Full Scale Styrofoam DeLorean Finally Takes Flight

September 22, 2025 by Tyler August 13 Comments

It’s 2025 and we still don’t have flying cars — but we’ve got this full-scale flying DeLorean prop from [Brian Brocken], and that’s almost as good. It’s airborne and on camera in the video embedded below.

We’ve written about this project before; first about the mega-sized CNC router [Brian] used to carve the DeLorean body out of Styrofoam panels, and an update last year that showed the aluminum frame and motorized louvers and doors.

Well, the iconic gull-wing doors are still there, and still motorized, and they’ve been joined by a tire-tilting mechanism for a Back To The Future film-accurate flight mode. With the wheels down, the prop can use them to steer and drive, looking for all the world like an all-white DMC-12.

The aluminum frame we covered before is no longer in the picture, though. It’s been replaced by a lighter, stiffer version made from carbon fibre. It’s still a ladder frame, but now with carbon fiber tubes and “forged” carbon fiber corners made of tow and resin packed in 3D printed molds. There’s been a tonne of work documented on the build log since we last covered this project, so be sure to check it out for all the details.

Even in unpainted white Styrofoam, it’s surreal to see this thing take off; it’s the ultimate in practical effects, and totally worth the wait. Honestly, with talent like [Brian] out there its a wonder anyone still bothers with CGI, economics aside.

Thanks to [Brian] for the tip! If you have a project you’ve hit a milestone with, we’d love to see it, even if it doesn’t trigger the 80s nostalgia gland we apparently all have embedded in our brains these days. Send us a tip!

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March To The Beat Of Your Own Piezoelectric Drum

September 20, 2025 by Tyler August 7 Comments

Drums! You hit them, and they vibrate. It’s kind of fun. Piezoelectric elements can create electric current when they vibrate. [Will Dana] put two and two together to try and charge his phone on his YouTube channel WillsBuilds embedded below.

It worked… about as well as you might expect. Which is to say: not very well. The random piezo elements [Will] glues to his drum almost certainly aren’t optimized for this use case. Adding weight helps, but it doesn’t look like a tuned system. Even if it was, piezoelectric generators aren’t terribly efficient by nature, and the (small) losses from the required bridge rectifiers aren’t helping. An energy-harvesting chip might have worked better, but it probably wouldn’t have worked well.

Since he cannot produce enough voltage in real time, [Will] opts to charge a capacitor bank that he can dump into the phone once it gets enough charge in it to register with the phone’s circuitry. It takes about 30 minutes drumming to charge the capacitors in parallel, before switching to series to get the voltage up to discharge. The capacitors drain in about a quarter second, probably to no measurable result– but the phone does read as “charging”, which was the goal.

Did it work? Technically, yes. The phone was “charging”. Is it practical? Certainly not. Is it a hack? Undeniably so.

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“Simplest” Oscilloscope Is A Cunning Vector Display

September 20, 2025 by Tyler August 18 Comments

Superlatives are tricky things. [mircemk]’s guide “How to make Simplest ever Oscilloscope Clock” falls into that category. It’s that word, simplest. Certainly, this is an oscilloscope clock, and a nice one. But is it simple?

There’s a nice oscilloscope circuit with a cute 2″ 5LO38I CRT and EF80 tubes for horizontal and vertical deflection that we’d say is pretty simple. (It’s based on an earlier DIY oscilloscope project [mircemk] did.) The bill of materials is remarkably sparse– but it’s modules that do it. One entry is a DC-DC step up supply to get the needed HV. Another is a LM317 to get 6.3 V to heat the tubes. The modules make for a very simple BOM, but on another level, there’s quite a bit of complex engineering in those little modules.

When we get to the “clock” part of the oscilloscope clock, that quandary goes into overdrive. There’s only one line on the BOM, so that’s very simple. On the other hand, it’s an ESP32. Depending on your perspective, that’s not simple at all. It’s a microcomputer, or at least something that can play at emulating one.

Oh, in the ways that matter to a maker — parts count, time, and effort, this oscilloscope clock is very simple. The fact that its actually a vector display for a powerful little micro just adds to the versatility of the build. We absolutely love it, to be honest. Still, the idea that you can have millions of transistors in a simple project — never mind the “simplest ever” — well, it just seems weird on some level when you think about it.

It all comes back to what counts as “simple”. If we’re taking lines on a BOM, arguably this would be even simpler if you used an existing oscilloscope.

Test Pattern Generator For SCART And RGB TVs

September 19, 2025 by Tyler August 3 Comments

CRTs don’t last forever, and neither do the electronics that drive them. When you have a screen starting to go wonky, then you need a way to troubleshoot which is at fault. A great tool for that is a pattern generator, but they’re not the easiest to come by these days. [baritonomarchetto] needed a pattern generator to help repair his favourite arcade machine, and decided to make his own DIY Portable RGB CRT Test Pattern Generator.

One of the test patterns available from the device. This TV appears to be in good working order.

