Once upon a time, countries protected their domestic industries with tariffs on imports. This gave the home side a price advantage over companies operating overseas, but the practice has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the past few decades.
Buying a desk is all well and good, but [WoodCraftly] found that the options they found online were too pricey for what was being offered. Buying the table frame from scratch was much cheaper, and just required crafting a top to match. That provided the opportunity to create this beautiful herringbone-finish desk created with some simple woodworking techniques.
Plenty of clamps were needed for the glue-up.
The build starts with a motorized corner desk frame that can be bought from amazon for just $550. To create the chevron-finish top, [WoodCraftly] grabbed some plywood sheets, and cut them into a series of 1-inch strips. These were then flipped 90-degrees onto their side, and glued together to create a panel that showed off the individual layers of the plywood. This panel was then cut into 3-inch wide strips at a 45-degree angle, and these strips were then placed back to back and once again glued up to create the attractive herringbone design.
From there, it was a simple matter of gluing up panels into the L-shape required for the desk, adding mounting holes, and rounding off the corners for a nice finish. The desk was also given a thick coat of epoxy on the bottom which soaked into the wood and helped give the desk some strength, and a top coat that was sanded back to a natural-look finish.
Overall, the final desk is just the product of some smart cutting and gluing steps combined to create a fun pattern in the end. It’s always fun to build your own furniture because you can express your own style in your creations. Video after the break.
When it comes to networking these days, the vast majority of our devices are connected wirelessly. Beyond that, we’re all familiar with the Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables that form the high-capacity Ethernet networks in our homes, schools, and offices.
It’s only if you go back to the very dawn of Ethernet that coaxial cables are relevant… right? Wrong! MoCA networking is all about coaxial cables, designed to hook up devices over cable TV infrastructure!
Energy prices have been in the news more often than not lately, as has war. The two typically go together, as conflicts tend to impact on the supply and trade of fossil fuels.
Traditionally, most Amigas were intended to boot from a floppy disk. . An Amiga can readily make its own boot floppy, but only once it’s already booted up. If you don’t have a floppy ready to go, you’re out of luck, as PCs can’t readily make them for Amigas. [Roc] whipped up the amigaXfer bootstrapping method to solve this very problem.
Shorting a couple of pins together can unlock a serial debug mode that can be used for bootstrapping the machine.
Available on Github, the amigaXfer tool is able to perform several tasks with an Amiga via its serial port. The Amiga must first be turned on while plugged into another computer running amigaXfer via serial connection. When the Workbench floppy prompt comes up, the CrashEntry feature on amigaXfer should be triggered, and the BERR and GND pins on the Amiga’s 68000 CPU should be connected just for a split second, triggering the Amiga to go into a special serial debug mode. This enables amigaXfer to take control, allowing a disk to be formatted and written with a debug bootblock, and this disk can then be used to boot the Amiga without the need for the hack.
It’s a nifty way to get your Amiga up and running if you’ve just bought it off eBay and it didn’t come with any disks. From here, you can use amigaXfer to load other programs onto the Amiga via the same serial cable you used for the bootstrapping process, too. The hack isn’t limited to just the Amiga 500, either. It should work on a range of machines, including AmigaOS versions 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x.
ePaper pricetags are becoming popular parts in the hacker community as a cheap way into tinkering with the technology. [Aaron Christophel] got his hands on a 4.4″ model with red, black, and white colors, and set about programming an ESP32 to drive the price tag instead.
The protocol the display uses was reverse-engineered by prompting the display to update via RF and monitoring the signals sent to between microcontrollers on the display’s control board. Once the protocol was understood, one of the microcontrollers could then be removed and replaced with an ESP32 for direct control. Implementing this takes some disassembly and some delicate soldering, but it’s nothing that should scare off an experienced hacker.
With the right code flashed to the ESP32, as available on Github, it’s possible to run the display directly. The hacked code does a great job driving the display, showing crisp lines and clean colors that indicate the e-Paper display is running properly.
NASA’s Mars Rovers are robots that have inspired many budding engineers around the world. [Nikodem Bartnik] had a particular fondness for them himself, and set out to build a miniature version of his very own.
The Raspberry Pi Pico W is the brains of the operation, serving as both microcontroller and remote wireless link for control. The robot uses four mecanum wheels for locomotion, with each getting its own motor. This allows the robot to move in all directions simply by rotating the wheels in different configurations. On top, the rover sports a articulated robot arm controlled by servos, which allows it to pick things up and put them down. Plus, there’s an FPV camera on top that delivers a video feed so the robot can be driven remotely. This is achieved over WiFi, thanks to a bit of custom control code written in Python.
It’s a surprisingly capable bot on smooth surfaces, as the mecanum wheels allow strafing and other movements that regular wheels simply can’t do. It’s also fun having a bot that can interact with its environment, thanks to its motorized appendages.
