Continue reading “Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright” →

Nixie Gear Indicator Shines Bright

January 20, 2026 by 7 Comments

When you’re driving a car with a stickshift, it’s pretty easy to keep track of which gear you’re in. That can be a little bit more difficult on something like a motorcycle with a sequential shifter. [decogabry] built a neat gearshift indicator to solve this issue.

An ESP32 devboard is used as the brain of the build. It’s paired with an ELM327 dongle over Bluetooth, which is able to hook into the bike’s ODB diagnostic port to pick up data like engine RPM, wheel speed, and coolant temperature. The first two factors are combined in order to calculate the current gear, since the ratio between engine RPM and wheel speed is determined directly by the gear selection. The ESP32 then commands a Philips ZM1020 Nixie tube to display the gear, driving it via a small nest of MPSA42 transistors. A separate self-contained power supply module is used to take the bike’s 12 volt supply up to the 170 volts needed to run the tube. There is also a small four-digit display used to show status information, RPM, and engine temperature.

Notably,  [decogabry] made this build rather flexible, to suit any bike it might be installed upon. The gear ratios are not hard coded in software. Instead, there is a simple learning routine that runs the first time the system is powered up, which compares RPM and wheel speed during a steady-state ride and saves the ratios to flash.

We’ve featured projects before that used different techniques to achieve similar ends. It’s also interesting to speculate as to whether there’s a motorcycle vintage enough to suit a Nixie display while still having an ODB interface on board as standard. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own neat automotive builds, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Demonstrating The Sheer Lack Of Security In First Gen Cellular Networks

January 20, 2026 by 23 Comments

Modern cellular networks are built to serve millions upon millions of users, all while maintaining strict encryption across all communications. But earlier cellular networks were by no means so secure, as [Nostalgia for Simplicity] demonstrates in a recent video.

The video begins with an anecdote — our narrator remembers a family member who could listen in on other’s conversations on the analog AMPS phone network. This was easily achieved simply by entering a code that would put an Ericsson handset into a test mode, in which it could be switched to tune in any desired AMPS channel. Since the communications were transmitted in a purely analog manner, with no encryption of any sort, any conversation on such a network was basically entirely open for anyone to hear. The video shows a recreation of this method, using a software-defined radio to spin up a low-power, very local AMPS network. A phone call is carried out between two handsets, with a third handset able to listen in just by using the special test mode.

If you’re particularly keen to build your own first-generation AMPS phone network, just know that it’s not really allowed due to rules around spectrum allocations. Still, it’s entirely possible as we’ve covered before. It doesn’t even take much hardware in our modern SDR era.

Continue reading “Demonstrating The Sheer Lack Of Security In First Gen Cellular Networks” →

Genetic Therapy Aims To Bring Hearing To Those Born Deaf

January 14, 2026 by 10 Comments

For those born with certain types of congenital deafness, the cochlear implant has been a positive and enabling technology. It uses electronics to step in as a replacement for the biological ear that doesn’t quite function properly, and provides a useful, if imperfect, sense of hearing to its users.

New research has promised another potential solution for some sufferers of congenital deafness. Instead of a supportive device, a gene therapy is used to enable the biological ear to function more as it should. The result is that patients get their sense of hearing, not from a prosthetic, but from their own ears themselves.

Continue reading “Genetic Therapy Aims To Bring Hearing To Those Born Deaf” →

Finding A Way To Produce Powerful Motors Without Rare Earths

January 13, 2026 by 40 Comments

The electric vehicle revolution has created market forces to drive all sorts of innovations. Battery technology has progressed at a rapid pace, and engineers have developed ways to charge vehicles at ever more breakneck rates. Similarly, electric motors have become more powerful and more compact, delivering greater performance than ever before.

In the latter case, while modern EV motors are very capable things, they’re also reliant on materials that are increasingly hard to come by. Most specifically, it’s the rare earth materials that make their magnets so good. The vast majority of these minerals come from China, with trade woes and geopolitics making it difficult to get them at any sort of reasonable price. Thus has sprung up a new market force, pushing engineers to search for new ways to make their motors compact, efficient, and powerful.

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Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round

January 12, 2026 by 55 Comments

If you’ve got a decent CRT monitor, you can usually adjust the settings to make sure the image scans nicely across the whole display. But what if you could rotate the whole image itself? [Jeri Ellsworth] has shown us how to achieve this with an amusing mechanical hack.

The trick behind this is simple. On a standard CRT, the deflection yoke uses magnetic coils to steer the electron beam in the X and Y axes, spraying electrons at the phosphors as needed. To rotate the display as a whole, you could do some complicated maths and change how you drive the coils and steer the electron beams… or you could just rotate the entire yoke instead. [Jeri] achieves this by putting the whole deflection yoke on a custom slip ring assembly. This allows it to receive power and signal as it rotates around the neck of the tube, driven by a stepper motor. Continue reading “Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round” →

A UI-Focused Display Library For The ESP32

January 9, 2026 by 13 Comments

If you’re building a project on your ESP32, you might want to give it a fancy graphical interface. If so, you might find a display library from [dejwk] to be particularly useful.

Named roo_display for unclear reasons, the library is Arduino-compatible, and suits a wide range of ESP32 boards out in the wild. It’s intended for use with common SPI-attached display controllers, like the ILI9341, SSD1327, ST7789, and more. It’s performance-oriented, without skimping on feature set. It’s got all kinds of fonts in different weights and sizes, and a tool for importing more. It can do all kinds of shapes if you want to manually draw your UI elements, or you can simply have it display JPEGs, PNGs, or raw image data from PROGMEM if you so desire. If you’re hoping to create a touch interface, it can handle that too. There’s even a companion library for doing more complex work under the name roo_windows.

If you’re looking to create a simple and responsive interface, this might be the library for you. Of course, there are others out there too, like the Adafruit GFX library which we’ve featured before. You could even go full VGA if you wanted, and end up with something that looks straight out of Windows 3.1. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own graphics code for the popular microcontroller platform, you should probably let us know on the tipsline!

Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip!