Making A Dog Car Wash Without (very) Fancy Tools

November 7, 2026 by No comments

[Stuff Made Here] got fed up with the hassle of washing their dog, and in traditional engineer fashion, decided that automating the process would solve the problem. However, as science fiction writers love to warn us, automation and living things don’t always mix.

The concept, much like a car wash, is to have an arch-like structure spray the dog with oscillating nozzles. A secondary nozzle provides a simple air drying function on each of the pods. An “undercarriage” nozzle of similar design runs in a channel below the dog to ensure all mud has been removed. The nozzles move along linear rails, driven by a DC motor. All the electronics are water proofed with the AC power source a distance away to provide additional electrical protection.

Unlike other projects of the past, [Stuff Made Here] set out to make this project without fancy metal working tools. Fortunately, it’s a project well suited to SLA 3D printing. While probably printable on an FDM printer, the parts need to withstand water back pressure. While there are better ways of doing this, the nozzles are mounted on an arch made of two bent conduits with legs welded on. The nozzles are mechanically connected with linkages to control the spraying direction.

However, [Stuff Made Here] couldn’t resist the urge to use a new CNC lathe when it arrived, so the quest to avoid fancy tools was lost to the desire to play with new fancy tools. Also, a grate under the under-carriage nozzle would have taken too long to source, so instead a plasma cutter made short work of some sheet metal. Granted, the parts could easily be 3D printed and/or sourced online.

Besides the fact that the dog is terrified of the machine and won’t use it, it works brilliantly! Sound off in the comments if you think [Stuff Made Here]’s attempt at making a project without fancy tools was successful.

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Artemis II Rocket Was Powerful Enough To Disrupt GPS

November 7, 2026 by No comments

Rockets certainly have a substantial impact if you ever see a launch in person. The noise, shock waves, and even heat can be awe-inspiring. What is less obvious are the impacts a launch has on our upper atmosphere, or “anthropogenic space weather” as the fancy scientists call it. A pre-print from a recent study on Artemis II’s impact on our atmosphere shows a shockingly wide range of effects.

As a whole, the impact on Artemis comes in waves. Each stage of the Space Launch System performs burns in different parts of the atmosphere, creating increasing ripples as the rocket moves through various layers. The first stage is the largest in terms of thrust, but has limited impact on the ionosphere because of how low it occurred. The 2nd and 3rd stages’ impact, however, was so large that it could’ve sustainably disrupted GPS signals at the time. Waves even traveled through the atmosphere across the entirety of North America in the form of gravity waves. These ionosphere “holes” might not be a major problem now, but it’s something to think about as we ramp up rocket production.

While this research relied on thousands of sensors across the globe, that doesn’t mean you need the same budget to analyze the state of the ionosphere at home.

A landscape-oriented e-paper display in a clear enclosure. A blue-ish LED glows on the right below the black rotary encoder knob.

Play Text Adventures On An E-Paper Handheld

November 7, 2026 by 1 Comment

Choose your own adventure books were one of the first media to become gamified in the computer era, and [Jeremy Ngai] wanted to bridge the experience further with an e-paper handheld adventure game.

With a 2.9″ e-paper screen, rotary encoder, and RGB LED that can provide mood lighting for the story, it can provide an estimated 20 hours of entertainment per charge, which is a lot better than the Game Gear this author had as a child. As with many projects we see these days, a custom PCB and 3D printed enclosure give the build a professional polish.

Upon the first boot, you setup the WiFi like on other ESP32 devices through a captive portal. Once connected to the internet, the device contacts Gemini for a generated choose-your-own-adventure story. We think it would be interesting to modify the code to connect to a library of human-written stories, perhaps a port of Zork? Everything you’d need to build your own is on GitHub.

If you want to play games that are easy on the eyes, how about an EInk Gameboy or another one with a separate screen and controller.

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Proper Linux, On An ESP32

November 7, 2026 by 8 Comments

The ESP32 series of microcontrollers feature a lot on these pages, offering as they do a significantly powerful processor and in most cases, wireless connectivity. One recent member of the bewilderingly large family is the ESP32-S31, It’s a dual-core RISC-V unit with WiFi 6, and if that’s not interesting enough there’s the news that it runs Linux. Not -nommu Linux, but the full-fat version, as it has a memory management unit.

