PC Watercooling Uses Everything But CNC Machining

December 26, 2025 by No comments

Names and labels are difficult. Take this “3D Printed” water-cooling loop by [Visual Thinker] on YouTube. It undeniably uses 3D printing — but it also uses silicone casting and laser-cut acrylic, too. All of these are essential parts, yet only 3D printing gets top billing in his thumbnail. At least the version we saw, anyway; the A/B testing game YouTubers play means that may change.

Perhaps that’s simply due to the contrast with [Visual Thinker]’s last build, where the “distro plate” that acts to plumb most of the coolant was made of layers of CNC-routed acrylic, held water-tight with O-rings. Not wanting to wait for his next build to be fabricated, and not wanting to take up CNC machining himself, [Visual Thinker] fell back on tools many of us have and know: the 3D printer and laser cutter.

In this project, the end plates of the cooling loop are still clear acrylic, but he’s using a laser cutter to shape them. That means he cannot route out gaps for o-rings like in the last project, so that part gets 3D printed. Sort of. Not trusting the seal a 3D printed gasket would be able to give him, [Visual Thinker] opts to use his 3D printer to create a mold to cast a seal in silicone. Or perhaps “injection-mold” would be a better word than cast; he’s using a large syringe to force the degassed silicone into the mold. The end part is three pieces: a 3D printed spacer holding two acrylic plates, with the cast-silicone gasket keeping the whole thing water-tight to at least 50 psi, 10x the operating pressure of his PC.

After that success, he tries replacing the printed spacer with acrylic for a more transparent look. In that version only temporary shims that are used to form the mold are 3D printed at all, and the rest is acrylic. Even if you’re not building a water-cooled art PC, it’s still a great technique to keep in your back pocket for fluid channeling.

In some ways, this technique is the exact opposite of the copper-pipe steampunk builds we’ve featured previously. Those were all about pretty plumbing, while with a distro plate you hardly need pipes at all. Like any water-cooled project, it’ll need a radiator, which could be a hack in and of itself.

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Cookie Launcher Makes You Catch Your Own Snack

December 25, 2025 by 2 Comments

Holiday cookies are a joy, and to make things a bit more fun, [The Skjegg] created the Cookie Launcher. At the touch of a button, a door opens and the tin launches a cookie (and perhaps a few crumbs) skyward. Catching it is up to the operator, but since the tin can hold up to 40 cookies at once (39 in a magazine and 1 in the launcher), there’s enough to get some practice in.

The design is a real thing of beauty, from the rotary cookie holder to the ejector. Individual cookies are held in a pan-style magazine that rotates until a tasty disk is lined up with the ejector. The red separators aren’t just for show, either. The little inward protrusion on each one interacts with an optical sensor to ensure the system always knows when things are lined up.

The launcher design is pretty neat, too. There’s a platform that uses two smooth bolts as guides, and elastic bands to store energy. A motor cranks it downward, where it locks into place. The rotary magazine then turns to line up a cookie, which gravity feeds into the launcher by rolling down an incline. When a cookie is in place, a door in the lid opens and the launcher platform releases, sending the cookie skyward.

The original concept for the Cookie Launcher involved voice activation, but training the voice module to trigger on custom Norwegian commands wasn’t very reliable. Luckily, a button is far more obedient. It may be a bit less magical to use, but in our opinion the physicality of a button push meshes perfectly well with the requirement to catch your own cookie.

You can get a good look at the operation and a detailed tour of the insides in the video, embedded below. Thanks to [Rohit] for sending in the tip!

If airborne cookies aren’t your bag, check out one a very different approach to hands-free cookie dispensing.

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Treating Functions As Vectors In Hilbert Space

December 25, 2025 by 25 Comments

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of mathematics is that it applies to literally everything, even things that do not exist in this Universe. In addition to this there are a number of alternative ways to represent reality, with Fourier space and its related transforms being one of the most well-known examples. An alternative to Euclidian vector space is called Hilbert space, as a real or complex inner product space, which is used in e.g. mathematical proofs. In relation to this, [Eli Bendersky] came up with the idea of treating programming language functions as vectors of a sort, so that linear algebra methods can be applied to them.

Of course, to get really nitpicky, by the time you take a function with its arguments and produce an output, it is no longer a vector, but a scalar of some description. Using real numbers as indices also somewhat defeats the whole point and claim of working in a vector space, never mind Hilbert space.

As with anything that touches upon mathematics there are sure to be many highly divisive views, so we’ll leave it at this and allow our esteemed readers to flex their intellectual muscles on this topic. Do you think that the claims made hold water? Does applying linear algebra to every day functions make sense in this manner, perhaps even hold some kind of benefit?

