Turning Up The Heat On HT-PLA’s Marketing

June 9, 2025 by 28 Comments

PLA is probably the most-printed filament on the market these days, and is there any wonder? It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it doesn’t poison you (as quickly as its competitors, anyway). What it doesn’t do very well is take the heat. Polymaker’s new HT-PLA formulation promises to solve that, and [My Tech Fun] put those claims to the test in a recent video.

Polymaker claims its HT-PLA is heat-stable up-to 150 C, but still prints as easily as standard PLA at up to 300 mm/s. By “heat stable” they mean able to maintain dimensions and form at that temperature when not under any load, save perhaps its own weight. If you need high-temp mechanical properties, they also offer a glass-fiber infused HT-PLA-GF that they claim is heat resistant up to 110 C (that is, able to withstand load at that temperature) which is hard to sneeze at, considering you  you could print it on a stock Ender so long as you tossed a hardened nozzle on it.

Now it’s not a free lunch: to get the very best results, you do need to anneal the parts, which can introduce shrinkage and warping in HT-PLA, but that’s where HT-PLA-GF shines. If you want to see the results of the tests you can jump to 19:27 in the video, but the short version is that this is mechanically like PLA and can take the heat.

The verdict? If you like printing PLA and want to shove something in a hot car, you might want to try HT-PLA. Otherwise, it’s just like PLA. It prints like PLA, it looks like PLA, and when cold it behaves mechanically like PLA, which we suppose was rather what Polymaker was going for. There is no word yet on whether the additives that make it high-temp increase off-gassing or toxicity but since this stuff prints like PLA and can stand a little airflow, it should be easy to ventilate, which might make for fewer trade-offs when building an enclosure.

What do you think, will you be trying HT-PLA anytime soon? Let us know in the comments.

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Feline Genetics And Why Orange Cats Are The Most Special

June 9, 2025 by 43 Comments

Recently, butlers to orange-colored cats got a bit of a shock when reading the news, as headlines began to call out their fuzzy feline friends as ‘freaks of nature’ and using similarly uncouth terms. Despite the name-calling, the actual reason for this flurry of feline fascination was more benign — with two teams of scientists independently figuring out the reason why some cats have fur that is orange. Tracking down the reason for this turned out to be far more complicated than assumed, with the fact that about 80% of orange cats are male being only the tip of the cat-shaped iceberg.

It was known to be an X chromosome-linked mutation, but rather than the fur coloring being affected directly, instead the mechanism was deduced to be a suppression of the black-brownish pigmentation (eumelanin) in favor of the orange coloration (pheomelanin). Finding the exact locus of the responsible ‘O gene’ (for orange) in the cat genome has been the challenge for years, which turned out to be a mutation related to the X-linked ARHGAP36 gene, whose altered expression results in the suppression of many melanogenesis genes.

Interestingly, this particular mutation appears to be of a singular origin that apparently persisted over millennia courtesy of the domestication of humans (H. sapiens) by Felis catus.

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Texas’ Right To Repair Bill Is A Signature Away From Becoming Law

June 9, 2025 by 21 Comments

In what could be a big step forward for consumer rights, the Texas Senate recently unanimously voted to pass HB 2963, which references the “Diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of certain digital electronic equipment”. If signed by the governor, this would make Texas the ninth US state to enact such a law, and the seventh pertaining to consumer electronics. Interestingly, this bill saw anti-parts pairing language added, which is something that got stripped from the Oregon bill.

Much like other Right to Repair bills, HB 2963 would require manufacturers to make spare parts, documentation and repair tools available to both consumers and independent repair shops. If signed, the act would take effect in September of 2026. Included in the bill are provisions to prevent overcharging for the provided parts and documentation.

As for how useful this is going to be for consumers, [Louis Rossmann] had a read of the bill and gave his  typically eloquent thoughts. The tl;dw is that while there is a lot of stuff to like, this bill leaves open potentially massive loopholes (e.g. assemblies vs parts), while also carving out massive exemptions, which leaves owners of game consoles, boats, cars, tractors, home appliances, etc. stranded with no new options.

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Nintendo Switch 2 Teardown, Let’s A-Go!

June 9, 2025 by 12 Comments

A new console challenger has appeared, and it goes by the name Nintendo Switch 2. The company’s latest iteration of the home console portable hybrid initially showed promise by featuring a large 1080p display, though very little official footage of the handheld existed prior to the device’s global release last week. However, thanks to a teardown video from [TronicsFix], we’ve got a little more insight into the hardware.

The technical specifications of this new console have been speculated on for the last handful of years. We now know NVIDIA is again providing the main silicon in the form of a custom 8x ARM Cortex A78C processor. Keeping the system powered is a 5220 mAh lithium ion battery that according to [TronicsFix] is held in with some seriously strong adhesive.

On the plus side for repairability, the onboard microphone and headphone jack are each attached by their own ribbon cable to the motherboard. The magnetic controller interfaces are also modular in design as they may one day prove to be a point of failure from repeated detachment. Speaking of which, [TronicsFix] also took apart the new version of the Joy-Con controller that ships with the system.

