Two white, cylindrical speakers are shown. The sides and most of the tops of the speakers are covered in holes, and at the center of the top of each, there is a circular LCD display. The top of the speaker is marked “Braun.”

A Modern Take On Iconic Industrial Design

June 9, 2025 by 21 Comments

The Functionalist design philosophy that Dieter Rams brought to Braun from the 50s to the 90s still inspires the look of a few devices, including Apple’s iPod, Teenage Engineer’s synthesizers and recorders – and [2dom]’s IR7 streaming radio.

The streaming radio was inspired by Braun’s portable radios, particularly the SK2, TP1, and the T3 pocket radio. [2dom] started with the T3’s circular pattern of holes and experimented with several variations, finally settling on a cylindrical shape with a central display; a prototype with a low-power monochrome rectangular display was eventually rejected in favor of a circular LCD. The housing consists of four 3D-printed components: an upper and lower shell, a resonator for the speaker, and a knob for a rotary encoder.

Electronics-wise, an ESP32 handles the computing requirements, while the LCD and rotary encoder provide a user interface. For audio, it uses a VS1053 MP3 decoder, PAM8403 amplifier, and a wideband speaker, with an audio isolation transformer to clean up the audio. To reduce power consumption, a MOSFET cuts power to the peripheral components whenever the device is in sleep mode. The full design is available on GitHub.

The end result of this effort is a quite authentic-looking 21st-century adaptation of Rams’s original designs. If you’re interested in more Braun designs, check out this replica of one of their desk fans. We’ve also seen a restoration of one of Braun’s larger radios, the TS2.

Run A Lawnmower On Diesel With Hot Bulb Hack

June 9, 2025 by 27 Comments

If you’re into automotive hacks and don’t watch [Robot Cantina], you are missing out. This hack has [Jimbo] taking a break from automotive hacking to butcher a poor, innocent Tecumseh lawnmower to run diesel fuel (or anything else) by converting the motor into a hot bulb engine. (Video embedded below.)

The secret is a long stack of anti-fouling adapters, which are essentially extension tubes that move the spark plug out of the combustion chamber to keep it from getting crudded up in an engine that’s burning too much oil. In this case, burning is what’s happening inside the anti-fouling adapters: by stacking seven of them, [Robot Cantina] is able to create a hot-bulb– volume that stays hot enough between strokes to induce spontaneous combustion of the fuel-air mix.

Hot-bulb engines were popular for certain tractors (the Lanz Bulldog being the most famous) and stationary engines from the late 19th century until Rudolf Diesel’s eponymous invention drove them out of their niche completely sometime after WWII.

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2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Fort Bawks Is Guarded By Object Detection

June 9, 2025 by 5 Comments

One of the difficult things about raising chickens is that you aren’t the only thing that finds them tasty. Foxes, raccoons, hawks — if it can eat meat, it probably wants a bite of your flock. [donutsorelse] wanted to protect his flock and to be able to know when predators were about without staying up all night next to the hen-house. What to do but outsource the role of Chicken Guardian to a Raspberry pi?

Object detection is done using a YOLOv8 model trained on images of the various predators local to [donutorelse]. The model is running on a Raspberry Pi and getting images from a standard webcam. Since the webcam has no low-light capability, the system also has a motion-activated light that’s arguably goes a long way towards spooking predators away itself. To help with the spooking, a speaker module plays specific sound files for each detected predator — presumably different sounds might work better at scaring off different predators.

If that doesn’t work, the system phones home to activate a siren inside [donutorelse]’s house, using a Blues Wireless Notecarrier F as a cellular USB modem. The siren is just a dumb unit; activation is handled via a TP-Link smart plug that’s hooked into [donutorelse]’s custom smart home setup. Presumably the siren cues [donutorelse] to take action against the predator assault on the chickens.

Weirdly enough, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an AI-enabled chicken coop, but it is the first one to make into our ongoing challenge, which incidentally wraps up today.

2025 Hackaday Pet Hacks Contest

Information Density: Microfilm And Microfiche

June 9, 2025 by 18 Comments

Today, we think nothing of sticking thousands of pages of documents on a tiny SD card, or just pushing it out to some cloud service. But for decades, this wasn’t possible. Yet companies still generated huge piles of paper. What could be done? The short answer is: microfilm.

However, the long answer is quite a bit more complicated. Microfilm is, technically, a common case of the more generic microform. A microform is a photographically reduced document on film. A bunch of pages on a reel of film is microfilm. If it is on a flat card — usually the size of an index card — that’s microfiche. On top of that, there were a few other incidental formats. Aperture cards were computer punch cards with a bit of microfilm included. Microcards were like microfiche, but printed on cardboard instead of film.

In its heyday, people used specialized cameras, some made to read fanfold computer printer paper, to create microfilm. There were also computer output devices that could create microfilm directly.

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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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