Have You Ever Used A Tick Stick?

February 28, 2026 by Tyler August 20 Comments

Picture this: you have an irregular opening you need to fabricate a piece to fill. Maybe it’s the stonework of a fireplace; maybe it’s the curved bulkhead of a ship. How do you get that shape? The most “Hackaday” answer would be to 3D scan the area, create a CAD model based on the point cloud, and route the shape with CNC. Of course, none of those were options for the entirety of human history. So how do you do it if you don’t have such high-tech toys? With a stick, as [Essential Craftsman] takes great pains to show us in the video below.

It’s not just any stick, of course. Call it a “tick stick”, a “speil stick”, or a “joggle stick” — whatever you call it, it’s just an irregularly shaped piece of wood. The irregular shape is key to the whole process. How you use it is simple: get some kind of storyboard — cardboard, MDF, whatever — that fits inside your irregular void. Thanks to the magic of the stick, it need not fit flush to the edges of the hole. You put the tick stick on the storyboard, press the pointy end against a reference point on the side of the hole, and trace the stick. The irregular shape means you’re going to be able to get that reference point back exactly later. Number the outline you just made, and rinse and repeat until you’ve got a single-plane “point cloud” made of tick stick outlines.

Your storyboard is probably going to look mighty confusing, but that’s what the numbers are for. Bring your storyboard and your tick stick onto the workbench and whatever you want to cut out– plywood, cardboard, 1/4″ steel armor plate, you name it–and simply repeat the process. Put the tick stick inside outline #1 and mark where the pointy end lands on the material. Then do it again for the other outlines, reproducing the points you measured on the original piece. After that, it’s just a game of ‘connect the dots’ and cutting with whatever methodology works for your substrate. A sharp knife will work for cardboard, but you’ll probably want something more substantial for steel plate.

It’s not often you’re going to need the tick stick– the [Craftsman] reports only needing it a few times over the course of a decades-long career, but when you need it, there’s not much else that will do the job. Well, unless you have a 3D scanner handy, that is. Continue reading “Have You Ever Used A Tick Stick?” →

The Only Snail You Want In Your Garden Is A Seed-Starting Hack

February 28, 2026 by Tyler August 11 Comments

As temperatures warm up in the Northern Hemisphere, one’s mind naturally turns to the outdoors and the garden — even if some of our gardens are still snow-covered. One secret to good gardening is that many of the plants we love take too long to grow if started from seed outside, at least in relatively temperate climes. There are a myriad of ways to grow seedlings indoors, and this new hack highlighted by [GrowVeg] looks like a great way to get started.

The idea apparently comes from the seedier side of Instagram, where [Farida Sober] has been popularizing it as a “seed snail”, a name they seem to have coined. The technique is very simple: take a sheet of something cheap that won’t disintegrate when moist like bubble wrap or cardboard, layer it with soil — up to 5 cm depending on your seed size — and you roll the whole thing up like a piece of sushi to produce the spiral shape that gives the hack its name. With a piece of tape to hold the roll, it’s just a matter of planting your seeds according to the packet directions. If that’s clear as mud, check out the video embedded below.

Once the seedlings have grown, it looks like it will be very easy to unroll the spiral and pluck them out to plant in the ground or bigger pots without overly traumatizing their roots, like we always do starting in flats. If it weren’t for those delicate roots, it certainly looks like the snail might save some space compared to, say, peat pots. Just remember that starting under the proper LEDs can make a huge difference to how quickly your seeds grow. No dirt? No problem — once sprouted, your plants can be made to grow hydroponically. For the really adventurous, there’s even aeroponics.

Continue reading “The Only Snail You Want In Your Garden Is A Seed-Starting Hack” →

NaCl Casting Technique Really Earns Its Salt

February 28, 2026 by Tyler August 18 Comments

Sodium Chloride has a melting point of 801 C (1,474 F), putting it comfortably between commonly-cast materials like aluminum and bronze. Which led to [Robinson Foundry] asking the question: can you cast salt like a metal? The answer, surprisingly, was yes!

[Robinson] tries casting the salt with two different methods: like it was glass, and like it was metal. In the glass-like casting, he packs a ceramic mold with salt and tosses it into an electric kiln, there to melt and very slowly cool. In metal-like casting, he just tosses salt into a crucible and melts it in the same beer-can kiln we saw when we featured his lost-pla casting a while back. The molten salt is poured very carefully into sand casting molds. If you’re familiar with the technique, you can skip to about 5:20 when he does the reveal.

