Author: Lewin Day

3486 Articles

Building A Minecraft Lantern For Halloween

October 21, 2025 by 5 Comments

Sometimes it’s fun to bring props from video games into the real world. [Hulk] has done just that with their latest Halloween build—creating a working replica of the lantern from Minecraft.

Key to the build is the 3D printed enclosure, which faithfully mimics the look of the in-game item. By virtue of Minecraft’s simplistic visual style, it’s a relatively straightforward print, without a lot of quirky geometry or difficult overhangs that might otherwise trip up your printer. It’s printed in six parts and assembled with acrylic lenses which act to diffuse the light coming from inside.

Electronically, an Arduino Nano runs the show. It’s hooked up to a pair of NeoPixel addressable LED rings, which provide rich RGB colors on demand. Rotary pots are installed on the enclosure to enable the color to be tuned to the user’s desire. Power is courtesy of an 18650 lithium-ion cell and a TP4056 module ensures the battery is kept happy when charging.

It’s a fun prop build, and one that would be the perfect addition to any Minecraft costume. Except for maybe a chicken jockey, because they don’t use lanterns. In any case, we’ve seen similar work before, too.

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Budget Stream Deck Clone Is Ripe For Hacking

October 21, 2025 by 13 Comments

The original Stream Deck was a purpose-built device to make it easier to manage a live video stream on the fly. Since its release, many other similar products have hit the market. Among them is the Ulanzi D200 U-Studio, which is proving popular with hackers for good reason.

[Rodrigo Laneth] has been digging into the D200, and found out it’s running Linux 5.10.160 on a quad-core Rockchip RK3308HS chip. Notably, he determined the kernel appears to be from Android, but that Ulanzi removed the Android userspace and “slapped Buildroot on top,” in his own words. Interesting, if not that unusual. What is key, however, is that the device has a fully open adb root shell, as noted by [lucasteske], which inspired [Rodrigo]’s investigation. This pretty much allows full access to the device, so you can make it do whatever weird thing your heart desires.

As you might expect, people are already making the D200 do fun stuff. [lucasteske] got it running DOOM in short order. Meanwhile, [Rodrigo] has it playing out Bad Apple!! at 30 FPS, with code and a deeper explanation available on GitHub.

It’s rare these days that manufacturers leave root open on any commercial device. You normally need to pull a few tricks to get that kind of access.

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Blinking An LED With A Single Transistor

October 20, 2025 by 32 Comments

Let’s say you want to blink an LED. You might grab an Arduino and run the Blink sketch, or you might lace up a few components to a 555. But you needn’t go so fancy! [The Design Graveyard] explains how this same effect can be achieved with a single transistor.

The circuit in question is rather odd at first blush. The BC547 NPN transistor is hooked up between an LED and a resistor leading to a 12V DC line, with a capacitor across the emitter and collector. Meanwhile, the base is connected to… nothing! It’s just free-floating in the universe of its own accord. You might expect this circuit to do nothing at all, but if you power it up, the LED will actually start to flash.

The mechanism at play is relatively simple. The capacitor charges to 12 volts via the resistor. At this point, the transistor, which is effectively just acting as a poor diode in this case, undergoes avalanche breakdown at about 8.5 to 9 volts, and starts conducting. This causes the capacitor to discharge via the LED, until the voltage gets low enough that the transistor stops conducting once again. Then, the capacitor begins to charge back up, and the cycle begins again.

It’s a weird way to flash an LED, and it’s not really the normal way to use a transistor—you’re very much running it out of spec. Regardless, it does work for a time! We’ve looked at similar circuits before too. Video after the break.

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Classy Desk Simulates Beehive Activity

October 20, 2025 by 13 Comments

Beehives are impressive structures, an example of the epic building feats that are achievable by nature’s smaller creatures. [Full Stack Woodworking] was recently building a new work desk, and decided to make this piece of furniture a glowing tribute to the glorious engineering of the bee. (Video, embedded below.)

The piece is a conventional L-shaped desk, but with a honeycomb motif inlaid into the surface itself. [Full Stack Woodworking] started by iterating on various designs with stacked hexagons made out of laser cut plywood and Perspex, filled with epoxy. Producing enough hexagons to populate the entire desk was no mean feat, requiring a great deal of cutting, staining, and gluing—and all this before the electronics even got involved! Naturally, each cell has a custom built PCB covered in addressable LEDs, and they’re linked with smaller linear PCBs which create “paths” for bees to move between cells.

What’s cool about the display is that it’s not just running some random RGB animations. Instead, the desk has a Raspberry Pi 5 dedicated to running a beehive simulation, where algorithmic rules determine the status (and thus color) of each hexagonal cell based on the behavior of virtual bees loading the cells with honey. It creates an organic, changing display in a way that’s rather reminiscent of Conway’s Game of Life.

It was a huge build, but the final result is impressive. We’ve featured some other great custom desks over the years too. Video after the break.

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Reshaping Eyeballs With Electricity, No Lasers Or Cutting Required

October 8, 2025 by 36 Comments

Glasses are perhaps the most non-invasive method of vision correction, followed by contact lenses. Each have their drawbacks though, and some seek more permanent solutions in the form of laser eye surgeries like LASIK, aiming to reshape their corneas for better visual clarity. However, these methods often involve cutting into the eye itself, and it hardly gets any more invasive than that.

A new surgical method could have benefits in this regard, allowing correction in a single procedure that requires no lasers and no surgical cutting of the eye itself. The idea is to use electricity to help reshape the eye back towards greater optical performance.

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Smart Bulbs Are Turning Into Motion Sensors

October 7, 2025 by 33 Comments

If you’ve got an existing smart home rig, motion sensors can be a useful addition to your setup. You can use them for all kinds of things, from turning on lights when you enter a room, to shutting off HVAC systems when an area is unoccupied. Typically, you’d add dedicated motion sensors to your smart home to achieve this. But what if your existing smart light bulbs could act as the motion sensors instead?

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Airbags, And How Mercedes-Benz Hacked Your Hearing

October 6, 2025 by 43 Comments

Airbags are an incredibly important piece of automotive safety gear. They’re also terrifying—given that they’re effectively small pyrotechnic devices that are aimed directly at your face and chest. Myths have pervaded that they “kill more people than they save,” in part due a hilarious episode of The Simpsons. Despite this, they’re credited with saving tens of thousands of lives over the years by cushioning fleshy human bodies from heavy impacts and harsh decelerations.

While an airbag is generally there to help you, it can also hurt you in regular operation. The immense sound pressure generated when an airbag fires is not exactly friendly to your ears. However, engineers at Mercedes-Benz have found a neat workaround to protect your hearing from the explosive report of these safety devices. It’s a nifty hack that takes advantage of an existing feature of the human body. Let’s explore how air bags work, why they’re so darn loud, and how that can be mitigated in the event of a crash.

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