Mod This IKEA Lamp Into Smart Lighting For Not A Lot

May 15, 2026 by No comments

The IKEA SKAFTSÄRV is an economical LED accent lamp, but while highly affordable it has only fixed lighting options. [simoneluconi] shows how it can easily be turned into a fully-configurable, WLED-connected, WiFi-enabled RGB lamp with little more than an ESP32-based board.

A thirty-LED lamp with integrated diffusor and stand can be had for surprisingly cheap. Add an equally-economical ESP32 board and it becomes a whole lot more.

To do this, the control board of the lamp gets replaced with an ESP32-C3 Super Mini board. Control and automation comes from WLED, open-source software that offers flexible automation and control for LED lights with a wide range of features, including native Android and iOS apps.

Modifying the SKAFTSÄRV lamp is fairly straightforward, but opening the unit does require breaking some glued seams to get inside. Once that’s done, the replacement board fits nicely into the housing and the unit can be closed back up. As far as WLED is concerned, the new lamp has 30 LEDs, WS281x type, GRB color order.

The end result is a stylish accent lamp with built-in diffusor and mount that can be controlled over WiFi with all the features WLED brings, such as easy integration with Home Assistant.

This isn’t the first time IKEA’s LED lighting has been given a powerup. Their pixel-style LED wall-mounted OBEGRÄNSAD, which displays a few canned animations out of the box, got considerably enhanced with a new controller.

Thanks [Crash] for the tip!

Hacking Hard Drive Firmware

May 15, 2026 by 9 Comments

You probably flash new firmware on a variety of devices regularly, even though that’s rare for non-technical types. But what about your hard drive firmware? Most of us don’t want to touch our operating drives, so unless you are dealing with surplus drives or have a special project in mind, you may not think much about the firmware running your spinning rust storage. [I Code 4 Coffee] uses hard drives in an unusual way to exploit Xbox 360s, and wound up reverse engineering some drive firmware with an eye to making changes.

The analysis started with three hard drives and an SSD. Looking for people who’ve done similar work wasn’t as productive as you might think. There isn’t much call for modifying hard drive firmware, and what data there is can be outdated.

One thing that was available was firmware dumps taken with a PC-3000 data recovery tool. What follows is a deep dive down the hard drive rabbit hole. There are backdoor vendor commands and connections to the diagnostic RS-232 port on some drives. You can find the technical artifacts on GitHub.

We learned a few things, and we bet you will too. Another way to get into the hard drive’s firmware is via JTAG.

PreFlight Slicer Brings Added Part Strength Feature, And Many More

May 15, 2026 by 5 Comments

Interested in taking some wild new 3D printing features for a test drive? preFlight is a free and open source slicer that brings a host of processing improvements as well as fascinating new features and interesting twists on old ones. There are almost too many to list, so here are a few that caught our eye.

Cross-sectional view of Interlocking Perimeters, which increases Z-strength. Unlike brick layers, layer height stays constant.

Want to mix and match different support types on the same object? No problem. How about use Nip & Tuck seams to better hide where layers start and stop? You can emboss images directly onto print surfaces with a real-time preview and use smart bridging for counter-bored holes. We particularly like the ability to preview a sliced object from the side instead of just by layer. That’s not all, either.

Those features alone are pretty intriguing, but there’s one in particular that is particularly relevant to creating stronger parts. Interlocking Perimeters increases layer bonding to increase object strength. Unlike brick layers, which staggers layers vertically, interlocking perimeters plays with spacing and compression to increase bonding in the Z axis while keeping layer heights constant. This is possible thanks in part to the greater control offered by Athena, the new perimeter generator.

There are plenty more features — like a full Python runtime embedded directly into the slicing pipeline, and a host of export pathways — so check out the GitHub repository for added detail and let us know in the comments if you give it a try.

Using A Nintendo Switch To Speed Up A 3D Printer

May 15, 2026 by 5 Comments

3D printers are almost never fast enough. [Cocoanix] had a Prusa MK3S with this very problem. He found it to be disappointingly tedious when completing even simple prints, and sought a way to make it faster. Thus, he grabbed a Nintendo Switch and got to work.

It might sound like an odd choice, and that’s because it is. There’s no special magic inside a Nintendo Switch that makes 3D printers faster – it’s just that the handheld console was a useful platform on which to run Klipper. As [Cocoanix] explains, Klipper is designed to run on faster general-purpose computers compared to the more limited microcontrollers used in some printers. It’s designed to off-load complex motion processing tasks to a faster CPU, while the printer’s onboard microcontrollers are freed up to simply handle the low-level tasks of driving the motors and so on. An older printer equipped with Klipper can often print faster, while implementing techniques like input shaping to further improve speed as well as print quality.

