Thermoforming: Shaping Curvy Grilles With No Supports

February 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Making sure the heatgun is on 'low' and gloves are on while pushing on the mold. (Credit: Zion Brock) — Making sure the heatgun is on ‘low’ and gloves are on while pushing on the mold. (Credit: Zion Brock)

Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire or hot air, thermoplastics like PLA can be further tweaked with a similar method. This can be much less complex than 3D printing the design with supports, as demonstrated by [Zion Brock].

For this classically styled radio project the front grille was previously 3D printed with the curved shape, but to avoid an ugly edge it had to be printed with most of the grille off the print bed, requiring countless supports and hours of printing time. To get around this, [Zion] opted to print the grille flat and then thermoform its curved shape. Of course, due to the unusual shape of the grille, this required a bit more effort than e.g. a spherical form.

This is similar to what is used with sheet metal to get detailed shaped, also requiring a mold and a way to stretch the flat shape over the mold. With the flat form designed to have all the material in the right places, it was able to be printed in less than an hour in PLA and then formed with a heatgun aimed at the part while the two-section mold is slid together to create the final form.

You can find the design files and full instructions on the website for the radio project.

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Designing A Compact RGB 14-Segment Display

February 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Sometimes you’re looking for a component for a project that you know should exist, but you just cannot find it. Something like a 14-segment LED display, but not just one with a fixed color, instead you want some of that sweet addressable RGB-ness. Unfortunately for [EastMakes], this particular display was nowhere to be found, so he decided to try making his own.

Using addressable SK6805 RGB LEDs with a mere 1.5 x 1.5 footprint as the basis, the layout for these individual LEDs on the PCBs was determined, and a layout created in KiCad. The PCB manufacturing and assembly were straightforward enough — the thing that really makes these displays is the diffuser. Here a few different approaches were tried, including FR4 with translucent segments in the soldermask, and a 3D printed version in both white and black PLA filament.

The FR4 approach using 0.8 mm thin PCBs looked quite all right, with the addition of through vias in the 1 mm version showing how these help to boost overall brightness. The 3D printed version prototypes didn’t look too shabby either, but it would probably help a lot if this diffuser panel also fit around the LEDs to prevent light bleeding between segments.

We’d love to see this type of RGB display being experimented with, as it seems to hold a lot of promise while also definitely being something that ought to exist.

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The Complex Engineering Of Runways

February 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Airport runways seem pretty simple, just another strip of asphalt or concrete not unlike the roads that our cars drive upon every day. We can even use these same highways as landing strips in a pinch, so you’d assume that the engineering for either isn’t that dissimilar. Of course, you can use a highway for an occasional emergency, but a runway that sees the largest and heaviest airplanes taxi, take off and land on a constant basis is a whole other challenge, as detailed in a recent [Practical Engineering] video and its transcript.

When you consider that an Airbus A380 the take-off weight is up to 550 ton, it’s quite clear what the challenge is for larger airports. Another major issue is that of friction, or lack thereof, as the speeds and kinetic energy behind it are so much higher. One only has to look at not only runway overruns but also when one skids off sideways due issues like hydroplaning and uneven friction. Keeping the surface of a runway as high-friction as possible and intact after hundreds of take-offs, tail-strikes and other events is no small feat.

Of course, the other part of runway engineering is for when things do go wrong and an airplane enters the runway safety areas, or overrun zones. This usually provides some flat and clear space where an airplane can safely bleed off its kinetic energy, with the collapsing surface of the EMAS technology being one of the best demonstrations of how this can be safely and dramatically shortened.

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Making A Hidden Door Status Sensor

February 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

The door sensor in its new enclosures. (Credit: Dillan Stock)

A common sight in ‘smart homes’, door sensors allow you to detect whether a door is closed or open, enabling the triggering of specific events. Unfortunately, most solutions for these sensors are relatively bulky and hard to miss, making them a bit of a eyesore. This was the case for [Dillan Stock] as well, who decided that he could definitely have a smart home, yet not have warts sticking out on every single doorframe and door. There’s also a video version of the linked blog post.

These door sensors tend to be very simple devices, usually just a magnet and a reed relay, the latter signaling a status change to the wireless transmitter or transceiver. Although [Dillan] had come across recessed door sensors before, like a Z-wave-based unit from Aeotec, this was a very poorly designed product with serious reliability issues.

