A man aims the LED flashlight into the night sky.

The World’s Longest Range LED Flashlight

May 13, 2025 by 39 Comments

[ApprehensiveHawk6178] reports that they have made the world’s longest range LED flashlight! While technically “handheld”, you’re gonna need both hands for this monster. According to the creator, it draws 1.2 kW (20 A @ 60 V) to deliver 100,000 lumens and approximately 20,000,000 candelas.

This spotlight is made from 48 white LEDs, wired in 16S3P configuration, and is powered by a similarly beefy 20S2P battery pack. That 1.2 kW power draw generates a lot of heat which is dissipated with an array of heat sinks and five cooling fans. Total cost was in the order of $2,000 USD.

It can be controlled via Bluetooth, and can run from its batteries for 30 minutes at full power. If you’d like to geek out over the specs click-through and read the discussion, a lot of technical detail is given and there are a bunch of photos showing the internals and assembly.

We’ve seen high-output LED lights with water cooling in the past, and wonder if that might be the next step for this particular build.

Thanks to [kms] for the tip.

Triggering Lightning And Safely Guiding It Using A Drone

May 9, 2025 by 43 Comments

Every year lightning strikes cause a lot of damage — with the high-voltage discharges being a major risk to buildings, infrastructure, and the continued existence of squishy bags of mostly salty water. While some ways exist to reduce their impact such as lightning rods, these passive systems can only be deployed in select locations and cannot prevent the build-up of the charge that leads up to the plasma discharge event. But the drone-based system recently tested by Japan’s NTT, the world’s fourth largest telecommunications company, could provide a more proactive solution.

The idea is pretty simple: fly a drone that is protected by a specially designed metal cage close to a thundercloud with a conductive tether leading back to the ground. By providing a very short path to ground, the built-up charge in said cloud will readily discharge into this cage and from there back to the ground.

To test this idea, NTT researchers took commercial drones fitted with such a protective cage and exposed them to artificial lightning. The drones turned out to be fine up to 150 kA which is five times more than natural lightning. Afterwards the full system was tested with a real thunderstorm, during which the drone took a hit and kept flying, although the protective cage partially melted.

Expanding on this experiment, NTT imagines that a system like this could protect cities and sensitive areas, and possibly even use and store the thus captured energy rather than just leading it to ground. While this latter idea would need some seriously effective charging technologies, the idea of proactively discharging thunderclouds is perhaps not so crazy. We would need to see someone run the numbers on the potential effectiveness, of course, but we are all in favor of (safe) lightning experiments like this.

If you’re wondering why channeling lightning away from critical infrastructure is such a big deal, you may want to read up on Apollo 12.

A Bicycle Is Abandonware Now? Clever Hack Rescues Dead Light

April 24, 2025 by 75 Comments

A bicycle is perhaps one of the most repairable pieces of equipment one can own — no matter what’s wrong with it, and wherever you are on the planet, you’ll be able to find somebody to fix your bike without too much trouble. Unfortunately as electric bikes become more popular, predatory manufacturers are doing everything they can to turn a bike into a closed machine, only serviceable by them.

That’s bad enough, but it’s even worse if the company happens to go under. As an example, [Fransisco] has a bike built by a company that has since gone bankrupt. He doesn’t name them, but it looks like a VanMoof to us. The bike features a light built into the front of the top tube of the frame, which if you can believe it, can only be operated by the company’s (now nonfunctional) cloud-based app.

The hack is relatively straightforward. The panel for the VanMoof electronics is removed and the works underneath are slid up the tube, leaving the connector to the front light. An off the shelf USB-C Li-Po charger and a small cell take the place of the original parts under a new 3D printed panel with a switch to run the light via a suitable resistor. If it wasn’t for the startling green color of the filament he used, you might not even know it wasn’t original.

We would advise anyone who will listen, that hardware which relies on an app and a cloud service should be avoided at all costs. We know most Hackaday readers will be on the same page as us on this one, but perhaps it’s time for a cycling manifesto to match our automotive one.

Thanks [cheetah_henry] for the tip.

The GRIP-tape robot picking a lemon

Robot Picks Fruit And Changes Light Bulbs With Measuring Tape

April 18, 2025 by 9 Comments

How far can you stretch a measuring tape before it buckles? The answer probably depends more on the tape than the user, but it does show how sturdy the coiled spring steel rulers can be. [Gengzhi He et. al.] may have been playing that game in the lab at UC San Diego when they hit upon the idea for a new kind of low-cost robotic gripper.

An image of the GRIP-tape robot described in the article, showing the tape-loop fingers.
Four motors, four strips of measuring tape (doubled up)– one robot hand.

With the lovely backronym “GRIP-tape” — standing for Grasping and Rolling in Plane — you get a sense for what this effector can do. Its two “fingers” are each made of loops of doubled-up measuring tape bound together with what looks suspiciously like duck tape. With four motors total, the fingers can be lengthened or shortened by spooling the tape, allowing  a reaching motion, pivot closer or further apart for grasping, and move-in-place like conveyor belts, rotating the object in their grasp.

