3D Printing A Big LEGO Christmas Tree

December 20, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

LEGO make lots of neat floral arrangements these days, and even little Christmas trees, too. While they’re fun to build out of tiny little blocks, they’re a little small for use as your main Christmas tree. Sadly, a bigger version simply doesn’t exist in the LEGO catalog, so if that’s your desire, you’ll have to build your own—as [Ruth] and [Ellis] did!

The concept behind the build is as you’d expect. The duo effectively just 3D printed giant versions of LEGO pieces, with which they then assembled a large Christmas tree. It sounds very straightforward, but scaling an existing LEGO design up by six times tends to come with some complications. A tactical decision was made early on to ease proceedings—the original LEGO tree had a large brown base that would take lots of printing. This was eliminated in the hopes that it would speed the build significantly. The long plastic shafts that supported the original design were also replaced with steel shafts since printing them would have been incredibly difficult to do well.

The rest of the video demonstrates the huge amount of work that went into actually 3D printing and assembling this thing. It’s pretty great to watch, and you’ll learn a lot along the way.

We’ve seen other creators try similar projects, where they 3D print their own building blocks from scratch. It normally turns out much harder than expected! No surprise when you think about all the engineering that went into perfecting LEGO all those years ago.

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Making A Mechanical Watch From Scratch Is Fine Work

December 20, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 7 Comments

There are plenty of hard jobs out there, like founding your country’s nuclear program, or changing the timing chain on a BMW diesel. Making your own mechanical watch from scratch falls under that umbrella, too. And yet, [John Raffaelli] did just that, and prevailed!

Only a handful of components were purchased—[John] grabbed jewels, sapphire crystals, the strap, and the hairspring and mainspring off the shelf. Everything else, he made himself, using a fine touch, a sharp eye, and some deft work on his machine tools. If you’ve never worked at this scale before, it’s astounding to see—[John] steps through how he produced tiny pinions and balance wheels that exist at sub-fingertip scale. Even just assembling something this tiny would be a challenge, but [John] was able to craft it all from scratch and put it together into a functioning timepiece when he was done.

The final piece doesn’t just look great—we’re told it keeps good time as well. People like [John] don’t come along every day, though we do have one similar story in our deep archives from well over a decade ago. If you’re cooking up your own bespoke time pieces in your home workshop, don’t hesitate to drop your story on the tipsline!

Building A Diet Coke Button

December 20, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 53 Comments

[mars91] had an interesting problem to solve—his girlfriend often requested Diet Coke, but yelling for one across the apartment was frustrating and impractical. A dedicated Diet Coke button seemed like the perfect solution, so that’s precisely what he built.

The Diet Coke Button is a relatively simple device. A small silver push-button activates an Adafruit Feather M0 to send out a signal via its RFM95 LoRa radio. That signal is picked up by the receiver device, which runs on an ESP32. It’s got an RFM95 LoRa module, which receives signals from the button and sounds an alarm to indicate the request for a Diet Coke. The ESP32 also hosts a basic website which allows Diet Coke requests to be submitted via the web, as well as general submissions of a textual nature. The latter are displayed on a small OLED display. If you’re feeling bold, you can even set up the ESP32 to be accessible from the outside Internet, with [mars91] explaining how to do so using a Cloudflare tunnel for your own protection.

The only problem is that delivering the Diet Coke is still something you have to do by hand. Perhaps a future upgrade would involve some kind of small apartment-spanning railway for the delivery of ice-cold cans to designated stations.

It’s a unique project, and one that recalls us of an interesting talk about a different type of call button.

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Embossing Leather With A Pipe Bender And 3D Printed Tooling

December 20, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 12 Comments

Embossed leather belts can be deliciously stylish. However, the tooling for making these fashionable items is not always easy to come by, and it rarely comes cheap. What do we do when a tool is expensive and obscure? We 3D print our own, as [Myth Impressions] demonstrates.