That’s when [Dillan] realized that he could simply take the PCB from one of the Aqara T1 door sensors that he already had and stuff them into a similar 20 mm diameter form factor as that dodgy sensor unit. Basically this just stuffs the magnet and PCB from an existing wart-style sensor into a recessed form factor, making it a very straightforward hack, that only requires printing the housings for the Aqara T1 sensor and some intimate time between the door and a drill.

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Building A Self-Playing Chess Board Robot

February 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

As popular as the game of chess is, it has one massive flaw. This being that it requires two participants, which can be a challenge. Although playing chess on a computer against an AI has been a thing for many decades, it’s hard to beat physical chess boards that give you all the tactile pleasure of handling and moving pieces, yet merging the two is tricky. You can either tell the player to also move the opponent’s pieces, or use a mechanism to do so yourself, which [Joshua Stanley] recently demonstrated in a video.

There are a few ways that you can go about having the computer move and detect the pieces. Here [Joshua] chose to use Hall magnetic sensors to detect the magnets that are embedded in the 3D printed chess pieces as well as their absence. These sensors are mounted to the back side of a PCB which is also the playing field, thus using the silkscreen for the board markings.

For the electromagnet that moves the chess pieces core x/y kinematics were used to move it underneath the PCB, engaging when moving pieces but otherwise deactivated. This is all controlled by an ESP32 MCU, while the computer runs the open-source Stockfish chess engine. As the human player changes piece positions this is detected by the magnet’s presence, with the change input into Stockfish.

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Gaming On An Arduino Uno Q In Linux

February 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

After Qualcomm’s purchase of Arduino it has left many wondering what market its new Uno Q board is trying to target. Taking the ongoing RAM-pocalypse as inspiration, [Bringus Studios] made a tongue-in-cheek video about using one of these SoC/MCU hybrid Arduino boards for running Linux and gaming on it. Naturally, with the lack of ARM-native Steam games, this meant using the FEX x86-to-ARM translator in addition to Steam’s Proton translation layer where no native Linux game exists, making for an excellent stress test of the SoC side of this board.

Technically, this is a heatsink. (Credit: Bringus Studios, YouTube)

We covered this new ‘Arduino’ board previously, which features both a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC and a Cortex-M33 MCU. Since it uses the Uno form factor, all SoC I/O goes via the single USB-C connector, meaning that a USB-C docking station is pretty much required to use the SoC, though there’s at least 16 GB of eMMC to install the OS on. A Debian-based OS image even comes preinstalled, which is convenient.

With a mere 2 GB of LPDDR4 it’s not the ideal board to run desktop Linux on, but if you’re persistent and patient enough it will work, and you can even play 3D video games as though it’s Qualcomm’s take on Raspberry Pi SBCs. After some intense gaming the SoC package gets really quite toasty, so adding a heatsink is probably needed if you want to peg its cores and GPU to 100% for extended periods of time.

As for dodging the RAM-pocalypse with one of these $44 boards, it’s about the same price as the 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5, but the 2 GB RPi 5 – even with the recent second price bump – is probably a better deal for this purpose. Especially since you can skip the whole docking station, but losing the eMMC is a rawer deal, and the dedicated MCU could be arguably nice for more dedicated purposes. Still, desktop performance is a hard ‘meh’ on the Uno Q, even if you’re very generous.

Despite FEX being a pain to set up, it seems to work well, which is promising for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR glasses, which are incidentally Qualcomm Snapdragon-based.

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Why Haven’t Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet?

February 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

If you are to believe the glossy marketing campaigns about ‘quantum computing’, then we are on the cusp of a computing revolution, yet back in the real world things look a lot less dire. At least if you’re worried about quantum computers (QCs) breaking every single conventional encryption algorithm in use today, because at this point they cannot even factor 21 yet without cheating.

In the article by [Craig Gidney] the basic problem is explained, which comes down to simple exponentials. Specifically the number of quantum gates required to perform factoring increases exponentially, allowing QCs to factor 15 in 2001 with a total of 21 two-qubit entangling gates. Extrapolating from the used circuit, factoring 21 would require 2,405 gates, or 115 times more.

Explained in the article is that this is due to how Shor’s algorithm works, along with the overhead of quantum error correction. Obviously this puts a bit of a damper on the concept of an imminent post-quantum cryptography world, with a recent paper by [Dennish Willsch] et al. laying out the issues that both analog QCs (e.g. D-Wave) and digital QCs will have to solve before they can effectively perform factorization. Issues such as a digital QC needing several millions of physical qubits to factor 2048-bit RSA integers.