Before you imagine a superlative experience, it’s worth the reminder that the available resources will not give it much when it comes to computing power. But there’s an Espressif GitHub repository, and work on a port of a 6.x kernel, so you should be able to do something with it. A quick look on AliExpress finds dev boards at a range of prices, so the cost of experimenting shouldn’t be too high.

This moment at which the paths of microcontroller and full-fat SoC start to cross has been on the horizon for quite a while, and it’s exciting to see it finally arrive. Expect more similar chips in competition with this one, and more power too. Meanwhile see our noting the launch of the S31.

Two 3D-printed enclosures, one blue and one red, sit on a workmat. In front of the blue enclosure, a soldering iron sits in a blue-and-yellow soldering iron stand.

Building A Homemade Induction Soldering Iron

November 7, 2026 by 2 Comments

Despite not being inherently any better at converting electricity into heat, induction-heated soldering irons often considerably outperform conventional irons with an identical power rating. They manage this by directly heating the iron tip with an internal induction coil, rather than conducting heat from a heater cartridge farther back — a design which makes induction irons very responsive, stable, and, unfortunately, expensive. [Frank Zhao], though, managed to design and build two induction soldering irons of his own.

In some ways, the handpiece of an induction-heated soldering iron is simpler than a resistive iron. Induction-powered soldering irons don’t have temperature sensors or any kind of electronic temperature control. Instead, the tip’s temperature is set by the cartridge material’s Curie point; once the cartridge reaches this temperature, the heating efficiency drops off sharply. This self-regulation means that most of the project’s complexity is contained in the power supply, which supplies an RF signal to the induction coil.

Here, [Frank] had two previous projects to work off of, and he based one design on each. The first was the work of [SergeyMax], who’d reverse-engineered a Metcal soldering iron and built his own induction iron based on it. This relied, however, on components hard to find outside of Russia, so [Frank] updated it to use parts available in America. It uses a frequency of 13.56 MHz and an F-type connector, making it compatible with the handpiece assemblies from a number of commercial manufacturers, including Hakko and Metcal. For a measure of portability, it can be powered through an XT30 connector or USB-PD and fits in a compact case.

[Frank]’s second, more inexpensive design was based on the open-source RadioThermal project, but adds the same XT30 and USB-PD power options, allows power level selection with external jumpers, and protects the circuit with a fuse. This design operates at 470 kHz, and uses a custom-built handpiece designed around a commercial soldering iron tip.

We’ve seen induction irons here before, albeit in a considerably less polished form. Alternatively, if you’re interested in seeing what’s inside a normal soldering iron tip, check out this teardown of a T12 tip.

Supercon 2026: Streaming Live

November 7, 2026 by No comments

While we’d love to have you all join us in Pasadena for Supercon 2026, the next best thing is to connect up to the festivities remotely through the magic of the Internet. The main stage talks (Lamarr) will be streamed live to our YouTube channel, while the talks taking place on the second stage (Hopper) will be recorded and posted afterwards.

Though it’s not quite as immersive as being there,  you can also join the #supercon-chat channel in the official Hackaday Discord server if you want to virtually rub shoulders with some of our favorite people in the world.

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Repairing A Polaroid 630 SL Lightmixer Instant Camera

November 7, 2026 by 1 Comment

Before the advent of digital cameras, if you wanted to take a few photos without having to get a whole roll of film developed, you’d use some form of instant camera. The Polaroid 630 SL Lightmixer that [Odd Tinkering] is looking at in a recent video is a good example of a late-80s, early-90s instant camera. As a mass-market product he got it slightly broken for $10, figuring it’d make for an interesting repair and restoration project.

Unlike the 1970s instant cameras that still used plenty of metal and such for the housing and mechanisms, this 600-series camera is pretty much an all-plastic affair. Produced much like the practically identical Lightmixer 630 between 1986 and 1992 it’s clearly designed for easy assembly, with plastic clips holding the whole affair together.

The symptoms for this sold-as-broken machine mostly pertained to issues with the trigger button and it taking shots by itself. This issue along with the flash not working turned out to be just due to corrosion on some connectors, but just getting to these parts required many hours of frustrating prying and trying not to break plastic. Somewhere along in all that violence the internal switch – consisting of a piece of bent copper strip – for the flash also ended up being broken.

With said broken strip patched and brazed back together, the corrosion cleaned and the outer shell’s paint having received a touch up, it works and looks pretty much as it would have back around 1990. You can even still get 600-series film for it today, as the retro-nostalgia factor seems to keep drawing people back to these machines, with newer models still being produced in various guises.

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