The build is based around a Harbor Freight pipe bender. However, instead of the usual metal tooling, it’s been refitted with a printed embossing ring specifically designed for imprinting leather. The tool features raised ridges in an attractive pattern, and the pipe bender merely serves as a straightforward device for rolling the plastic tooling over a leather belt blank. Once cranked through the machine, the leather belt comes out embossed with a beautiful design.

It’s a neat project, and the 3D printed tooling works surprisingly well. The key is that leather is relatively soft, so it’s possible to use plastic tools quite effectively. With that said, you can even form steel with printed tooling if you use the right techniques.

We’ve seen some other neat leatherworking hacks before, like this nicely-modified Singer sewing machine.

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Subchannel Stations: The Radio Broadcasts You Didn’t Know Were There

December 20, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 31 Comments

Analog radio broadcasts are pretty simple, right? Tune into a given frequency on the AM or FM bands, and what you hear is what you get. Or at least, that used to be the way, before smart engineers started figuring out all kinds of sneaky ways for extra signals to hop on to mainstream broadcasts.

Subcarrier radio once felt like the secret backchannel of the airwaves. Long before Wi-Fi, streaming, and digital multiplexing, these hidden signals beamed anything from elevator music and stock tickers to specialized content for medical professionals. Tuning into your favorite FM stations, you’d never notice them—unless you had the right hardware and a bit of know-how.

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Multimeter Gets Socket Upgrade To Use Nicer Probes

December 20, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 11 Comments

[Piffpaffpoltrie] had a problem. They found the InLine VA40R to be a perfectly usable multimeter, except for a couple of flaws. Most glaring among these were the tiny sockets for the test probes. These proved incompatible with the probes they preferred to use, so naturally, something had to be done.

The desire was to see the multimeter work with [Piffpaffpoltrie]’s connector of choice: the 4 mm Multi Contact banana plug from Stäubli. Swiss-made, gold-plated, and highly reliable, nothing else would do. The original sockets on the multimeter were simply too small to properly accept these, so to make them work, they were machined down, drilled, tapped, and then fitted with a short M3 screw which was then soldered in place. This short length of thread then allowed the new sockets to bolt right into the PCB in place of the original sockets.

Ultimately, many would just buy a new multimeter. This hack is a fiddly and time-consuming one, but it’s kind of neat to see someone go to such lengths to customize their tools to their own satisfaction.

We don’t see a lot of multimeter hacks, because these tools usually get all the necessary features from the manufacturer. Still, the handful we’ve featured have proven most interesting. If you’re tinkering away at customizing your own test gear, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Old BBC Micro Gets Some Disk Help From A Raspberry Pi

December 19, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 15 Comments

[Peter Mount] had a simple problem. He’d treated himself to a retro purchase in the form of a BBC Master 128—a faster sequel to the BBC Micro Model B. The only problem was he needed a way to get software on to it. Cue a creative hack using a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

When [Peter] received the machine, it already had a GoTek floppy emulator, which pulled disk images off a USB drive. However, he wanted an easier and quicker way to get disk images to and from the machine for development purposes. Swapping the USB drive to and from another machine seemed too tedious.

Instead, he decided to swap in a Pi Zero W for this purpose, setting it up to emulate a flash drive by following instructions from MagPi Magazine. This would allow him to use the SCP tool to copy disk images over to the Pi Zero W via its WiFi connection. Basically, the Pi Zero W was acting as a wirelessly-updated storage device hooked up to the GoTek floppy emulator.

It’s a nifty way of doing things. [Peter] could have set about creating his own floppy emulator from scratch with wireless capability included. However, there was no need. He just needed a wirelessly-accessible USB drive, and the Pi Zero W was more than happy to act in that role.

The BBC Micro is a beloved machine of many in the British Isles, and it had rather an extended family. If you’ve pulled off your own nifty hack on this classic machine, be sure to hit us up on the tipsline!