A Wood Chipper From First Principles

June 28, 2025 by 10 Comments

For whatever reason, certain pieces of technology can have a difficult time interacting with the physical world. Anyone who has ever used a printer or copier can attest to this, as can anyone whose robot vacuum failed to detect certain types of non-vacuumable waste in their path, making a simple problem much worse. Farm equipment often falls into this category as well, where often complex machinery needs an inordinate amount of maintenance and repair just to operate normally. Wood chippers specifically seem to always get jammed or not work at all, so [Homemade Inventions] took a shot at building one on their own.

To build this screw-based wood chipper, the first thing to fabricate is the screw mechanism itself. A number of circles of thick steel were cut out and then shaped into pieces resembling large lock washers. These were then installed on a shaft and welded end-to-end, creating the helical screw mechanism. With the “threads” of the screw sharpened it is placed into a cylinder with a port cut out to feed the wood into. Powering the screw is a 3 kW electric motor paired with a custom 7:1 gearbox, spinning the screw at around 200 rpm. With that, [Homemade Inventions] has been able to easily chip branches up to 5 centimeters thick, and theorizes that it could chip branches even thicker than that.

Of course, wood chippers are among the more dangerous tools that are easily available to anyone with enough money to buy one or enough skill to build one, along with chainsaws, angle grinders, and table saws, so make sure to take appropriate safety precautions when using or building any of these things. Of course, knowing the dangers of these tools have led to people attempting to make safer versions like this self-propelled chainsaw mill or the semi-controversial table saw safety standard.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

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Building A 3D-Printed RC Dump Truck

June 27, 2025 by 1 Comment

Whatever your day job, many of us would love to jump behind the controls of a dump truck for a lark. In the real world, that takes training and expertise and the opportunity is denied to many of us. However, you can live out those dreams on your desk with this 3D-printed build from [ProfessorBoots.]

The build exists as two separate parts—the tractor, and the trailer. The tractor is effectively a fairly straightforward custom RC build, albeit with a few additional features to make it fit for purpose. It’s got six wheels as befitting a proper semi, and it has a nifty retractable magnetic hitch mechanism. This lets it hook up to various trailers and unhitch from them as desired, all from a press on the remote. The hitch also has provision for power and control lines that control whatever trailer happens to be attached.

As for the trailer, it’s a side-dumper that can drop its load to the left or right as desired. The dumping is controlled via a linear actuator using a small DC motor and a threaded rod. A servo controls a sliding locking mechanism which determines whether the truck dumps to the left or right as the linear actuator rises up.

The design video covers the 3D printed design as well as some great action shots of the dump truck doing its thing. We’ve featured some builds from [ProfessorBoots] before, too, like this neat 3D-printed forklift . Video after the break.

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All The Stars, All The Time

June 27, 2025 by 5 Comments

Some of the largest objects in the night sky to view through a telescope are galaxies and supernova remnants, often many times larger in size than the moon but generally much less bright. Even so, they take up a mere fraction of the night sky, with even the largest planets in our solar system only taking up a few arcseconds and stars appearing as point sources. There are more things to look at in the sky than there are telescopes, regardless of size, so it might almost seem like an impossible task to see everything. Yet that’s what this new telescope in Chile aims to do.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory plans to image the entire sky every few nights over a period lasting for ten years. This will allow astronomers to see the many ways the cosmos change with more data than has ever been available to them. The field of view of the telescope is about 3.5 degrees in diameter, so it needs to move often and quickly in order to take these images. At first glance the telescope looks like any other large, visible light telescope on the tops of the Andes, Mauna Kea, or the Canary Islands. But it has a huge motor to move it, as well as a large sensor which generates a 3200-megapixel image every 30 seconds.

In many ways the observatory’s telescope an imaging technology is only the first part of the project. A number of machine learning algorithms and other software solutions have been created to help astronomers sift through the huge amount of data the telescope is generating and find new irregularities in the data, from asteroids to supernovae. First light for the telescope was this month, June 2025, and some of the first images can be seen here. There have been a number of interesting astronomical observations underway lately even excluding the JWST. Take a look at this solar telescope which uses a new algorithm to take much higher resolution images than ever before.

GEEKDeck Is A SteamDeck For Your Living Room

June 27, 2025 by 19 Comments

You know what the worst thing about the Steam Deck is? Being able to play your games on the go. Wouldn’t it be better if it was a screenless brick that lived under your TV? Well, maybe not, but at least one person thought so, because [Interfacing Linux] has created the GeekDeck, a Steam OS console of sorts in this video embedded below.

The hack is as simple as can be: he took a GEEKOM A5, a minicomputer with very similar specs to the Steam Deck, and managed to load SteamOS onto it. We were expecting that to be a trial that took most of the video’s runtime, but no! Everything just… sorta worked. It booted to a live environment and installed like any other Linux. Which was unexpected, but Steam has released SteamOS for PC. 

