Author: Navarre Bartz

307 Articles

Quix Furniture For Modular Furniture Fun

February 7, 2025 by 19 Comments

If you’re someone who moves a lot, or just likes to change your decor, the limitations of conventional furniture can be a bit of a pain. Why not build your furniture modularly, so it can change with you?

QUIX is a modular building system designed for furnishings developed by [Robert Kern]. Giving people the ability to “build any kind of furniture in minutes with no tools,” it seems like a good gateway for people who love building with LEGO but find the pegs a little uncomfortable and expensive for full-sized chairs and couches. Anything that makes making more accessible is an exciting development in our book.

Featuring a repeating series of interlocking hooks, the panels can be produced via a number of techniques like CNC, laser cutter, or even smaller 3D printed models. Dowels and elastic bands serve as locks to prevent the furniture from tilting and since you have such a wide variety of panel materials to choose from, the color combinations can range from classic plywood to something more like a Mondrian.

If you’re looking for more modular inspiration for your house, how about gridbeam or Open Structures? If you’re wanting your furniture more musically-inclined, try Doodlestation instead.

Continue reading “Quix Furniture For Modular Furniture Fun” →

A picture of a stainless steel ring with a phillips screwdriver bit protruding from it sitting slightly askance atop a matching ring with a phillips head cut out like that of a screw. They are the same size so they can mesh when placed together.

Making Products For Fun And (Probably No) Profit

February 5, 2025 by 25 Comments

If you’re like most makers, you have a few product ideas kicking about, but you may not have made it all the way to production of those things. If you’re thinking about making the leap, [Simone Giertz] recently discussed all the perils and pitfalls of the process from idea to reality.

The TLDR is that there’s a big difference between making one item and making hundreds or thousands of them, which you probably already knew, but it is nice to see what sort of issues can crop up in this seemingly simple example of the Yetch Screwdriver Ring. It turns out that the metalworking skills of tool making and jewelry making rarely overlap in the contract manufacturing world.

[Giertz] also shares some of the more mundane, yet terrifying, parts of business like finally committing to bulk orders and whether it’s wise to go with intermediaries when working with suppliers overseas. She also keys us into parts of the process where things can go wrong, like how product samples typically use a different manufacturing process than bulk for practical reasons and how you need to have very specific quality control requirements not just decide if a product is good enough based on vibes.

If you’d like some more advice on making your own products, check out [Carrie Sundra]’s Supercon talk about Manufacturing on a Shoestring Budget.

Continue reading “Making Products For Fun And (Probably No) Profit” →

A black box with the words "Steam BRICK" emblazoned in white and orange text. It sits on a grey surface with various electronic parts surrounding it.

Steam Brick Makes Your Steam Deck Headless

January 26, 2025 by 44 Comments

Handhelds are designed to be portable, but what if you need something smaller than OEM? The Steam Brick pulls basically everything off of a Steam Deck to make it as portable as possible.

[crastinator-pro] found they rarely used the controller or screen on their Steam Deck, and the form factor was too bulky to conveniently chuck into their bag, negating the advantage of owning a portable console. As to be expected from any self-respecting hacker, they did a couple quick tests with components unplugged then got to work with the rotary tool.

After excising the main board from its handheld bonds and trimming unnecessary bits from the aluminum frame around the mainboard, they designed a case that can be tossed in a bag without any special treatment. The case was printed in polycarbonate to better withstand the heat of the console running at full tilt, and the colorful details were added in PLA with a 3D pen.

We’ve discussed using a Steam Deck as a single-board computer before, but if you want to keep it in one piece, you could also get it setup in a slick keyboard case.

A design sketch of a partially disassembled candybar mobile phone. The enclosure is a clamshell of plastic that envelops the functional internals of the device and is illustrated to the right upper corner of the image, slightly overlapping the internals evoking the idea of the internals being inserted into the cover. The words "buttons part of the cover" are written toward the top with an arrow toward the numpad and "plastic shell with various design" is written toward the bottom with an arrow toward the translucent blue shell.

The Nokia Design Archive Is Open For Viewing

January 21, 2025 by 19 Comments

During the Cambrian Explosion of cellphone form factors at the turn of the millenium, Nokia reigned supreme. If you’d like to see what they were doing behind the scenes to design these wild phones, you’ll love the Nokia Design Archive from Aalto University.

Featuring images, presentations, videos and a number of other goodies (remember transparencies?), this collection gives us some in-depth insight into how consumer products were dreamed up, designed, and brought to market. Some projects require more reading between the lines than others as the Archive is somewhat fragmented, but we think it could still be an invaluable peek into product design, especially if you’re working on projects that you want to be usable outside of a hacker audience.

