Author: Al Williams

4265 Articles

Citizen Science Is All Fun And Games

July 13, 2025 by 7 Comments

You are probably familiar with initiatives like Seti@Home, where you donate unused computer power to some science project that needs computer cycles. [Jeff Yoshimi] wants to borrow your most powerful computer: your brain. The reason: cancer research.

[Jeff’s] recent book, Gaming Cancer, has three examples: Eterna, Foldit, and Nanocrafter. All three make games out of creating biological molecules. With Foldit, you create proteins in a bonsai-like fashion. EteRNA is more like Sudoku for RNA. Nanocrafter used DNA strands as puzzle pieces, although it is no longer operational. Their website, amusingly, looks like it was taken over by a slot machine site and a probably AI-generated text tries to convince you that slot machines are much like fusing DNA strands.

What can these projects do? Eterna’s open vaccine challenge used gameplay to help design RNA molecules for vaccines that don’t require ultra-cold storage, and the results drove improvements in real-life vaccines.

There have been several science fiction stories that center on the idea that a game of some sort might be an entrance test to a super-secret organization (The Last Starfighter or Stargate: Universe, for example). Maybe a future science game will trigger scholarship or job offers. It could happen.

We like citizen science. Zooniverse does a good job of making it fun, but maybe not to the level of a game. You can make contributions in space, or even right here on Earth.

Die Cut Machine Makes Portable Metal Cuts

July 12, 2025 by 11 Comments

[Kevin Cheung] likes to upcycle old soda cans into — well — things. The metal is thin enough to cut by hand, but he’d started using a manual die-cutting machine, and it worked well. The problem? The machine was big and heavy, weighing well over 30 pounds. The solution was to get a lightweight die cutter. It worked better than expected, but [Kevin] really wanted it to be more portable, so he stripped it down and built the mechanism into a new case.

The video below isn’t quite a “how-to” video, but if you like watching someone handcraft something with a lot of skill, you’ll enjoy it. It also might give you ideas about how you could use one of these cutters, even if you don’t bother building a nice case for it.

We’ve seen cutters that use computer control, but they aren’t inexpensive. They will, however, make the same kind of cuts. But these manual die cutters are very inexpensive, and you simply have to find a way to make the die. You can easily make them for cutting paper, and, with the right materials, you can make the kind you see in [Kevin]’s video, too.

We have to admit, carrying the gizmo into a public place seemed to make a lot of people happy. So maybe portability is a good goal. But either way, you can have some fun with a machine like that.

If you want to cut paper, these work great. If you want paper to make the cuts, we have just the thing for you.

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The 555 Writ Large

July 12, 2025 by 25 Comments

Few electronic ICs can claim to be as famous as the 555 timer. Maybe part of the reason is that the IC doesn’t have a specific function. It has a lot of building blocks that you can use to create timers and many other kinds of circuits. Now [Stoppi] has decided to make a 555 out of discrete components. The resulting IC, as you can see in the video below, won’t win any prizes for diminutive size. But it is fun to see all the circuitry laid bare at the macro level.

The reality is that the chip doesn’t have much inside. There’s a transistor to discharge the external capacitor, a current source, two comparators, and an RS flip flop. All the hundreds of circuits you can build with those rely on how they are wired together along with a few external components.

Even on [stoppi]’s page, you can find how to wire the device to be monostable, stable, or generate tones. You can also find circuits to do several time delays. A versatile chip now blown up as big as you are likely to ever need it.

Practical? Probably not, unless you need a 555 with some kind of custom modification. But for understanding the 555, there’s not much like it.

We’ve seen macro 555s before. It is amazing how many things you can do with a 555. Seriously.

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DIY X-Rays Made Easy

July 11, 2025 by 32 Comments

Who doesn’t want an X-ray machine? But you need a special tube and super high voltage, right? [Project 326] says no, and produces a USB-powered device that uses a tube you can pick up two for a dollar. You might guess the machine doesn’t generate X-rays with a lot of energy, and you’d be right. But you can make up for it with long exposure times. Check out the video below, with host [Posh Arthur].

The video admits there are limitations, of course. We were somewhat sad that [Project 326] elected not to share the exact parts list and 3D printed files because in the unlikely event someone managed to hurt themselves with it, there could be a hysterical reaction. We agreed, though, that if you are smart enough to handle this, you’ll be smart enough to figure out how to duplicate it — it doesn’t look that hard, and there are plenty of not-so-subtle clues in the video.

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Double Your Printing Fun With Dual-Light 3D Printing

July 10, 2025 by 9 Comments

Using light to 3D print liquid resins is hardly a new idea. But researchers at the University of Texas at Austin want to double down on the idea. Specifically, they use a resin with different physical properties when cured using different wavelengths of light.

Natural constructions like bone and cartilage inspired the researchers. With violet light, the resin cures into a rubbery material. However, ultraviolet light produces a rigid cured material. Many of their test prints are bio-analogs, unsurprisingly.

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Embedded USB Debug For Snapdragon

July 10, 2025 by 5 Comments

According to [Casey Connolly], Qualcomm’s release of how to interact with their embedded USB debugging (EUD) is a big deal. If you haven’t heard of it, nearly all Qualcomm SoCs made since 2018 have a built-in debugger that connects to the onboard USB port. The details vary by chip, but you write to some registers and start up the USB phy. This gives you an oddball USB interface that looks like a seven-port hub with a single device “EUD control interface.”

So what do you do with that? You send a few USB commands, and you’ll get a second device. This one connects to an SWD interface. Of course, we have plenty of tools to debug using SWD.

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Voltage Divider? Filter? It’s Both!

July 10, 2025 by 3 Comments

When we do textbook analysis, we tend to ignore the real-world concerns for the sake of learning. So, a typical theoretical voltage divider is simply two resistors. But if you examine a low-pass RC filter, you’ll see a single resistor and a capacitor. What if you combine them? That’s what [Old Hack EE] did in a recent video, and you can check it out below.

It helps if you are familiar with Thevenin equivalents and, of course, Ohm’s Law. There’s also a bit of algebra, but nothing too complicated. The example design has a lossy filter at 100 Hz.

Of course, RC filters are easy to understand if you think of them as voltage dividers with a frequency-variable resistance, which is what the math is basically saying. The load impedance, in this case, is R2 in parallel with Xc at a given frequency.

He mentions that you might find a circuit like this in a power supply. However, it is also common to see this circuit wherever a divider drives a load with capacitance or even parasitic capacitance in cables or circuit boards.

We’ve discussed Thevenin equivalence modeling before. If you want really good filters, you are probably going to need op-amps.

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