The Tale Of The Final EVGA GPU Overclocking Record

January 23, 2023 by 12 Comments

It’s not news that EVGA is getting out of the GPU card game, after a ‘little falling out’ with Nvidia. It’s sad news nonetheless, as this enthusiastic band of hardware hackers has a solid following in certain overclocking and custom PC circles. The Games Nexus gang decided to fly over to meet up with the EVGA team in Zhonghe, Taiwan, and follow them around a bit as they tried for one last overclocking record on the latest (unreleased, GTX4090-based) GPU card. As you will note early on in the video, things didn’t go smoothly, with their hand-lapped GPU burning out the PCB after a small setup error. Continue reading “The Tale Of The Final EVGA GPU Overclocking Record” →

DIY Custom Earplugs For Pennies Per Pair

January 23, 2023 by 30 Comments

Hearing is one of our most precious senses, and yet many take their hearing for granted, exposing themselves to loud noises that do lasting damage. [Jonathan Levi] of The Next Level does no such thing, at least not anymore. He’s even gone so far as to have custom acrylic earplugs made, which he carried around for two years, finally had them tweaked to be perfect, and promptly lost them. Rather than shell out another $150-$200 for another pair, [Jonathan] decided to see if he could make some himself.

While it’s true that [Jonathan] got a head start by asking the earplug company for the STLs they created back when he was fitted, he goes through the ways that one could mold and then scan one’s ears at home for not a lot of money. There are even kits for squirting that quick-setting goo into your ear to get just the right shape. Once you’ve got the ear canal positives, some quick photogrammetry work with your phone camera and a lazy Susan should be enough to get a model going in Blender.

[Jonathan] had the good sense to label left and right on the 3D printed mold, and furthermore added some small 3D printed screws that are color-coded to help him keep them plugs straight, and give him something to grab on to when it’s time to take them out. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

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Listening To A Flashlight — Lunar Flashlight

January 23, 2023 by 4 Comments

If you’ve been looking for a practical example of using GNU Radio, you should check out [Daniel Estévez’s] work on decoding telemetry captured from the Lunar Flashlight cubesat. The cubesat is having some trouble, but the data in question was a recording from the day after launch. We aren’t sure what it would take to eavesdrop on it live, but the 3-minute recording is from a 20-meter antenna at 8.4 GHz.

The flowgraph for GNU Radio isn’t as bad as you might think, thanks to some judicious reuse of blocks from other projects to do some of the decoding. The modulation is PCM/PM/bi-phase-L. Nominally, the speed is supposed to be 48,000 baud, but [Daniel] measured 48,077.

Continue reading “Listening To A Flashlight — Lunar Flashlight” →

Smart Bike Suspension Tunes Your Ride On The Fly

January 23, 2023 by 23 Comments

Riding a bike is a pretty simple affair, but like with many things, technology marches on and adds complications. Where once all you had to worry about was pumping the cranks and shifting the gears, now a lot of bikes have front suspensions that need to be adjusted for different riding conditions. Great for efficiency and ride comfort, but a little tough to accomplish while you’re underway.

Luckily, there’s a solution to that, in the form of this active suspension system by [Jallson S]. The active bit is a servo, which is attached to the adjustment valve on the top of the front fork of the bike. The servo moves the valve between fully locked, for smooth surfaces, and wide open, for rough terrain. There’s also a stop in between, which partially softens the suspension for moderate terrain. The 9-gram hobby servo rotates the valve with the help of a 3D printed gear train.

But that’s not all. Rather than just letting the rider control the ride stiffness from a handlebar-mounted switch, [Jallson S] added a little intelligence into the mix. Ride data from the accelerometer on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense was captured on a smartphone via Arduino Science Journal. The data was processed through Edge Impulse Studio to create models for five different ride surfaces and rider styles. This allows the stiffness to be optimized for current ride conditions — check it out in action in the video below.

[Jallson S] is quick to point out that this is a prototype, and that niceties like weatherproofing still have to be addressed. But it seems like a solid start — now let’s see it teamed up with an Arduino shifter.

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Smiling ad family with 3D printer

Ask Hackaday: Do Kids Need 3D Printers?

January 23, 2023 by 72 Comments

Mattel holds a fond place in most people’s hearts as they made many of the toys we played with as kids. You might remember the Thingmaker, which was essentially an Easy Bake Oven with some goop and molds that let you make rubbery creatures. But back in 2016, Mattel had an aborted attempt to bring 3D printing to kids under the Thingmaker label. You can see a promo video of the device below. You might not have seen one in real life, though. The product was delayed and eventually canceled. Even so, we frequently see press releases for “kids printers” and we’ve been wondering, should this be a thing? Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Do Kids Need 3D Printers?” →

Vintage Electronics Hack Chat

January 23, 2023 by 24 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, January 25 at noon Pacific for the Vintage Electronics Hack Chat with Keri Szafir!

The world of the hardware hacker is filled with smells. The forbidden but enticing waft of solder smoke, the acrid bite of the Magic Blue Smoke, the heady aroma of freshly greased gears, the unmistakable smell of hot metal — they all tell a story, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But the smell inside a piece of vintage electronics? Now that’s a complicated story indeed. It might be the wax of the old capacitors, the resinous scent of well-baked resistors, the enameled wire in transformers, or just the smell of the hot glass of the vacuum tubes. Whatever it is, once you smell it, you’ll never forget it

join-hack-chatFor some of us, that first whiff starts a lifelong passion for vintage gear. Keri Szafir knows quite well what it’s like to be bitten by the vintage bug, so much so that she goes by “The Vacuum Tube Witch” over on her YouTube channel. Her projects include repairs and restorations of vintage amps and radios, and even new builds with old tubes. She’ll stop by the Hack Chat to talk about vintage electronics, tube hoarding collecting, and even her new interest in retro display technologies. Where there’s a tube, there’s a way!

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

A white clock with a house profile sits on a variegated grey background. A yellow skein of yarn sits on the top left side of the clock feeding into a circular loom that takes up the bulk of the center. A yellow scarf extends out the back of the clock and out of frame below the image.

Knitting Clock Makes You A Scarf For Next Year

January 23, 2023 by 17 Comments

Time got a little wibbly wobbly during these pandemic years. Perhaps we would’ve had a more tangible connection to it if [Siren Elise Wilhelmsen]’s knitting clock had been in our living rooms.

Over the course of a year, [Wilhelmsen]’s clock can stitch a two meter scarf by performing a stitch every half hour. She says, “Time is an ever forward-moving force and I wanted to make a clock based on times true nature, more than the numbers we have attached to it.” Making the invisible visible isn’t always an easy feat, but seeing a clock grow a scarf is reminiscent of cartoon characters growing a beard to organically communicate the passage of time.

We’d love some more details about the knitting machine itself, but that seems like it wasn’t the focus of the project. A very small run of these along with a couple prototypes were built, with a knitting grandfather clock now occupying the lobby of The Thief hotel in Oslo.

If you’re looking for more knitting machines, checkout this Knitting Machine Rebuild or Knitting 3D Models Into Stuffies.

Continue reading “Knitting Clock Makes You A Scarf For Next Year” →