As it turns out, the sand casting works out much better. While the glass-style casting in the electric kiln grew much larger crystals and so is more translucent, it’s also stuck completely inside the porous ceramic. Perhaps the ceramic would need glazed to pull off that technique?

On the other hand, the sand reacts with the salt in some way– molten salt isn’t exactly a noble gas, after all–to create a lovely gunmetal finish to the parts. They almost look like metal, though the brittleness gives away the game when he opens the mold to show a dagger in several pieces. For the decorative busts and megalodon teeth in the test, though, it is a great success.

Now, we’re not going to say this video came about because of high metal prices, or comment on what sort of trade policies might be driving up the price of metals like aluminum in the USA, but we do think this a great hack. While salt-based castings are obviously going to have very different physical properties than metal, for decorative work, it creates a lovely finish out of a material that’s cheap as dirt. Hopefully he comes back to the glass-style casting; we would not want to trust that black coating around food, and a salt crystal salt shaker sounds too good to pass up.

The only times we’ve seen molten salt around here is in nuclear reactors, and in homemade batteries, though that first one obviously wasn’t table salt.

Continue reading “NaCl Casting Technique Really Earns Its Salt” →

The S2000 at a much lower altitude than 2000 m.

Wind Power Is Taking Off In China– All The Way To 2000 M AGL

February 26, 2026 by Tyler August 56 Comments

2000 m above ground level (AGL), winds are stronger and much, much more consistent than they are at surface. Even if the Earth were a perfect sphere, there’d be a sluggish boundry layer at the surface, but since it’s got all these interesting bumps and bits and bobs, it’s not just sluggish but horribly turbulent, too. Getting above that, as much as possible, is why wind turbines are on big towers. Rather than build really big tower, Beijing Lanyi Yunchuan Energy Technology Co. has gone for a more ambitious approach: an aerostat to take power from the steady winds found at high altitude. Ambitiously called the Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System (SAWES), the megawatt-scale prototype has recently begun feeding into the grid in Yibin, Sichuan Province.

The name might be a bit ambitious, since its 2000 m test flight is only one tenth of the way to the stratosphere, but Yibin isn’t a bad choice for testing: as it is well inland, the S2000 prototype won’t have to contend with typhoons or other ocean storms. The prototype is arguably as ambitious as the name: its 12 flying turbines have a peak capacity of three megawatts. True, there are larger turbines in wind farms right now, but at 60 m in length and 40 m in diameter, the S2000 has a lot of room to grow before hitting any kind of limit or even record for aerostats. We’re particularly interested in the double-hull construction– it would seem the ring of the outer gas bag would do a good job funneling and accelerating air into those turbines, but we’d love to see some wind tunnel testing or even CFD renderings of what’s going on in there.

A rear view shows the 12 turbines inside the double hull. It should guide air into the gap, but we wonder how much turbulence the trusses in there are making.

During its first test flight in January 2026, the system generated generated 385 kilowatt-hours of electricity over the course of 30 minutes. That means it averaged about 25% capacity for the test, which is a good safe start. Doubtless the engineers have a full suite of test flights planned to demonstrate the endurance and power production capabilities of this prototype. Longer flights at higher capacity may have already happened by the time you read this.

Flying wind turbines isn’t a new idea by any means; a few years ago we featured this homemade kite generator, and the pros have been in on it too. Using helium instead represents an interesting design choice–on the plus side, its probably easier to control, and obviously allowing large structures, but the downside is the added cost of the gas. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

We’re willing to bet it catches on faster than harvesting wind energy from trees.

All images from Beijing Lanyi Yunchuan Energy Technology Co., Ltd.

A rooftop array of solar thermal collectors

The MOST Effective Thermal Mass Works Like A Sunburn

February 25, 2026 by Tyler August 13 Comments

Way, way back in the days when men wore beards and wide-lapelled suits in exotic colors, only NASA had access to photovoltaics and ‘solar’ meant solar thermal. In those days of appropriate technology, it was thought that the ultimate in thermal mass was a phase-change material– a salt or wax that in melting and re-freezing could hold far more heat than plain rock or water, which were more often used. Well, now that it’s the 21st century, we’ve got something even better. As Ars Technica reports about a recent paper in Science Magazine, Molecular Solar Thermal (MOST) energy storage can blow that old stuff right out of the water.

