Belt File From Old Mixer And Junk Bin Parts

October 9, 2026 by 1 Comment

Making one’s own power tools can be a rewarding way to upcycle parts, and [bluesyann] does exactly that with a belt file made from an old mixer. We like how the enclosure for the old mixer is preserved and acts as a handle, so there’s no need to worry about motor mounting and wiring separately. It looks perfectly usable, and all the hardware needed is the sort of thing one finds in a scrap pile.

[bluesyann] stretches the sanding belt between a 3D printed pulley attached to the mixer motor, and a bearing fitted into the end of some aluminum U-channel. Scrap wood and more nested U-channel make up the rest of the assembly, and there’s even a tension adjustment made from a threaded rod.

There’s a bill of materials and a 3D model for the pulley, but a build like this is more about sharing the broad strokes rather than the exact design. Whenever one modifies or integrates an existing piece of equipment (the mixer, in this case) into a project, most of the work is about working with and around the bits one can’t change.

Watch it in action in a brief video, embedded just below. If you like the idea but don’t have a mixer like the one [bluesyann] used, let us point you toward a similar DIY attachment to get a similar result from a common angle grinder.

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Low Current Density Nickel Plating

October 8, 2026 by 3 Comments

We imagine that electroplating is like making PC boards or soldering surface-mount chips. Before you’ve done it, it seems like a lot. Afterward, you can’t remember why it was such a big deal. [Kovancapol] wants to show you how to plate a mirror-finish nickel over your tools, and while it looks like a lot to set up, we are guessing that it gets easy once you have everything together.

There is a bit of chemical setup, as you might expect with reagents like nickel sulfate and nickel chloride. Then there’s the glassware, nickel anodes, and a power supply. As you can see in the video, the results look very nice. We can’t help but wonder what other uses you might have for this process.

A conductive coating on a 3D print might be feasible. We aren’t sure soldering PCB traces would be worth it since nickel gets hard to solder as it oxidizes. You can mix and match plating for some pretty impressive results.

Introducing The Garlic-Powered Door And Window Sensor

October 8, 2026 by 7 Comments

Most home security sensors require a chemical battery or external power source to operate, which can be a point of weakness. If the battery in a window or door sensor dies overnight and nobody is there to swap it, it might miss that one intruder or mess up your carefully curated home automation system. In that sense self-powered sensors are rather interesting, such as this one by [Manas Tiwari] and [Deepak Bharti] that is based around the triboelectric effect.

The research article is sadly paywalled, but the IEEE Spectrum article covers all the salient details. The sensor uses ground up garlic peel for the positive side of this triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) as they call it, with a sheet of polyethylene (PE) forming the negative side. Once installed on a door frame, opening said door generates about 210 VAC with a 45 µA short circuit current. A dual-side layer of garlic peel bumps this up to 400 VAC and 65 µA.

As installed, the researchers used this generated current to detect changes using a separate MCU running off a powerbank, which obviously does not really solve the ‘running out of charge’ issue. The generated power could conceivably be used to send a brief wireless packet to a receiver elsewhere in the room, somewhat like the Bluetooth link in the example, but more low-power.

The researchers also reported that this sensor was still functional after half a year in storage, and survived 200 stress cycles, which seems like a good start for what appears to be a very cheap sensor to construct.

Turning A Run-Over Samsung Galaxy S23 Into A Gaming PC

October 8, 2026 by 19 Comments

Repurposing old smartphones for more general purpose computing isn’t a new thing, but the project by [LastComputer] ups the ante by going from a Samsung Galaxy S23 that looks like it got run over by at least a few cars to a very serviceable gaming computer, courtesy of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.

The somehow still working but definitely worse for wear phone was purchased for 1,700 Ukrainian Hryvnia (~$40). It being SIM locked also helped reduce the price, even if someone had somehow wanted to use it again as a phone. Since the SoC inside is also used in quite capable gaming handhelds, but with good cooling, that would be a real waste.

Converting it into proper gaming system requires some careful disassembly, some gentle whacking with a hammer to straighten out the frame and a new battery as the mainboard won’t work without one installed.

A 3D-printed phone case glued to an SSD cage for the 512 GB SSD serves as the enclosure, along with two USB hubs, one of which also provides HDMI output. For the active cooling system a heatsink was hot-glued to the vapor chamber with a properly sized fan mounted to it. Here we could definitely see some zip ties being added to prevent it from falling off.

