Author: Tyler August

564 Articles

Laser Your Way To Smoother FDM 3D Prints

August 29, 2026 by 13 Comments

Now, not everyone minds the characteristic layer lines you get with Filament Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D prints, but sometimes you need a smooth surface. If so we might go for filling primer, Bondo, or maybe break out the ABS and vapor smooth. Well, [I changed a thing] has an alternate suggestion: lasers. Laser melting can smooth the walls on a print, or the top surfaces as he shows in two different videos, both embedded below. The results look roughly similar to vapor smoothing, without the chemical exposure small risk of explosion.

Of course, you need a laser to do this, and [I changed a thing] has two diode lasers mounted to the X-axis of his printer. Of the two, the top surfaces were a lot easier to get right than the wall smoothing, which makes sense. Top surfaces are right there for the laser to get at, after all, while with his laser setup [I changed a thing] needs to get at the walls obliquely. [I changed a thing] tries melting layer-by-layer as well as a few methods to get at the walls of a finished print; which works best seems to depend on the size of and geometry of the object, so it looks like this technique is as much art as science right now.

This effort is closely related to the previous work [I changed a thing] did on improving layer adhesion with laser melting.  It’s also not the first time we’ve seen laser-driven print smoothing, but that project used non-planar movements to do a post-print laser pass.

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Analog Optical Feedback Generates 4K Fractals With No Computer

August 27, 2026 by 28 Comments

For users of a certain age, fractal patterns and computers are nearly synonymous. Typing in BASIC programs and seeing the Mandelbrot set or other fractals slowly render on screen is a key memory for some of us. Others will have generated recursive patterns mucking about: point an analog camera at the screen showing its video feed, and you’d better believe you get recursion. It’s called video feedback, and it looks a lot better than audio feedback sounds, especially in the hands of a master like [The Light Herder] who has now found a way to take this vintage art into the 4K resolution of the 21st century.

Physically this build is very similar to the “God Machine II” sculpture we covered previously, which in turn built on the first 720p version of his art piece. Getting analog video feedback in HD was hard enough — you need to be able to adjust the hue, saturation, brightness and contrast of the monitor as you go in order to have the full control of the resulting image. Most old TVs had those back in the SD era, but once HD came around it was rare; [The Light Herder] despaired of ever finding a screen that would to this in 4K.

As it turns out, the answer was to embrace digital — all the knobs on his analog control board feed into a Teensy, which is communicating via RS-232 with the LCD driver boards to alter the desired display properties. Obviously judicious selection of driver boards was required. If you watch the build video embedded below, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of tech in this analog, ‘no computer’ setup. If you want to skip the how-to and a master’s explanation of video feedback and just see pretty pictures he’s got a demo video as well. It really has to be seen to be believed.

If you want to create a colorful analog light show that isn’t quite so self-referential and a lot simpler to build, you could always try soap. Actually, we’d love to see him start the feedback with some soap-film colors. The result would likely be as was once said “totally far out, man”.

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Eenk Provides EInk, ESP32 Powered Text Adventures

August 27, 2026 by 16 Comments

There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth of words of well-crafted story to go with the action. [t0mg] is a fan of such adventures, and also quite enjoys carrying around his palm-sized ESP32 powered Xteink e-ink reader, so decided to create a project to merge the two interests, called eeink.

The Xteink readers have gotten popular lately because their modest internals and size make them very affordable. Not to mention hackable, since they’re basically an ESP32-C3 e-ink dev board that comes with a nice case and battery. The X4 Pro notably comes with an ESP32-S3 which means a lot more RAM, but this project targets both that and the X3/X4 that use the C3 version. Using the C3 means working within some rather stringent limits, as Xteink didn’t spring for any PSRAM, so [t0mg] had less memory to work with than folks did in the 80s.

This project is specifically focused on adventures using the scripting language ink, and comes with its own IDE called eenky to roll your own choose your own adventure book. It’s all on GitHub under an MIT license, and if you want to see it in action there’s a demo video embedded below.

Speaking of Zork, it wasn’t just the first commercial text adventure; it brought some important technological innovations, too.

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Encoding MOD Files Optically On Paper, Because Amiga’s Legacy Will Outlast M-Disks

August 26, 2026 by 30 Comments

All but a few of our very youngest readers are surely familiar with music formats that rely on optical disks. When we say [RobSmithDev] made a MOD tracker that uses an optical disk, then, you might be forgiven for thinking he stuck a bunch of MOD files onto a CD– MOD files being a format of electronic music that was conceived of on the Commodore Amiga that is still used to this day. A dedicated MOD-CD player might be a fun project, but it’s not what [Rob] did; his project is far more impressive and impractical, as he’s come up with a way to encode the MOD files on paper for optical playback. This way the Amiga’s legacy can be preserved longer than the paltry thousand years promised by the optical M-disk format.

Zooming way, way in on the disk reveals that he’s actually printing the patterns of the MOD file row by row, just like you’d see playing it in a ‘tracker’ program. A MOD file, you see, does not encode music like a WAV or MP3. Rather, like with MIDI, it lists the notes the software reading the file — traditionally called a tracker — is to recreate. Unlike a MIDI file, though, you don’t have to store the same notes more than once: repeating sections are stored in patterns. So most of the disk is just a long list of hexadecimal numbers: several columns worth, one for each ‘voice’ or instrument playing in the song. Another difference with MIDI is that MOD files are self-contained in that they are supposed to contain the samples, which isn’t in evidence until you flip over the disk.