Molecular energy storage? That’s where the sunburn comes in. A sunburn occurs because proteins in your skin are denatured– kinked, twisted, and knocked out of shape– by ultraviolet light. The researchers realized that those kinky proteins are pretty energetic: like a spring, they’re storing energy in their distorted structure. Even better, certain chemicals, like the pyrimidone in the study, don’t ‘relax’ the way a phase change material does. It’s not a matter of warming up and giving up the energy stored in the molecular structure when cooling down– the energy needs coaxed out, in this case by an acidic solution.

That poses problems for a closed-loop system, since you’d be continuously diluting the pyrimidone with heat-releasing acid and neutralizing base. On the other hand, 1.65 MJ/kg of energy storage is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re collecting it with nothing more technically advanced than a fluid running through clear tubing. Conveniently enough, researchers found a way to make this stuff liquid at room temperature.

Comparing the heat in this MOST storage material to electrical potential in a battery is a case of apples and oranges, but in terms of pure energy density the pyrimidone cooked up for the paper is in the same range as Li-Ion batteries. There is some self-discharge, in that the altered “dewar” state of the pyrimidone decays naturally, but with a half-life of upto 481 days, you could imagine storing up a tankful UV-altered pyrimidone all year round to provide your winter’s heat.

There’s not much power making it to surface in the UV, but lower energy photons cannot effect the transition.

It’s not perfect. Right now you get about 20 “charge cycles” before the molecules break down, but then, if you’re using this for seasonal load-spreading, a two-decade service life is nothing to shake a stick at. It’s only collecting energy from the UV range of the spectrum, which is a tiny fraction of the energy from our sun. The quantum efficiency of the molecule is rather poor as well– it takes a lot of photons to get a dewar transition.

With solar photovaltaics being as cheap as they are, thermal builds are few and far between– even solar water heaters are powered by PV these days. Of course if you’re somewhere that doesn’t get much sun, you could always go for wind power instead.

Thanks to [zit] for the tip! If you’ve seen a bright idea in the wild, or have one yourself, our tips line is open rain or shine.

The metal comm badge and M5stick on an LCARS mousepad

Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge

February 25, 2026 by Tyler August 38 Comments

One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation he uses to control his smart home.

This hack is as slick as it is simple. The shiny comm badge is actually metal, purchased from an online vendor that surely pays all appropriate license fees to Paramount. It was designed for magnetic mounting, and you know what else has a magnet to stick it to things? The M5StickC PLUS2, a handy ESP32 dev kit. Since the M5Stick is worn under the shirt, its magnet attached to the comm badge, some features (like the touchscreen) are unused, but that’s okay. You use what you have, and we can’t argue with how easy the hardware side of this hack comes together.

[Spanner] reports that taps to the comm badge are easily detected by the onboard accelerometer, and that the M5Stick’s microphone has no trouble picking up his voice. If the voice recordings are slightly muffled by his shirt, the Groq transcription API being used doesn’t seem to notice. From Groq, those transcriptions are sent to [Spanner]’s Home Assistant as natural language commands. Code for the com-badge portion is available via GitHub; presumably if you’re the kind of person who wants this, you either have HA set up or can figure out how.

It seems worth pointing out that the computer in Star Trek: TNG did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command.

This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January. Continue reading “Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge” →

What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance

February 25, 2026 by Tyler August 31 Comments

It’s a blustery January day outside Lakehurst, New Jersey. The East Coast of North America is experiencing its worst weather in decades, and all civilian aircraft have been grounded the past four days, from Florida to Maine. For the past two days, that order has included military aircraft, including those certified “all weather” – with one notable exception. A few miles offshore, rocking and bucking in the gales, a U.S. Navy airship braves the storm. Sleet pelts the plexiglass windscreen and ice sloughs off the gasbag in great sheets as the storm rages on, and churning airscrews keep the airship on station.

If you know history you might be a bit confused: the rigid airship USS Akron was lost off the coast of New Jersey, but in April, not January. Before jumping into the comments with your corrections, note the story I’ve begun is set not in 1933, but in 1957, a full generation later.

The airship caught in the storm is no experimental Zeppelin, but an N-class blimp, the workhorse of the cold-war fleet. Yes, there was a cold war fleet of airships; we’ll get to why further on. The most important distinction is that unlike the last flight of the Akron, this story doesn’t end in tragedy, but in triumph. Tasked to demonstrate their readiness, five blimps from Lakehurst’s Airship Airborne Early-Warning Squadron 1 remained on station with no gaps in coverage for the ten days from January 15th to 24th. The blimps were able to swap places, watch-on-watch, and provide continuous coverage, in spite of weather conditions that included 60 knot winds and grounded literally every other aircraft in existence at that time. Continue reading “What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance” →