A 3D-printed, hand-cranked, toy conveyor belt designed after the transporter belts in Factorio.

Designing A Toy Conveyor Belt For Fun And Profit

March 5, 2025 by 5 Comments

[Hope This Works] wants to someday build a tiny factory line in the garage, with the intent of producing some simple widget down the line. But what is a tiny factory without tiny conveyor belts? Not a very productive one, that’s for sure.

As you may have noticed, this is designed after the transporter belts from the game Factorio. [Hope This Works] ultimately wants something functional that’s small enough to fit in one hand and has that transporter belt aesthetic going. He also saw this as a way to level up his CAD skills from approximately 1, and as you’ll see in the comprehensive video after the break, that definitely happened.

And so [Hope This Works] started by designing the all-important sprockets. He found a little eight-toothed number on McMaster-Carr and used the drawing for reference. From there, he designed the rest of the parts around the sprockets, adding a base so that it can sit on the desk or be held in the hand.

For now, this proof-of-concept is hand-cranked. We especially love that [Hope This Works] included a square hole for the crank handle to stand in when not in use. Be sure to check out the design/build video after the break to see it in action.

How happy would you be to see Factorio come up in a job interview?

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Piggyback Board Brings Touch Sensing To USB Soldering Iron

March 5, 2025 by 20 Comments

The current generation of USB-powered soldering irons have a lot going for them, chief among them being portability and automatic start and stop. But an iron that turns off in the middle of soldering a joint is a problem, one that this capacitive-touch replacement control module aims to fix.

The iron in question is an SJ1 from Awgem, which [DoganM95] picked up on Ali Express. It seems well-built, with a sturdy aluminum handle, a nice OLED display, and fast heat-up and cool-down. The problem is that the iron is triggered by motion, so if you leave it still for more than a second or two, such as when you’re soldering a big joint, it turns itself off. To fix that,[DoganM95] designed a piggyback board for the OEM controller with a TTP223 capacitive touch sensor. The board is carefully shaped to allow clearance for the existing PCB components and the heater cartridge terminals, and has castellated connections so it can connect to pads on the main board. You have to remove one MOSFET from the main board, but that’s about it for modifications. A nickel strip makes contact with the inside of the iron’s shell, turning it into the sensor plate for the TTP223.

[DoganM95] says that the BA6 variant of the chip is the one you want, as others have a 10-second timeout, which would defeat the purpose of the mod. It’s a very nice bit of design work, and we especially like how the mod board nests so nicely onto the OEM controller. It reminds us a little of those Quansheng handy-talkie all-band mods.

Haptic Displays Bring Sports To The Vision Impaired

March 5, 2025 by 3 Comments

When it comes to the majority of sports broadcasting, it’s all about the visual. The commentators call the plays, of course, but everything you’re being shown at home is on a screen. Similarly, if you’re in the stadium, it’s all about getting the best possible view from the best seats in the house.

Ultimately, the action can be a little harder to follow for the vision impaired. However, one company is working hard to make sports more accessible to everyone. Enter OneCourt, and their haptic sports display technology.

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Is This The Oldest HD Video Online?

March 5, 2025 by 35 Comments

Take a look at this video from [Reely Interesting], showing scenes from traditional Japanese festivals. It’s well filmed, and as with any HD video, you can see real detail. But as you watch, you may see something a little out of the ordinary. It’s got noise, a little bit of distortion, and looking closely at the surroundings, it’s clearly from the 1980s. Something doesn’t add up, as surely we’d expect a video like this to be shot in glorious 525 line NTSC. In fact, what we’re seeing is a very rare demo reel from 1985, and it’s showing off the first commercial HDTV system. This is analogue video in 1035i, and its background as listed below the video makes for a very interesting story.

Most of us think of HDTV arriving some time in the 2000s when Blu-ray and digital broadcasting supplanted the NTSC or PAL systems. But in fact the Japanese companies had been experimenting since the 1960s, and these recordings are their first fruits. It’s been digitized from a very rare still-working Sony HDV-1000 reel-to-reel video recorder, and is thus possibly the oldest HD video viewable online. They’re looking for any HDV-1000 parts, should you happen to have one lying around. Meanwhile, the tape represents a fascinating window into a broadcast history very few of us had a chance to see back in the day.

This isn’t the first time we’ve touched on vintage reel-to-reel video.

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Big Chemistry: Glass

March 5, 2025 by 12 Comments

Humans have been chemically modifying their world for far longer than you might think. Long before they had the slightest idea of what was happening chemically, they were turning clay into bricks, making cement from limestone, and figuring out how to mix metals in just the right proportions to make useful new alloys like bronze. The chemical principles behind all this could wait; there was a world to build, after all.

Among these early feats of chemical happenstance was the discovery that glass could be made from simple sand. The earliest glass, likely accidentally created by a big fire on a sandy surface, probably wasn’t good for much besides decorations. It wouldn’t have taken long to realize that this stuff was fantastically useful, both as a building material and a tool, and that a pinch of this and a little of that could greatly affect its properties. The chemistry of glass has been finely tuned since those early experiments, and the process has been scaled up to incredible proportions, enough to make glass production one of the largest chemical industries in the world today.

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China Claims Commercial Nuclear Fusion By 2050 As Germany Goes Stellarator

March 5, 2025 by 48 Comments

Things are heating up in the world of nuclear fusion research, with most fundamental issues resolved and an increasing rate of announcements being made regarding commercial fusion power. China’s CNNC is one of the most recent voices here, with their statement that they expect to have commercial nuclear fusion plants online by 2050. Although scarce on details, China is one of the leading nations when it comes to nuclear fusion research, with multiple large tokamaks, including the HL-2M and the upcoming CFETR which we covered a few years ago.

Stellaris stellarator. (Credit: Proxima Fusion)

In addition to China’s fusion-related news, a German startup called Proxima Fusion announced their Stellaris commercial fusion plant design concept, with a targeted grid connection by the 2030s. Of note is that this involves a stellarator design, which has the major advantage of inherent plasma stability, dodging the confinement mode and Greenwald density issues that plague tokamaks. The Stellaris design is an evolution of the famous Wendelstein 7-X research stellarator at the Max Planck Institute.

While Wendelstein 7-X was not designed to produce power, it features everything from the complex coiled design and cooled divertors plus demonstrated long-term operation that a commercial reactor would need. This makes it quite likely that the coming decades we’ll be seeing the end spurt for commercial fusion power, with conceivably stellarators being the unlikely winner long before tokamaks cross the finish line.