While he does cite [Nicholas Murray]’s RP2040 test pattern generator as a starting point (which itself builds on the PicoVGA library once featured here), he couldn’t just build one. That worthy project only outputs VGA and because [baritonomarchetto] is in Europe, he needed a SCART connector. Since he’s working on arcade machines, he needed non-SCART RGB signals, too. The arcade signals need to be at higher voltages (TLL level) than the RGB signal you’d find in SCART and VGA.

The upshot is while he’s using [Nicholas]’s code for the RP2040, he’s rolled his own PCB, including a different resistor ladders to provide the correct voltages depending on if he’s dealing with a home TV or arcade CRT. To make life easier, the whole thing runs off a 9V battery.

If you’re wondering what the point of these test patterns is, check out this 1981-vintage pattern generator for some context from the era. If a digital replica doesn’t float your boat, it is possible to recreate the original analog circuitry that generated these patterns back when the CRT was king.

Dirty Pots, Meet Power Tools!

September 19, 2025 by Tyler August 26 Comments

Let’s face it, nobody likes scrubbing, but what option do you have? You can’t exactly break out the grinder to clean off the remains of last nights dinner… right? Well, maybe not a grinder, but thanks to this hack by [Markus Opitz], you can use an oscillating tool.

It’s a simple enough hack: [Markus] modeled the attachment for his Bosch oscillating tool in Tinkercad, and created a bracket to hold a large metal binder clip. The clip attaches with a screw, and can hold whatever scrubbing pad your carpel-tunnel afflicted hands can’t bear to hold on to. He’s using a self-cleaning stainless-steel sponge.

One nice touch is a pair of protective lips on the jaws of the metal clip, to keep it from accidentally scratching the delicate surface under care. Of course if you have a drill or a Dremel handy you can buy attachments for polishing disks of various grits, but what’s the fun in that? Doing the dishes with a hacked-together oscillating tool just somehow seems more fun. Plus this way you can’t accidentally produce an engine-turning pattern.

We don’t seem to have featured many hacks for these fun, buzzing, multi-purpose tools, so if you’ve got one send us a tip. We did feature an oscillating cutter for CNC once, but that was fully DIY.

Think You Need A New PC For Windows 11? Think Again

September 18, 2025 by Tyler August 25 Comments

As the sun sets on Windows 10 support, many venues online decry the tsunami of e-waste Windows 11’s nonsensical hardware requirements are expected to create. Still more will offer advice: which Linux distribution is best for your aging PC? [Sean] from Action Retro has an alternate solution: get a 20 year old Sun Workstation, and run Windows 11 on that.

The Workstation in question from 2005 is apparently among the first Sun made using AMD’s shiny new 64-bit Opteron processor. Since Windows has no legacy 32-bit support– something it shares with certain Linux distributions– this is amongst the oldest hardware that could conceivably install and run Redmond’s latest.

And it can! Not in unaltered form, of course– the real hack here is courtesy of [ntdevlabs], whose “Tiny11” project strips all the cruft from Windows 11, including its hardware compatibility checker. [ntdevlabs] has produced a Tiny11Builder script that is available on GitHub, but the specific version [Sean] used is available on Archive.org.

[Sean] needed the archived version of Tiny11 because Windows 11 builds newer than 22H2 use the POPCNT operation, which was not present in AMD’s first revision of the x86_64 instruction set. POPCNT is part of Intel’s SSE4 extension from 2007, a couple years after this workstation shipped.

If you’re sick of being told to switch to Linux, but can’t stomach staying with Windows either, maybe check out Haiku, which we reported as ready for daily driving early last year.

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Oil-Based Sprengel Pump Really Sucks

September 17, 2025 by Tyler August 21 Comments

Have you heard of the Sprengel pump? It’s how they drew hard vacuum back before mechanical pumps were perfected — the first light bulbs had their vacuums drawn with Sprengel pumps, for example. It worked by using droplets of a particular liquid to catch air particles, and push them out a narrow tube, thereby slowly evacuating a chamber. The catch is that that liquid used to be mercury, which isn’t something many of us have on hand in kilogram quantities anymore. [Gabriel Wolffe] had the brainwave that one might substitute modern vacuum pump oil for mercury, and built a pump to test that idea.

Even better, unlike the last (mercury-based) Sprengel pump we saw, [Gabriel] set up his build so that no glassblowing is required. Yes, yes, scientific glassblowing used to be an essential skill taught in every technical college in the world. Nowadays, we’re glad to have a design that lets us solder brass fittings together. Technically you still have to cut an eyedropper, but that’s as complex as the glasswork gets. Being able to circulate oil with a plastic tube and peristaltic pump is great, too.

If you try it, you need to spring for vacuum pump oil. This type of pump is limited in the vacuum it can draw by the vapor pressure of the fluid in use, and just any oil won’t do. Most have vapor pressures far in excess of anything useful. In the old days, only mercury would cut it, but modern chemistry has come up with very stable oils that will do nearly as well.

How well? [Gabriel] isn’t sure; he bottomed out his gauge at 30 inches of Mercury (102 kPa). It may not be any lower than that, but it’s fair to say the pump draws a healthy vacuum without any unhealthy liquid metals. Enough to brew up some tubes, perhaps.

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