LED Printers: The Quiet Achievers You May Not Have Heard Of

March 2, 2026 by No comments

Many different types of printers have entered the market over the years. Most of us are intimately familiar with the common inkjet and laser, both of which can be found in homes and offices all over the world. Then there are those old dot matrix printers that were so noisy in use, thermal printers, and even solid ink printers that occupied a weird niche for a time.

However, very little attention is ever paid to the LED printer. They’re not actually that uncommon, and they work in a very familiar way. It’s just that because these printers are so similar to an existing technology, they largely escaped any real notability in the marketplace. Let’s explore the inner workings of the printer tech that the world forgot.

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A cylindrical neodymium-iron-boron magnet in shown on a grey background. A white line of boiling liquid surrounds the top edge of the magnet, and a cloud of condensing vapor hangs over it.

Homemade Liquid Oxygen Demonstrates Paramagnetism

March 2, 2026 by No comments

Liquid nitrogen isn’t exactly an everyday material, but it’s acquired conveniently enough to be used in extreme overclocking experiments, classroom demonstrations, chemistry and physics experiments, and a number of other niche applications. Liquid oxygen, by contrast, is dangerous enough that it’s only really used in rocket engines. Nevertheless, [Electron Impressions] made some of his own, and beyond the obvious pyrotechnic experimentation, demonstrated its unusual magnetic properties. Check out the video, below.

The oxygen in this case was produced by electrolysis through a proton-exchange membrane, which vented the hydrogen into the atmosphere and routed the oxygen into a Dewar flask mounted at the cold end of a Stirling cryo-cooler. The cooler had enough power to produce about 30 to 40 milliliters of liquid oxygen per hour, enough to build up an appreciable amount in short order. As expected, the pale blue liquid caused burning paper to disappear in a violent flame, and a piece of paper soaked in it almost exploded when ignited.

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Accidental Climate Engineering With Disintegrating Satellites

March 2, 2026 by 1 Comment

For many decades humankind has entertained the notion that we can maybe tweak the Earth’s atmosphere or biosphere in such a way that we can for example undo the harms of climate change, or otherwise affect the climate for our own benefit. This often involves spreading certain substances in parts of the atmosphere in order to reflect or retain thermal solar radiation or induce rain.

Yet despite how limited in scope these attempts at such intentional experiments have been so far – with most proposals dying somewhere before being implemented – we have already embarked on a potentially planet-wide atmospheric reconfiguration that could affect life on Earth for centuries to come. This accidental experiment comes in the form of rocket stages, discarded satellites, and other human-made space litter that burn up in the atmosphere at ever increasing rates.

Rather than burning up cleanly into harmless components, this actually introduces metals and other compounds into the upper parts of the atmosphere. What the long-term effects of this will be is still uncertain, but with the most dire scenarios involving significant climate change and ozone layer degradation, we ought to figure this one out sooner rather than later.

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Simple D-STAR Transceiver Uses Inexpensive Hardware

March 2, 2026 by 11 Comments

[Yeckel] recently put the finishing touches on an ambitious implementation of a simple D-STAR (Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio) transceiver using some very accessible and affordable hardware. The project is D-StarBeacon, and [Yeckel] shows it working on a LilyGO TTGO T-Beam, an ESP32-based development board that includes a SX1278 radio module and GPS receiver. It even serves a web interface for easy configuration.

What is D-STAR? It’s a protocol used by radio operators for voice that also allows transmitting low-speed data, such as short text messages or GPS coordinates. While voice is out of scope for [Yeckel]’s project (more on that in a moment) it can do all the rest, including send images. That makes beacon-type functions possible on inexpensive hardware, instead of requiring a full-blown radio.

As mentioned, voice is a big part of D-STAR. While [Yeckel] was able to access the voice data, attempts to decode it were unsuccessful. A valiant effort, but we suppose voice decoding isn’t terribly relevant to beacon-type operations like transmitting APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System).

So far as [Yeckel] is aware, D-StarBeacon is currently the only open-source implementation of a D-STAR radio available on the internet, which is pretty interesting. We’ve seen projects that touch indirectly on D-STAR, but nothing like this.