It’s worth noting that you don’t have to use a Nintendo Switch for this. It’s just a good hook for the YouTube video. Typically you’d use a Raspberry Pi or some other computer instead, but the fact it runs on a jailbroken console is amusing nonetheless. It’s also cool to see the results – in this video, [Cocoanix] got the Benchy printing time down from 90 minutes to just 8.

We’ve previously discussed the benefits of Klipper at length.

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An E-Bike Motor From First Principles

May 14, 2026 by 5 Comments

Many of us have made electric transport of some form, whether a Hacky Racer, and e-bike, a go-kart, or whatever. We have invariably bought a motor, or if we are really adventurous, repurposed a car alternator. Not [Birdbrain] though, because she’s designed and built her own from first principles.

The video below goes into significant detail on the design of her motor, looking at cores, wire sixes, and configurations with a useful simulation along the way. We particularly like the way she uses a bandsaw to cut transformer laminations to shape for her core. The 3D printed housing initially isn’t strong enough for the forces induced by the magnets, but she attacks that problem with a new print. The motor works well, and as an added bonus there’s an introduction to the different types of motor driver. It seems the cheap ones don’t deliver a good waveform for the characteristics of the motor. Sadly she doesn’t fit it to a real bike in the video, but it seems this thing might just work.

If you lack the courage to make the whole thing from scratch, we took a quick look at the car alternator route a while back.

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Mix Your Own ECN-2 Development Chemicals

May 14, 2026 by 1 Comment

After the digital camera rose to prominence, it became a cool hobby to keep taking photos on film. It was even cooler if you did the same with an old motion picture camera. The retro film revival has kept a dedicated bunch of photo labs in business over the years, but it’s still possible to save some cash on development by doing it yourself. If that’s your game, you might try mixing up your own development chemicals. 

As explained by [No Grain No Gain], it’s quite possible to mix up your own ECN-2 chemistry from scratch if you know what you’re doing. ECN-2 is the chemistry you’ll want if you’re trying to develop any of Kodak’s Vision3 films, along with CineStill films.

The problem with traditional methods of making developer is that once it’s mixed up, it doesn’t keep well, and the more you use it, the worse the quality gets. To beat this problem, this method involves producing two stock solutions which can be kept on the shelf for long periods of time. They can then be combined together with a little CD-3 developer on an as-needed basis. This makes it easy to always have fresh developer on hand for the best possible results on every roll processed. To make everything, you’ll need sodium sulfite, potassium bromide, sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, and the specialist CD-3 developing agent. It’s then a simple job to mix up the dry chemicals with a bunch of distilled water to make the two necessary solutions to keep on hand. The video also explains how to deal with RemJet films if you happen to be shooting those.

[No Grain No Gain] estimates that this method can cut the cost of development to as little as 50 cents a roll. There’s plenty of labor involved, but if you want the freshest, best developer on hand for your home lab, it’s a method worth considering.

We’ve explored modern film development techniques before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Mix Your Own ECN-2 Development Chemicals” →

A cylindrical grey robot sits on a white mat. The robot is made of three grey sections connected by a series of radially-arranged copper pillars.

Controlling A Vibrobot With Only One Motor

May 14, 2026 by 4 Comments

The vibrobot – a vibrating motor and battery attached to the head of a brush – isn’t truly a robot, since its movement can’t be controlled, but it’s whetted the interest of many future roboticists. With a clever control method, though, it is in fact possible to drive them in any desired direction while using only one motor.

[Namaskar Mitro] based the design of this robot on this research paper; if the vibrating motor is mounted at an angle above the base of the robot, it causes the bot to rotate, and if the motor is mounted off-center from the center of mass, the robot moves in a circle. Crucially, reversing the direction of the motor’s rotation reverses the direction of the robot’s rotation. By rapidly switching the direction of rotation, the bot can move in a series of short, shallow arcs which approximate a straight line.

The robot which [Namaskar] built was based on an ESP-01F microcontroller, which let it be remote-controlled over Wi-Fi. It used a DRF8212 motor driver to control a vibrating pager motor, which was housed inside a 3D-printed enclosure. To move in a straight line, the ESP-01F switches the motor’s direction every 250 milliseconds, which still produces a slightly erratic movement. It can, however, approximately follow a traced path.

This adds to the previous vibrobot control methods we’ve seen: a pair of differentially-driven vibrating motors or a weight-shifting mechanism.

Thanks to [110y6] for the tip!