In case you weren’t aware, SteamOS is an immutable distribution based on Arch Linux. Arch of course has all the drivers to run on… well, any modern PC, but it’s the immutable part that we were expecting to cause problems. Immutable distributions are locked down in a similar manner to Mac OS (everything but /home/ is typically read-only, even to the superuser) and SteamOS doesn’t ship with package manager that can get around this, like rpm-ostree in Fedora’s Silverblue ecosystem. Actually, if you don’t have a hardware package that matches the SteamDeck to the same degree this GEEKOM does, Bazzite might be a good bet– it’s based on Siverblue and was made to be SteamOS for PC, before Steam let you download their OS to try on your PC.

Anyway, you can do it. Should you? Well, based on the performance shown in the video, not if you want to run triple-A games locally. This little box is no more powerful than the SteamDeck, after all. It’s not a full gaming rig. Still, it was neat to see SteamOS off of the ‘deck and in the wild.

Usually we see hacks that use the guts of the SteamDeck guts with other operating systems, not the other way around. Like the Bento Box AR machine we liked so much it was actually  featured twice.  The SteamDeck makes for a respectable SBC, if you can find a broken one. If not, apparently a Chinese MiniPC will work just as well.

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Standing Desk Uses Pneumatics To Do The Job

June 27, 2025 by 6 Comments

Most standing desks on the market use electric motors or hand cranks to raise and lower the deck. However, [Matthias Wandel] found a Kloud standing desk that used an altogether different set up. He set about figuring out how it worked in the old-fashioned way—by pulling it apart.

The Kloud desk relies on pneumatics rather than electrical actuators to move up and down. Inside the desk sits a small tank that can be pressurized with a hand-cranked mechanism. A lever can then be used to release pressure from this tank into a pair of pneumatic cylinders that drive the top of the desk upwards. The two cylinders are kept moving in sync by a tensioned metal ribbon that ties the two sides together. The mechanism is not unlike a gas lift chair—holding the lever and pushing down lets the desk move back down. Once he’s explained the basic mechanism, [Matthias] gets into the good stuff—pulling apart the leg actuator mechanism to show us what’s going on inside in greater detail.

If you’ve ever thought about building your own standing desk, this might be a video worth watching. We’ve featured some other great pneumatics projects before, too. Video after the break.

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Can Digital Poison Corrupt The Algorithm?

June 27, 2025 by 24 Comments

These days, so much of what we see online is delivered by social media algorithms. The operations of these algorithms are opaque to us; commentators forever speculate as to whether they just show us what they think we want to see, or whether they try to guide our thinking and habits in a given direction. The Digital Poison device  from [Lucretia], [Auxence] and [Ramon] aims to twist and bend the algorithm to other ends.

The concept is simple enough. The device consists of a Raspberry Pi 5 operating on a Wi-Fi network. The Pi is set up with scripts to endlessly play one or more select YouTube videos on a loop. The videos aren’t to be watched by anyone; the device merely streams them to rack up play counts and send data to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The idea is that as the device plays certain videos, it will skew what YouTube recommends to users sharing the same WiFi network based on perceived viewer behavior.

To achieve subtle influence, the device is built inside an unobtrusive container. The idea being that it could be quietly connected to a given WiFi network to stream endlessly, in turn subtly influencing the view habits of other users on the same network.

It’s difficult to say how well this concept would work in practice. In many cases, sites like YouTube have robust user tracking that feeds into recommendation algorithms. Activity from a random user signed into the same network might not have much of an influence. However, conceptually, it’s quite interesting, and the developers have investigated ways to log the devices operation and compare it to recommendations fed to users on the network. Privacy provisions make this difficult, but it may be possible to pursue further research in this area. Files are on Github for the curious.

Ultimately, algorithms will always be a controversial thing as long as the public can’t see how they work or what they do. If you’re working on any projects of your own in this space, don’t hesitate to let us know!

[Thanks to Asher for the tip!]

Hackaday Podcast Episode 326: A DIY Pockels Cell, Funny Materials To 3D Print With, And Pwning A Nissan Leaf

June 27, 2025 by 3 Comments

Time for another European flavoured Hackaday Podcast this week, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, two writers sweltering in the humidity of a Central European summer. Both of our fans and air conditioners made enough noise to be picked up on the microphone when they were turned on, so we’re suffering for your entertainment.

The big Hackaday news stories of the week are twofold, firstly a cat-themed set of winners for the 2025 Pet Hacks contest, and then the announcement of a fresh competition: the 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge. Get your once-a-second projects ready!

This week gave us a nice pile of interesting hacks, including some next-level work growing and machining the crystal for a home-made Pockels cell light valve, an upcoming technique for glass 3D prints, and enough vulnerabilities to make any Nissan Leaf owner nervous. We note that mechanical 7-segment displays are an arena showing excellent hacks, and we’re here for it.

Meanwhile among the quick hacks a filament made of PLA with a PETG core caught Elliot’s eye, while Jenny was impressed with a beautifully-made paper tape punch. Finally in the can’t miss section, The latest in Dan Maloney’s Mining and Refining series looks at drilling and blasting. Such an explosive piece should come last, but wait! There’s more! Al Williams gives us a potted history of satellite phones, and explains why you don’t carry an Iridium in your pocket.

Or download it your own fine self. MP3 for free!

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