Watch it go through its paces in the video embedded below. Since the T-Beam is just a microcontroller development board, the user interface comes from an Android app on a mobile phone, which is why you see a phone in the video.

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Examining A World’s Record From The Age Of Steam

March 2, 2026 by 8 Comments

There aren’t many speed records that remain unbroken for the greater part of a century, but one of them is that of the fastest steam locomotive. As with so many such things, there’s a bit of controversy and more than one contender, but the one in the record books is the A4 Pacific, Mallard. In 1938, this locomotive thundered down an incline on the London & North Eastern Railway’s mainline in the north of England at 126 MPH. But can that number be taken as reliable? The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has a video in which they investigate.

It’s a fascinating look at the science of railway speed measurement as it existed in 1938, the record itself, and the paper dynamometer roll which recorded it. We’ve placed the video below the break, and in it, we see an in-depth analysis of the noise and inconsistencies in the recording, and see them come to the conclusion that a safer figure to quote would be 124 MPH.

Our assessment is that, of course, the LNER wanted to squeeze every morsel of publicity from it in a game of one-upmanship with their arch-rivals in the London Midland and Scottish railway, so it’s likely that their use of a momentary figure makes sense in that light. Even the best-laid 1930s jointed track would have been bumpy compared to modern continuous rail, and we are guessing that the ancient clerestory dynamometer car would hardly be as smooth-riding as a modern express coach. The achievement of measuring at all with mechanical instruments in such an environment at those speeds would have been tricky, to say the least. It leaves us wondering whether 1930s electronics could have produced some kind of trackside measurement device, but perhaps the LNER trusted their mechanical instruments more. Perhaps the Pennsylvania Railroad should have followed its example.

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Teardown Of Dangerous Fake Wago Connectors

March 1, 2026 by 6 Comments

Everyone loves Wago connectors for how versatile and effective they are for quickly and securely connecting conductors, but it can be tempting to buy a bag of the significantly cheaper knock-offs. The reason why this can be a terrible idea is explained by [Big Clive] who tore down a few bags of them to ogle at their internals.

The main problem with some of these knock-offs is the way that they use the plastic molding as part of the structure that holds the conductors in place. Over time this plastic will develop larger tolerances, with heat developed from passing large currents speeding up the process. As the examined type of connector relies on metal clamps that securely push the conductor onto the busbar, having the plastic weaken, and the clamp correspondingly loosen up, is clearly not a desirable scenario.

As [Clive] says in the video, you’re probably okay using these cheapo knock-offs for a quick test on the bench, but you should never put them in a permanent installation. Not just due to potential fiery scenarios, but also for insurance claims should the worst come to pass, and the insurance company finds dodgy connectors everywhere in the electrical wiring. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of knock-off Wago problems.

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Making A 286 Think It’s Alive Again

March 1, 2026 by 6 Comments

[Nagy Krisztián] had an Intel 286 CPU, only… There was no motherboard to install it in. Perhaps not wanting the processor to be lonely, [Nagy] built a simulated system to bring the chip back to life.

Okay, 68 pins does look like a lot when you arrange them like that.

The concept is simple enough. [Nagy] merely intended to wire the 286 up to a Raspberry Pi Pico that could emulate other parts of a computer that it would normally expect to talk to. This isn’t so hard with an ancient CPU like the 286, which has just 68 pins compared to the 1000+ pins on modern CPUs. All it took was a PLCC-68 socket, an adapter PCB, a breadboard, and some MCP23s17 logic expanders to give the diminutive microcontroller enough I/O. With a bit of work, [Nagy] was able to get the Pi Pico running the 286, allowing it to execute a simple program that retrieves numbers from “memory” and writes them back in turn.

Notably, this setup won’t run the 286 at its full clock speed of 12 MHz, and it’s a long way off from doing anything complex like talking to peripherals or booting an OS. Still, it’s neat to see the old metal live again, even if it’s just rattling through a few simple machine instructions that don’t mean a whole lot. [Nagy] equates this project to The Matrix; you might also think of it as a brain in a jar. The 286 is not in a real computer; it’s just hooked up to a microcontroller stimulating its various pins in a way that is indistinguishable from its own perspective. Continue reading “Making A 286 Think It’s Alive Again” →