Redneck Spaceship From Trash

December 25, 2025 by 7 Comments

Facebook Marketplace provides you with a free grain silo, so what do you do with it? If you are [saveitforparts], you mix it with other materials and produce a retro-style rocket ship prop. Art project? Sure, we’ll call it that.

We have to admit, we also see rockets in everyday objects, and the silo does look the part. He also had some junk that looked like a nose cone, some tanks, and other assorted trash.

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FibreSeeker 3: Continuous Carbon Fiber Vs Chopped CF

December 25, 2025 by 7 Comments

Although you can purchase many types of FDM filaments containing ‘carbon fiber’ these days, they are in no way related to the carbon fiber (CF) composite materials used for rocket hulls and light-weight bicycles. This is because the latter use continuous fibers, often in weaved CF mats, whereas the FDM filaments just use small, chopped, fragments of CF. Obviously this will not result in the same outcome, which makes it interesting that a company called Fibre Seek is now running a KickStarter for a very affordable co-extrusion FDM printer that can add continuous CF to any part. They also sent a few test parts to [Dr. Igor Gaspar] for testing against regular FDM CF prints.

It should be noted here that continuous CF with FDM is not new, as Markforged already does something similar, though at a ‘Contact us for a price quote’ level. The advantage of the Fibre Seek solution is then the co-extrusion that would make printing with continuous CF much more flexible and affordable. Based on the (sponsored) [CNC Kitchen] video of a few weeks ago at a tradeshow, the FibreSeeker 3 printer is effectively a standard CoreXY FDM printer, with the special co-extrusion dual print head that allows for CF to be coated with the target thermoplastic before being printed as normal.

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MQTT Pager Build Is Bringing Beepers Back

December 25, 2025 by 19 Comments

Pagers were once a great way to get a message to someone out in public; they just had to be cool enough to have one. These days, they’re mostly the preserve of doctors and a few other niche operators. [Kyle Tryon] is bringing the beeper back, though, with a custom ESP32-based build.

The ESP32 is a great microcontroller for this kind of project, because it’s got WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity built right in. This let [Kyle] write some straightforward code so that it could receive alerts via MQTT. In particular, it’s set up to go off whenever there’s an app or service notification fired off by the Sentry platform. For [Kyle]’s line of work, it’s effectively an on-call beeper that calls them in when a system needs immediate attention. When it goes off, it plays the ringtone of your choice—with [Kyle] making it capable of playing tunes in Nokia’s old-school RTTTL music format.

The code was simple enough, and the assembly wasn’t much harder. By starting with an Adafruit ESP32 Reverse TFT Feather, the screen and buttons were all ready to go right out of the box. [Kyle] merely had to print up a rad translucent case on a resin printer to make it look like a sweet fashionable beeper from the 90s.

It’s a fun little project that should prove useful, while also being nicely reminiscent of a technology that has largely fallen by the wayside. Continue reading “MQTT Pager Build Is Bringing Beepers Back” →

Born To Burn: The Battle Born LFP Battery

December 25, 2025 by 37 Comments

Would you feel confident in buying US-made LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries? While the answer here is generally expected to be ‘yes’, especially compared to getting an unbranded LFP battery off eBay from a random seller, the outcome may not be that different. Case in point the 100 Ah, 12 VDC LFP Battle Born battery that [Will Prowse] took a look at to see why its positive terminal gets positively crispy.

Battle Born battery positive terminal. (Credit: Will Prowse, YouTube)
Battle Born battery positive terminal. (Credit: Will Prowse, YouTube)

Once the lid was cut off, it’s easy to see what the problem is: the positive terminal is only loosely attached to the bus bar, leading to extremely poor contact. It also appears that there’s a plastic spacer which has properly melted already in this well-used battery that [Will] obtained from a viewer.

This overheating issue with Battle Born batteries has been reported for years now, which makes it a great idea to take a good look at any Battle Born LFP batteries you may have kicking around, as they may be plagued by the same design flaw. Trying to make use of the manufacturer’s warranty could be complicated based on the commentators in the DIY Solar Forum thread, as Battle Born likes to claim that the overheating issue is an external problem and not a design flaw.

Either way, it looks like an incredibly sketchy way to design a battery terminal on an LFP battery that is supposed to surge 100+A. [Will] is requesting that anyone affected posts details in the forum or similar to get all information together, as he looks to push Battle Born on this issue.

What makes this issue worse is that shortly after releasing that first video, Battle Born responded to some concerned customers with a response that claims that their terminal design is a ‘thermal fail-safe’, but as can be seen in [Will]’s follow-up video, it absolutely doesn’t look like one.

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