There’s no B-side to [Rob]’s album. Instead a QR-code like series of barcodes is used to encode the samples used in each track on the disk, as well as other information needed to recreate the MOD file, including metadata like title and artist, and the sequencing of the patterns on the front. Of course this means he needs two cameras on his physical mod player, one on each side, and steppers to slide them across the disk like a linear tracking turntable. The front is read via OCR of his modified Amiga “Topaz” font, while the rear holds the first 1084 bytes of the MOD file in a QR-inspired format [Rob] produced specifically for this project.

Unlike the last time we saw someone store music in QR codes, the more modest size requirements of modfiles — something that led to their use in keygens — means this player can store the music’s 8-bit sound samples without the OPUS compression [Rob] is using affecting fidelity. He’s working on another video to give the details of the player– as he works out the bugs, right now it can’t jump betwixt patterns on the disk as fast as some modfiles need–but we’re willing to hazard a guess he’s got a Raspberry Pi in there, and that it’s probably not running the Amiga-inspired AROS operating system.

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Reject Fluid Simulations, Return To Rheoscopic Fluid

August 25, 2026 by 14 Comments

Fluid simulations are one of the “killer apps” of high-performance computing, but if you can’t afford the performance, they can take a depressingly long time to run. Depending on your use case, as long as you keep the Reynold’s number in mind– or are just looking for a qualitative look at pretty flows–you might be able to get away with purely-practical simulations using rheoscopic fluid, as [Visual Thinker] demonstrates in a recent video.

The fluid, as you can guess from the name, lets you scope out rheos— that’s flow, for those of you didn’t take Greek. Making it is as simple as you could ask for: get some mica flakes, which are readily available to add ‘sparkle’ to cosmetics, and mix with water and a drop of soap. The soap isn’t always necessary, but depending on your mica it helps keep it in suspension and avoid clumping– [Visual Thinker] found it helped him a good deal. Being flat plates of reflective material, the mica flakes catch the light and sparkle beautifully– and since they align with the fluid shear, they show you exactly what’s going on in your ‘simulation’.

[Visual Thinker] isn’t starting with serious simulations; the first thing he tries is essentially a toy that lets him see fluid flow around a Benchy by sticking magnets in it and using it to move a cross-section of its hull though a thin layer of fluid sandwitched betwixt pieces of laser-cut acrylic. We don’t call it a toy to disparage it, though– we totally want one. [Visual] mentions the idea of a coffee table combining the concept with the kind of underslung mechanism we see in sand drawing tables, which sounds dangerously hypnotic. If any of you build one, please try and tear your eyes away long enough to let us know.

He has another beautiful piece that make the video worth watching: a wind-tunnel, again made of laser-cut acrylic and printed parts. With careful consideration of the scale and flow speeds, that one might actually prove useful– and even if it doesn’t, it’s pretty enough that it doesn’t really matter. Beauty has its own utility sometimes.

Most wind tunnels we see around here use actual wind, but rheoscopic fluid was invented for this sort of thing, even if it does make for pretty baubles.

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Amiga-Inspired AROS Goes Bare Metal On Raspberry Pi

August 23, 2026 by 14 Comments

There’s no actual data, but if we had to guess the least-favourite Disney movie of former Amiga owners would have to be Frozen, because none of them will ever be able to “Let it Go”. The Amiga-derived AROS Research Operating System has just been ported to boot bare-metal on the Raspberry Pi, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Yes, there’s a 64-bit Amiga-compatible OS that runs on ARM. It truly is a time of wonders.

AROS has already been ported to a number of platforms. Besides x86, there’s a PPC port that provided a lot of code to the MorphOS, which you can read about here, and a back-port that brings AROS back to original Amiga 68k hardware. There is even a build for RISC V.

AROS developers are making sure that Amiga legacy isn’t stuck on any given hardware, so they never have to let it go. So while not totally out of left field, this development is “pretty nifty” both in that it gives another ultralight operating system for the Pi, with boot times to rival RiscOS, and another platform for ex-Amiga users to play with that isn’t 40 years old. Previously if you wanted to run AROS on a Pi it was virtualized in Linux, making it similar to all other Amiga emulators.

While some software has been recompiled for ARM, the available software isn’t as full-featured as x86, but that’s almost certain to change as time goes on. It’s early days yet and this build is very much a work in progress. Likewise we expect support for other Pi boards to expand, as while right now the target is the Pi3, the forum threads include discussion of the Pi4 and even Zero2W.

You can check the port out in action in a video by [Dan Wood] embedded below, sent to us by tipster [Stephen Walters]. Thanks [Stephen]!

We have featured AROS once before, thought it’s been a while.

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Bluetooth Shock Collar Keeps Wearer On Task

August 23, 2026 by 60 Comments

Like a lot of us [Liam Kloppers] had a problem with doomscrolling. Unwilling to go cold-turkey because he does find some utility in social media. He tried a number of things before deciding to say “Screw it” and just go full Pavlov on himself with some old-fashioned classical conditioning. Who needs willpower when you have electric shocks to dissuade you?

The key here was finding an electric-shock dog collar that could be controlled via a smartphone application, which meant he could reverse-engineer its Bluetooth protocol and get it linked up to his own software. The initial implementation ties his quick-and-dirty Python control program with a web server living on his laptop, which he’s configured MacroDroid to call on when his personal criterion for ‘doomscrolling’ is met.

With the shock collar wrapped around his leg, [Liam] was ready to test. It turns out dogs are a lot tougher than people, because even when set to a low level, the shock from the device made him toss his phone across the room and had him hesitant to even pick it up again.

Since he couldn’t bring himself to put the shock collar back onto his leg, he’s now thinking of an audible alarm, something we’ve seen work before. If you’re as unhappy with your habits as [Liam], perhaps consider a device like Commodore’s social-media-free phone before resorting to self-electrocution.