Compared to running the phone in its stock cooling configuration this shaves off about seven degrees C, with thermal throttling noticeably reduced. This consequently provides a much better desktop experience in Samsung’s DeX (Desktop eXperience) desktop mode, which is what’s used for running applications and games.

Running God of War as an emulated PS2 game works pretty well, as does running games with the Dolphin emulator and the GameHub app using which PC games on Steam, GoG and others can be run. Although you can also install other OSes on the phone hardware, Samsung DeX doesn’t appear to be a bad option if you happen to repurpose a high-end Samsung phone that supports this mode.

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The 80s Called: They Say This DIY Phone Is, Like, Totally Rad

October 8, 2026 by 4 Comments

Like more than a few of us , [Kevin Noki] is sick of being pulled out of flow state by that annoyingly addictive black rectangle we all carry around. His solution was to build a phone to escape his phone, in a YouTube video we embedded down below. We’d say that phone is straight out of the 1980s, except it’s not quite a phone. It would perhaps be more accurate to say he’s building a Bluetooth handset– actual telephony remains the province of a professional device with regulatory approval, because getting custom hardware on VoLTE is a nonstarter in many places.

He starts out using an ESP32, because he already had one and why not? It’s got bluetooth, after all. Alas, audio quality he was getting through it was a little too crunchy, so he pivoted to use a dedicated Hands Free Profile (HFP) bluetooth module that is purpose built for exactly this kind of application. He’s selling the design on his website, but given how much detail he shows on screen, recreating your own version would be easy enough to save the quid. You’d be missing out on the STL for the fantastic 80s brick he’s made, which may be the most interesting part of the build to us.

We’d likely have jumped right to CAD and printed out a few iterations of the case until we were happy, but [Kevin] takes a more traditional industrial-design approach, mocking up the phone with XPS foam and a manually-operated hot wire cutter. It’s not a step we see makers take very often, but it pays off here– at least for subtracting material, it’s a very quick way to iterate, and he only needs to do one 3D print for the final version. We also like very high-tech acrylic bending jig, which he uses to put some black LED acrylic over the display.

It’s a lot of work to make you less-likely to grab a phone you still need anyway– remember, there’s no cellular modem in this– but, hey, it beats torturing yourself, or worse, a tamagotchi.

Digital Signage In The Browser With Just A Click

October 8, 2026 by 12 Comments

There are many ways to display text on a computer screen, but most require at least some manual effort from the user. It’s annoying enough even if you’re dealing with one machine, but it gets even more of a hassle when you’re trying to display something on multiple devices of varying size and capability. That’s where BIGWORDS.PAGE by [SpeakingOfBrad] comes in.

It’s essentially a simple web page you can control via a carefully crafted URL, letting you create all sorts of text displays you can “distribute” to browsers on other devices with a simple link. So, for example, if you wanted to let everyone see what your favorite website is, you need only point the browser on your phone or laptop to https://bigwords.page/#Hackaday. As the image at the top of this post shows, you can also change the font and text colors by adding a few more values.

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With Latest Update, Alexa Refuses To Pass The Aux

October 8, 2026 by 22 Comments

Although the feature has been deleted from newer models, there was a time when Amazon’s Echo devices included a 3.5 mm “aux” input jack that let you connect other audio sources to the smart speaker. Alexa would even let you switch over to an external source with a voice command — or at least, it used to.

As first reported by Reddit user [n8-sd], Amazon has started informing users that voice control over the 3.5 mm jack is no longer supported. While the physical input will still function on models equipped with it, if you want to mute the audio coming from an external device you’ll have to wade through the Alexa smartphone application to do it.

In a statement to Ars Technica, an Amazon rep confirmed that voice control over the auxiliary input has been removed as of the latest software version, and that their analytics showed not many people were using the feature in the first place. They also pointed out that no changes have been made to voice control of Bluetooth devices. While we don’t doubt that the total number of users that were physically plugging an audio source into their Echos was probably low in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t really explain why such a simple feature needed to be actively removed.

Some commenters have theorized that the real reason behind the change is the fact that Amazon has no way of monitoring what users are playing over the auxiliary input. Since cataloging and selling the media consumption habits of users is big business these days, that’s a problem. While they might prefer to disable the feature entirely, they know that would stir up some bad press, so they’re opting to simply make it more annoying to use. We’re not saying we entirely buy this explanation, but it’s not the craziest thing we’ve ever heard either.

Although the Echo devices have never been particularly hackable, they have enjoyed a certain amount of success with tech-savvy users, making it all the more disappointing to see the ecosystem seemingly becoming less capable over time.