Upgrading An Old Espresso Machine

June 14, 2025 by 25 Comments
The Francis! Francis! X1 espresso machine in its assembled state. (Credit: Samuel Leeuwenburg)

Recently, [Samuel Leeuwenburg] got his paws on a Francis! Francis! X1 (yes, that’s the name) espresso machine. This is the espresso machine that is mostly famous for having been in a lot of big TV shows in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, the X1 even became a pretty good espresso machine after the manufacturer did some more tinkering with it, including changing the boiler material, upgrading the pump, etc.

In the case of the second-hand, but rarely used, machine that [Samuel] got, the machine still looked pretty good, but its performance was pretty abysmal. After popping the machine open the boiler turned out to be pretty much full of scale. Rather than just cleaning it, the boiler was upgraded to a brass version for better heat retention and other perks.

Continue reading “Upgrading An Old Espresso Machine” →

Wood bent into a spiral

Make Magical-Looking Furniture With Kerf Bend Wizard

June 14, 2025 by 26 Comments

The intersection between “woodworkers” and “programmers” is not a densely populated part of the Venn diagram, but [Michael Schiebler] is there with his Kerf Bend Wizard to help us make wood twist and bend like magic.

Kerf bending is a fine technique we have covered before: by cutting away material on the inside face of a piece of wood, you create an area weak enough to allow for bending. The question becomes: how much wood do I remove? And where? That’s where Kerf Bend Wizard comes to the rescue.

More after the break…

Continue reading “Make Magical-Looking Furniture With Kerf Bend Wizard” →

The Switch 2 Pro Controller: Prepare For Glue And Fragile Parts

June 14, 2025 by 33 Comments
The Switch 2 Pro controller’s battery is technically removable, if you can get to it. (Credit: VK’s Channel, YouTube)

For those of us who have worked on SNES and GameCube controllers, we know that these are pretty simple to get into and maintain. However, in the trend of making modern game controllers more complex and less maintainable, Nintendo’s new Switch 2 Pro controller is giving modern Xbox and PlayStation controllers a run for their money in terms of repair complexity. As shown in a teardown by [VK] on YouTube (starting at nine minutes in), the first step is a disappointing removal of the glued-on front plate. After that you are dealing with thin plastic, the typical flimsy ribbon cables and a lot of screws.

The main controller IC on the primary PCB is an ARM-based MediaTek MT3689BCA Bluetooth SoC, which is also used in the Switch 2’s Joy-Cons. The 3.87 V, 1070 mAh Li-ion battery is connected to the PCB with a connector, but getting to it during a battery replacement might be a bit of a chore.

Continue reading “The Switch 2 Pro Controller: Prepare For Glue And Fragile Parts” →

A clock face is shown consisting of two rings of plastic, with backlighting behind one of the rings. There is red light at the one o’clock position, and blue light at the nine-thirty position. A black plastic arm is pointing to the three-thirty position.

A Concentric Clock With Multiple Modes

June 14, 2025 by No comments

Most of us spend our lives within reach of a device that provides a clock, stopwatch, and a timer – you’re almost certainly reading this article on such a device – but there are fewer options if you want a screen-free clock. [Michael Suguitan]’s TOKIDOKI rectifies this situation by combining those three functions into a single, physical, analog clock face.

TOKIDOKI displays time by lighting the appropriate segments of two concentric rings of colored LEDs (Adafruit Neopixel rings); the inner ring indicates hours, while the outer ring displays minutes. There is one clock hand, and while it does indicate the passage of time in some situations, its main function is as a dial to control the clock’s different functions. The hand is connected to a Dynamixel XL-330 servo motor, which also serves as a position sensor. Winding the dial clockwise starts a countdown timer, with each successive full rotation switching to a larger unit of time (a fun/unsettling feature is that the largest chronometric unit is the user’s expected lifetime: 84 years). Winding counterclockwise either starts a stopwatch or sets an alarm, depending on how many full rotations you make.

A Raspberry Pi Pico running some MicroPython firmware manages the device and gets the current time from a local network. To soften the light’s quality, the LED rings are pointed backwards to provide back-lighting off of a recessed surface. The entire device is powered by USB-C, and is enclosed in a 3D-printed housing.