The Archive also includes approximately 2000 objects including many unreleased “unknown” models and prototypes of phones that actually did make it into the wild. While we’d love to get our hands on some of these devices IRL, having images with reference colors is probably the next best thing. Having replaced a number of smartphone screens, we hope more hackers take up the buttons and indestructible casing of these elegant devices for a more civilized age.

Thanks to [Michael Fitzmayer] for the tip! Be sure to checkout his work on Nokia N-Gage phones, including an SDK if you too love to taco talk.

A woman in a dark green shirt and grey jeans holds a set of cinnamon pants. She is standing next to a burnt orange cushioned and backed-chair. The arm rests, legs, and outer circular rack are a blonde wood. It looks somewhat mid-century modern. A number of differently-colored clothes line the wall in the background.

Uncanny Valley Of Clean Conquered By Clever Chair

December 27, 2024 by 11 Comments

Do you ever have clothes that you only wore for a few hours, so you don’t want to wash them, but it still seems icky to put them back in the drawer or closet? What if you had a dedicated place to put them instead of on your floor or piled on a chair in the corner? [Simone Giertz] has a tidier solution for you.

On top of the quasi-dirty clothing conundrum, [Giertz]’s small space means she wanted to come up with a functional, yet attractive way to wrangle these clothes. By combining the time-honored tradition of hanging clothes on the back of a chair and the space-saving efficiency of a Lazy Susan, she was able to create a chair with a rotating rack to tuck the clothes out of the way when not wearing them.

The circular rack attached to the chair orbits around a circular seat and arm rests allowing clothes to be deposited on the chair from the front and conveniently pushed to the back so they remain out of sight and out of mind until you need them. The hardware chosen seems to be pretty strong as well given the number of items placed on the rail during the demonstration portion of the video. We also really like how [Giertz] challenged herself to “CAD celibacy” for the duration of the build to try to build it quick.

If you want to see some other clever furniture hacks, how about repurposing the seats from an old subway, or hacking IKEA furniture to be more accessible?

Continue reading “Uncanny Valley Of Clean Conquered By Clever Chair” →

A pair of hands hold two dark brown boards perpendicular two each other on a light brown benchtop. There are two light brown oval dowels in the end of one board that then project toward holes in the opposite board. Circular holes in the oval dowels are visible perpendicular to the second board, and will match up with holes in the board once pressed in. A cylindrical dowel is laying next to the joint and will be placed into the circular holes once assembled.

Creating A Signature Wood Joint

December 1, 2024 by 25 Comments

We really love when makers make their construction techniques evident in an aesthetically-pleasing way, and [Laura Kampf] has created a clever joint that reveals how a piece is made.

[Kampf] is a big fan of using her domino joiner, which is similar to biscuits or dowel joinery, but she didn’t love how it hid the construction of the joint. She first figured out an “off label” use of the joiner by running it from the outside of the joint to show the exposed domino from one end.

Building on the concept to show an interesting contrast on both sides of the joint, she drilled a hole perpendicular the domino and placed a dowel through it, creating a locking joint. The choice looks great once a finish is applied to really accentuate the contrast, and another bonus is that if glue is only applied to the dowel and domino, it becomes trivial to separate the joint if needed by drilling out the dowel.

If you’d like to see some other interesting ways to join wood, how about this laser-cut wedge tenon, soda bottle heat shrink, or this collection of CNC joints.

Continue reading “Creating A Signature Wood Joint” →

A hand holds a small PCB with an edge connector over the exposed, mostly black components of an M4 Mac mini. The bottom cover is hanging by an FFC cable off to the left of the

Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage

December 1, 2024 by 17 Comments

Apple’s in-house chips have some impressive specs, but user serviceability is something Apple left behind for consumer machines around a decade ago. Repair legend [dosdude1] shows us how the new M4 Mac mini can get a sizeable storage upgrade without paying the Apple tax.

The Mac mini is Apple’s least expensive machine, and in the old days you could swap a SATA drive for more storage and not pay the exorbitant prices that OEMs demand. Never one to turn down a walled garden, later Intel machines and now the ARM-based M-series chips soldered storage into the machine leaving an upgrade out of the hands of anyone without a hot air station.

Both the Mac Studio and Mac mini now have proprietary storage cards, and after some tinkering, [dosdude1] has successfully upgraded the storage on the base model M4 mini. While most people don’t casually reball NAND chips while chatting on a video, his previous work with others in the space to make a Mac Studio upgrade kit give us hope we’ll soon see economical storage upgrades that keep the Mac mini affordable.

We’ve previously covered the first time Apple tried to make its own processors, and some of their more recent attempts at repairability.

Continue reading “Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage” →