The green CRT display of a scanning-electron microscope is shown, displaying small particles.

DIY Calibration Target For Electron Microscopes

June 12, 2025 by 3 Comments

It’s a problem that few of us will ever face, but if you ever have to calibrate your scanning electron microscope, you’ll need a resolution target with a high contrast under an electron beam. This requires an extremely small pattern of alternating high and low-density materials, which [ProjectsInFlight] created in his latest video by depositing gold nanoparticles on a silicon slide.

[ProjectsInFlight]’s scanning electron microscope came from a lab that discarded it as nonfunctional, and as we’ve seen before, he’s since been getting it back into working condition. When it was new, it could magnify 200,000 times and resolve features of 5.5 nm, and a resolution target with a range of feature sizes would indicate how high a magnification the microscope could still reach. [ProjectsInFlight] could also use the target to make before-and-after comparisons for his repairs, and to properly adjust the electron beam.

Since it’s easy to get very flat silicon wafers, [ProjectsInFlight] settled on these as the low-density portion of the target, and deposited a range of sizes of gold nanoparticles onto them as the high-density portion. To make the nanoparticles, he started by dissolving a small sample of gold in aqua regia to make chloroauric acid, then reduced this back to gold nanoparticles using sodium citrate. This gave particles in the 50-100 nanometer range, but [ProjectsInFlight] also needed some larger particles. This proved troublesome for a while, until he learned that he needed to cool the reaction temperature solution to near freezing before making the nanoparticles.

Using these particles, [ProjectsInFlight] was able to tune the astigmatism settings on the microscope’s electron beam so that it could clearly resolve the larger particles, and just barely see the smaller particles – quite an achievement considering that they’re under 100 nanometers across!

Electron microscopes are still a pretty rare build, but not unheard-of. If you ever find one that’s broken, it could be a worthwhile investment.

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Red and black grabber combat robot

Step Into Combat Robotics With Project SVRN!

June 11, 2025 by 4 Comments

We all love combat robotics for its creative problem solving; trying to fit drivetrains and weapon systems in a small and light package is never as simple as it appears to be. When you get to the real lightweights… throw everything you know out the window! [Shoverobotics] saw this as a barrier for getting into the 150g weight class, so he created the combat robotics platform named Project SVRN.

You want 4-wheel drive? It’s got it! Wedge or a Grabber? Of course! Anything else you can imagine? Feel free to add and modify the platform to your heart’s content! Controlled by a Malenki Nano, a receiver and motor controller combo board, the SVRN platform allows anyone to get into fairyweight fights with almost no experience.

With 4 N10 motors giving quick control, the platform acts as an excellent platform for various bot designs. Though the electronics and structure are rather simple, the most important and impressive part of Project SVRN is the detailed documentation for every part of building the bot. You can find and follow the documentation yourself from [Shoverobotics]’s Printables page here!

If you already know every type of coil found in your old Grav-Synthesized Vex-Flux from your Whatsamacallit this might not be needed for you, but many people trying to get into making need a ramp to shoot for the stars. For those needing more technical know-how in combat robotics, check out Kitten Mittens, a bot that uses its weapon for locomotion!

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Hacking T Cells To Treat Celiac Disease

June 11, 2025 by 14 Comments

As there is no cure for celiac disease, people must stick to a gluten free diet to remain symptom-free. While this has become easier in recent years, scientists have found some promising results in mice for disabling the disease. [via ScienceAlert]

Since celiac is an auto-immune disorder, finding ways to alter the immune response to gluten is one area of investigation to alleviate the symptoms of the disease. Using a so-called “inverse vaccine,” researchers “engineered regulatory T cells (eTregs) modified to orthotopically express T cell receptors specific to gluten peptides could quiet gluten-reactive effector T cells.”

The reason these are called “inverse vaccines” is that, unlike a traditional vaccine that turns up the immune response to a given stimuli, this does the opposite. When the scientists tried the technique with transgenic mice, the mice exhibited resistance to the typical effects of the target gluten antigen and a related type on the digestive system. As with much research, there is still a lot of work to do, including testing resistance to other types of gluten and whether there are still long-term deleterious effects on true celiac digestive systems as the transgenic mice only had HLA-DQ2.5 reactivity.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, we covered “inverse vaccines” in more detail previously.

Compound Press Bends, Punches And Cuts Using 3D Printed Plastic

June 11, 2025 by 7 Comments

It’s not quite “bend, fold or mutilate” but this project comes close– it actually manufactures a spring clip for [Super Valid Designs] PETAL light system. In the video (embedded below) you’ll see why this tool was needed: by-hand manufacturing worked for the prototype, but really would not scale.

Two examples of the spring in question, embedded in the 3D printed light socket. There’s another pair you can’t see.

The lights themselves might be worthy of a post, being a modular, open source DMX stage lighting rig. Today though we’re looking at how they are manufactured– specifically how one part is manufactured. With these PETAL lights, the lights slot into a base station, which obviously requires a connection of some sort. [Super Valid Designs] opted for a spring connector, which is super valid.

It’s also a pain to work by hand: spring steel needed to be cut to length, hole punched, and bent into the specific shape required. The hand-made springs always needed adjustment after assembly, too, which is no good when people are giving you money for objects. Even when using a tent-pole spring that comes halfway to meeting their requirements, [Super Valid Designs] was not happy with the workflow. Continue reading “Compound Press Bends, Punches And Cuts Using 3D Printed Plastic” →

Randomly Generating Atari Games

June 11, 2025 by 25 Comments

They say that if you let a million monkeys type on a million typewriters, they will eventually write the works of Shakespeare. While not quite the same thing [bbenchoff] (why does that sound familiar?), spent some computing cycles to generate random data and, via heuristics, find valid Atari 2600 “games” in the data.

As you might expect, the games aren’t going to be things you want to play all day long. In fact, they are more like demos. However, there are a number of interesting programs, considering they were just randomly generated.

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Network Infrastructure And Demon-Slaying: Virtualization Expands What A Desktop Can Do

June 11, 2025 by 18 Comments

The original DOOM is famously portable — any computer made within at least the last two decades, including those in printers, heart monitors, passenger vehicles, and routers is almost guaranteed to have a port of the iconic 1993 shooter. The more modern iterations in the series are a little trickier to port, though. Multi-core processors, discrete graphics cards, and gigabytes of memory are generally needed, and it’ll be a long time before something like an off-the-shelf router has all of these components.

But with a specialized distribution of Debian Linux called Proxmox and a healthy amount of configuration it’s possible to flip this idea on its head: getting a desktop computer capable of playing modern video games to take over the network infrastructure for a LAN instead, all with minimal impact to the overall desktop experience. In effect, it’s possible to have a router that can not only play DOOM but play 2020’s DOOM Eternal, likely with hardware most of us already have on hand.

The key that makes a setup like this work is virtualization. Although modern software makes it seem otherwise, not every piece of software needs an eight-core processor and 32 GB of memory. With that in mind, virtualization software splits modern multi-core processors into groups which can act as if they are independent computers. These virtual computers or virtual machines (VMs) can directly utilize not only groups or single processor cores independently, but reserved portions of memory as well as other hardware like peripherals and disk drives.

Proxmox itself is a version of Debian with a number of tools available that streamline this process, and it installs on PCs in essentially the same way as any other Linux distribution would. Once installed, tools like LXC for containerization, KVM for full-fledged virtual machines, and an intuitive web interface are easily accessed by the user to allow containers and VMs to be quickly set up, deployed, backed up, removed, and even sent to other Proxmox installations. Continue reading “Network Infrastructure And Demon-Slaying: Virtualization Expands What A Desktop Can Do” →