This project was designed as an experiment in minimal interfaces, and it certainly achieved that goal, though we imagine that it takes a bit of time to get used to using this clock. We always enjoy seeing innovative clocks here, from digital to analogue, and those that split the difference. Continue reading “A Concentric Clock With Multiple Modes” →

Watkin’s Tower: London’s Failed Eiffel Tower

June 13, 2025 by 8 Comments

The city of London is no stranger to tall constructions today, but long before the first skyscrapers would loom above its streets, Watkin’s Tower was supposed to be the tallest structure in not only London but also the entirety of the UK. Inspired by France’s recently opened Eiffel tower, railway entrepreneur and Member of Parliament [Sir Edward Watkin] wanted to erect a structure that would rival the Eiffel tower, as part of a new attraction park to be constructed near the Middlesex hamlet of Wembley. In a retrospective, [Rob’s London] channel takes a look at what came to be known as Watkin’s Folly among other flattering names.

The first stage of Watkin's Tower at Wembley Park. The only to be ever completed. (Source: Wikimedia)
The first stage of Watkin’s Tower at Wembley Park. The only to be ever completed. (Source: Wikimedia)

After [Gustave Eiffel], the architect of the Eiffel tower recused himself, a design competition was held for a tower design, with the Illustrated Catalogue of the 68 designs submitted available for our perusal. The winner turned out to be #37, an eight-legged, 366 meter tall tower, much taller than the 312.2 meter tall Eiffel tower, along with multiple observation decks and various luxuries to be enjoyed by visitors to Wembley Park.

Naturally, [Watkin] commissioned a redesign to make it cheaper, which halved the number of legs, causing subsidence of the soil and other grievances later on. Before construction could finish, the responsible company went bankrupt and the one constructed section was demolished by 1907. Despite this, Wembley Park was a success and remains so to this day with Wembley Stadium built where Watkin’s Folly once stood.

Continue reading “Watkin’s Tower: London’s Failed Eiffel Tower” →

Open A Portal To An NES Emulator

June 13, 2025 by 2 Comments

The Portal games were revolutionary not only for their puzzle-based, narrative-driven gameplay, but also for their unique physics engine, which let players open portals anywhere and conserve momentum and direction through them. They’re widely regarded as some of the best video games ever made, but even beyond that they have some extra features that aren’t talked about as much. Namely, there are a number of level editors and mods that allow the in-game components to be used to build things like logic gates and computers, and this project goes even further by building a working NES emulator, all within Portal 2.

The main limitation here is that Portal 2 can only support a certain number of in-game objects without crashing, far lower than what would be needed to directly emulate NES hardware. The creator of the project, [PortalRunner], instead turned to Squirrel, the Portal 2 scripting language, and set about porting an existing NES emulator called smolnes to this scripting language. This is easier said than done, as everything in the code needs to be converted eight bits and then all of the pointers in smolnes need to be converted to use arrays, since Squirrel doesn’t support pointers at all. As can be easily imagined, this led to a number of bugs that needed to be sorted out before the game would run at all.

For those interested in code golfing, porting, or cross-compatibility, this project is a master class not only in the intricacies of the Portal 2 scripting language but in the way the NES behaves as well, not to mention the coding skill needed to recognize unique behaviors of the C language and the Squirrel scripting language. But eventually [PortalRunner] is able to get Super Mario Bros. running in Portal 2, albeit with low resolution and frame rate. Since we heard you like games within games, someone else put DOOM inside DOOM so you can DOOM while you DOOM.

Continue reading “Open A Portal To An NES Emulator” →

How A DIY Chicken Coop Door Opener Went From Simple To Complex

June 13, 2025 by 18 Comments

How hard could it be to make a chicken coop door that can be configured to open and close automatically using a straightforward interface? That’s the question that [Jeff Sandberg] set out with, after three years of using a more basic off-the-shelf unit that offered no remote access nor a convenient user interface. The use case for [Jeff] was rather straightforward: the door would be open during the day and closed at night to keep the hens safely inside the coop.

The commercial solution offered an RTC-backed programmable interface as well as a light sensor, but the latter wasn’t always reliable in inclement weather and making simple changes to the programming when e.g. the hens had to stay inside a day due to work on the yard, was much more complicated than needed, plus had to be done on the spot. The new system would solve all these ills.

That said, the existing door mechanism was doing a fine job and could be kept. This just left making a new box with electronics to control it, starting with an ESP32C3 with the ESPHome firmware that is hooked into the local Home Assistant system, along with a motor to lift and lower the door and with magnetic contact sensors.

So far so easy. The hard part came with the installation, which involved trenching to the hen house for mains power, repairing the damage from this, and troubleshooting a power issue that turned out to be due to a dodgy power adapter. The payoff is that now the chicken coop is also part of the smart home and their owner never has to trudge through a soggy garden again to adjust the programming on a dim LC display with far too few buttons.