Arguably the biggest pain point for owners of the original Nintendo Switch was the reliability of the analog sticks on the diminutive controllers. There were widespread reports of “stick drift” that caused players to lose control as onscreen avatars would lazily move in one direction without player input. For the Switch 2, the Joy-Con controllers feature roughly the same number of dome switch buttons as well as haptic feedback motors. The analog sticks are larger in size on the outside, but feature the same general wiper/resistor design of the original. Many will cry foul of the continued use of conventional analog stick design in favor of hall effect sensors, but only time will tell if the Nintendo Switch 2 will repeat history.

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Garden Hose Gets Laminar Flow

June 8, 2025 by 14 Comments

We aren’t sure if [Joshua Bellamy] is serious that he wants a laminar flow to water his plants, but there are many places where having a smooth and predictable flow of water is useful or even essential. With his 3D printed adapter, you can produce laminar flow from any garden hose.

If you haven’t heard the term before, laminar flow is to water what a laser is to light. The water moves in parallel tracks with minimal mixing and turbulence. Ensuring laminar flow is often critical to precise flow metering, for example.

This isn’t [Joshua]’s first attempt. He has made a nozzle like this before, but it required a lot of assembly (“more fiddly bits than a Swedish flat-pack sofa” according to the post). Depending on the version, you’ll need various bits of extra hardware in addition to the 3D printed parts. Some versions have drop-in nuts and even an LED. Fiberglass insulation at the inlet diffuses turbulence, and some manual work on the output provided better results. When everything is working, the output of the hose should look like a glass rod, as you can see in the video below.

Air can also have laminar or non-laminar flow. Laminar air flow in a laser cutter’s air assist can make a big difference. If you don’t fancy 3D printing, you could save some drinking straws from your last few hundred trips to the local fast food emporium.

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Wireless Power Makes For Cable-Free Desk

June 8, 2025 by 33 Comments

Some people hate cables with a passion; others are agnostic and prefer cabled peripherals to having to stop and charge their mouse. [Matt] from DIYPerks has the best of both worlds with this wireless-powered, no-cable desk setup.

The secret is embedded within the plywood desk: an evaluation kit from Etherdyne Technologies, Inc consisting of a 100 W RF power supply and its associated power antenna looping around the desktop edge. The mechanism is similar to the inductive charging often seen on phones nowadays, but at higher frequency and larger scale, enabling power to be transmitted several feet (at least a meter) above the desktop.

The range is impressive (this isn’t the maximum), but the efficiency is not advertised.

The kit from ETI contained several PCB-coil receivers, which [Matt] built into a number of devices, including a lamp, heated cup, microphone, speakers, his mouse, keyboard, and even a custom base to run his monitor, which really shows the power these things can pull.

The microphone is a non-Bluetooth RF unit lovingly modified to studio quality, at least as far as we can tell on laptop speakers through YouTube’s compression. The speakers use a pair of Bluetooth modules to negotiate stereo sound while staying in sync. And before you ask “what about signal for the monitor?”– we have to inform you that was taken care of too, via a wireless HDMI dongle. Check it out in the video below.

Of course the elephant in the room here is power usage — there’s a 10 W base draw, and probably a big hit to efficiency vs cabled-everything– but we figure he gets partway to a pass on that by using a Frameworks mainboard instead desktop hardware. Indeed, a full analysis might show that the transmission efficiency of this system is no worse than the power to charge/discharge inefficiencies in a more conventional battery powered wireless setup.

While no wires is pretty clean, we’re not sure this beats the totally-hidden-in-the-desk PC [Matt] built last year in terms of minimalist aesthetic.  That Frameworks mainboard also likely lacks the power of his triple-screen luggable, but this was still an entertaining build.

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Hackaday Links: June 8, 2025

June 8, 2025 by 20 Comments

When purchasing high-end gear, it’s not uncommon for manufacturers to include a little swag in the box. It makes the customer feel a bit better about the amount of money that just left their wallet, and it’s a great way for the manufacturer to build some brand loyalty and perhaps even get their logo out into the public. What’s not expected, though, is for the swag to be the only thing in the box. That’s what a Redditor reported after a recent purchase of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, a GPU that lists for $1,999 but is so in-demand that it’s unobtainium at anything south of $2,600. When the factory-sealed box was opened, the Redditor found it stuffed with two cheap backpacks instead of the card. To add insult to injury, the bags didn’t even sport an Nvidia logo.

The purchase was made at a Micro Center in Santa Clara, California, and an investigation by the store revealed 31 other cards had been similarly tampered with, although no word on what they contained in lieu of the intended hardware. The fact that the boxes were apparently sealed at the factory with authentic anti-tamper tape seems to suggest the substitutions happened very high in the supply chain, possibly even at the end of the assembly line. It’s a little hard to imagine how a factory worker was able to smuggle 32 high-end graphics cards out of the building, so maybe the crime occurred lower down in the supply chain by someone with access to factory seals. Either way, the thief or thieves ended up with almost $100,000 worth of hardware, and with that kind of incentive, this kind of thing will likely happen again. Keep your wits about you when you make a purchase like this.

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