The combination means it can reach out, grab a light bulb, and screw it into a socket. Or open and decant a jar of spices. Another video shows the gripper reaching out to pick a lemon, and gently twist it off the tree. It’s quite a performance for a device with such modest components.

At the moment, the gripper is controlled via remote; the researchers plan on adding sensors and AI autonomous control. Read all the details in the preprint, or check below the fold to watch the robot in action.

This is hardly the first time we’ve highlighted a grabby robot. We’ve seen belts, we’ve seen origami — but this is the first time we’ve seen a measuring tape. Have you seen a cool robot? Toss us a tip. We’d love to hear from you. Continue reading “Robot Picks Fruit And Changes Light Bulbs With Measuring Tape” →

Chase Light SAO Shouldn’t Have Used A 555, And Didn’t

March 27, 2025 by 13 Comments

Around these parts, projects needlessly using a microcontroller where a simpler design would do are often derided with the catch-all “Should have used a 555,” even if the venerable timer chip wouldn’t have been the ideal solution. But the sentiment stands that a solution more complicated than it needs to be is probably one that needs rethinking, as this completely mechanical chaser light badge Simple Add-On (SAO) aptly demonstrates.

Rather than choosing any number of circuits to turn a strip of discrete lights on and off, [Johannes] took inspiration for his chaser lights from factory automation mechanisms that move parts between levels on steps that move out of phase with each other, similar to the marble-raising mechanism used in [Wintergatan]’s Marble Machine X.

Two thin plates with notches around the edge are sandwiched together inside the 3D printed case of the SAO, between the face and the light source. A small motor and a series of gears rotate the two masks 180° out of phase with each other, which creates the illusion that the light is moving.

It’s pretty convincing; when we first saw the video below, we were sure it was a row of tiny LEDs around the edge of the badge.

Hats off to [Johannes] for coming up with such a clever mechanism and getting it working just in time for Hackaday Europe. If you need to catch up on the talks, we’ve got a playlist ready for you.

Continue reading “Chase Light SAO Shouldn’t Have Used A 555, And Didn’t” →

Producing Syngas From CO2 And Sunlight With Direct Air Capture

March 21, 2025 by 17 Comments
The prototype DACCU device for producing syngas from air. (Credit: Sayan Kar, University of Cambridge)

There is more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere these days than ever before in human history, and while it would be marvelous to use these carbon atoms for something more useful, capturing CO2 directly from the air isn’t that easy. After capturing it would also be great if you could do something more with it than stuff it into a big hole. Something like producing syngas (CO + H2) for example, as demonstrated by researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Among the improvements claimed in the paper as published in Nature Energy for this direct air capture and utilization (DACCU) approach are that it does not require pure CO2 feedstock, but will adsorb it directly from the air passing over a bed of solid silica-amine. After adsorption, the CO2 can be released again by exposure to concentrated light. Following this the conversion to syngas is accomplished by passing it over a second bed consisting of silica/alumina-titania-cobalt bis(terpyridine), that acts as a photocatalyst.

The envisioned usage scenario would be CO2 adsorption during the night, with concentrated solar power releasing it the day with subsequent production of syngas. Inlet air would be passed only over the adsorption section before switching the inlet off during the syngas generating phase. As a lab proof-of-concept it seems to work well, with outlet air stripped from virtually all CO2 and very high conversion ratio from CO2 to syngas.

Syngas has historically been used as a replacement for gasoline, but is also used as a source of hydrogen (e.g. steam reformation (SMR) of natural gas) where it’s used for reduction of iron ore, as well as the production of methanol as a precursor to many industrial processes. Whether this DACCU approach provides a viable alternative to SMR and other existing technologies will become clear once this technology moves from the lab into the real world.

Thanks to [Dan] for the tip.

DIY Your Own Red Light Therapy Gear

March 18, 2025 by 103 Comments

There are all kinds of expensive beauty treatments on the market — various creams, zappy lasers, and fine mists of heavily-refined chemicals. For [Ruth Amos], a $78,000 LED bed had caught her eye, and she wondered if she could recreate the same functionality on the cheap.

The concept behind [Ruth]’s build is simple enough. Rather than buy a crazy-expensive off-the-shelf beauty product, she decided to just buy equivalent functional components: a bunch of cheap red LEDs. Then, all she had to do was build these into a facemask and loungewear set to get the same supposed skin improving benefits at much lower cost.

[Ruth] started her build with a welding mask, inside which she fitted red LED strips of the correct wavelength for beneficial skin effects. She then did the same with an over-sized tracksuit, lacing it with an array of LED strips to cover as much of the body as possible. While it’s unlikely she was able to achieve the same sort of total body coverage as a full-body red light bed, nor was it particularly comfortable—her design cost a lot less—on the order of $100 or so.

Of course, you might question the light therapy itself. We’re not qualified to say whether or not red LEDs will give you better skin, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen a DIY attempt at light therapy. Continue reading “DIY Your Own Red Light Therapy Gear” →