A photo of a white dog with curly fur riding a black skateboard with grey motors under the front deck. There are blue squares on the top of the deck that she is standing on to steer the board.

An Electric Skateboard For The Dogs

September 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

What’s a dog to do if they want to do some accessible skateboarding? [Simone Giertz]’s three-legged pup, [Scraps], got the chance to try a LEGO Technic board for her thrills.

This electric LEGO skateboard features six motors and paw pedals to let [Scraps] steer while [Giertz] remotely controls the speed of the board. While it’s not a particularly fast ride, it does let [Scraps] live out her dreams of being a YouTube dog skateboard celebrity.

A video from [Giertz] wouldn’t be complete without a life lesson, and this time it was the importance of rest to the creative process. Sometimes when a solution eludes you, it’s just time to take a break. The steering mechanism, in particular, was giving her trouble but became simple the next morning. We’re also treated to an adorable shot of [Scraps] napping when the initial shoot of her riding the board wasn’t going as planned.

Want to try your hand at making your own skateboard? How about a deck from recycled plastic, tank treads instead of wheels, or is a rocket-powered skateboard more your speed?

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3D Print Yourself These Mini Workshop Tools

September 6, 2024 by 27 Comments

Kitting out a full workshop can be expensive, but if you’re only working on small things, it can also be overkill. Indeed, if your machining tends towards the miniature, consider building yourself a series of tiny machines like [KendinYap] did. In the video below, you can see the miniature electric sander, table saw, drill press, and cut-off saw put through their paces.

Just because the machines are small, doesn’t mean they’re not useful. In fact, they’re kind of great for doing smaller jobs without destroying what you’re working on. The tiny belt sander in particular appeals in this case, but the same applies to the drill press as well. [KendinYap] also shows off a tiny table and circular saw. The machines are straightforward in their design, relying largely on 3D printed components. They’re all powered by basic DC brushed motors which are enough to get the job done on the small scale.

They look particularly good if tiny scale model-making is your passion.

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Build Yourself A Beautiful Interactive Light Toy

September 5, 2024 by 7 Comments

Sometimes, we build things with LEDs as indicator lamps or to illuminate something important. Sometimes, we build things with LEDs purely to glow and be beautiful. This interactive light toy from [Jens] falls into the latter category.

The build uses a 16×16 addressable LED matrix.  [Jens] then ported some “Bouncy Bubbles” Processing code from Keith Peters to the Arduino Mega, and set it up to display on the matrix. An accelerometer was used to control the bouncing ball animations, while a second Arduino was then tapped to act as a musical synthesizer to add more vibes. The whole kit was then built into a 3D-printed housing with a nice hazy diffuser to give the LEDs a smoother, even look. [Jens] steps through how he got the diffuser just right, including a support structure that made all the difference to the aesthetic of the finished product. Getting diffusion right is key to making a nice LED project, and [Jens] got it very right here.

It’s a nice little art piece that looks kind of relaxing to play with in a dark room. We love a good glowable project here at Hackaday, so if you’ve built your own—don’t hesitate to let us know! Video after the break.

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Build A Super Cheap RC Trainer Plane With Foam

September 5, 2024 by 20 Comments

Once upon a time, RC planes were expensive models that took months to build and big money to equip with electronics. Since the 20th century though, powerful batteries have become cheap, as have servos and radio controllers. Combine them with a bit of old packing material and you can get a little RC trainer up and running for peanuts, as [Samm Sheperd] demonstrates.

[Samm] started referring to this as the “$5 trainer,” though he admits that it will cost more than that if you don’t have some bits and pieces laying around. He demonstrates how to cut cheap foamboard with a hot guitar string, and how to form it into a viable wing. That’s the most crucial part, with the fuselage and tail surfaces relatively simple by comparison. With that complete, it’s as simple as bolting on a motor, some servos, and control horns, and you’re up and running. You can even whip up a landing gear if you’re so inclined! Then, figure out your center of gravity, get it right, and then you’re pretty much ready to fly.

It’s a great primer on how to build a basic RC model, and if you do it right, it should have pretty forgiving handling, too. Plus, it’s so cheap that it should be easy to repair if you crash. Happy modelling! Video after the break.

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High-Speed Jelly Launcher Destroys Toast

September 5, 2024 by 10 Comments

You shouldn’t play with your food. Unless you’re designing some kind of portable cannon to fling it across the room. That’s precisely what [Backhaul Studios] did.

The first step of designing the condiment cannon was deciding what it should fire. Little low-profile tubs of jelly ended up being the ideal. They were stout enough to survive high-speed flight, while their low height was good for aerodynamics. The cannon itself is built from metal and 3D-printed parts. Multiple iterations eventually landed on a flywheel launcher design with big brushless motors and large 6-inch discs. It sounds positively awful in action and can fling jam (jelly) packets at immense speed. From there, it was simply necessary to design a magazine feed system to enable high-speed full-auto jelly delivery.

If you’ve ever hucked ketchup packets at a brick wall, you’ve understood the joy of splattering condiments everywhere. This cannon is just a way to do that faster and more hilariously. We’ve seen other fun builds along these lines before, too. Video after the break.

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Launching Model Airplanes With A Custom Linear Induction Motor

September 5, 2024 by 18 Comments

Launching things with electromagnetism is pretty fun, with linear induction motors being a popular design that finds use from everywhere in hobby designs like [Tom Stanton]’s to the electromagnetic launchers on new US and Chinese aircraft carriers. Although the exact design details differ, they use magnetic attraction and repulsion to create a linear motion on the propulsive element, like the sled in [Tom]’s design. Much like the electromagnetic catapults on a Gerald R. Ford-class carrier, electrical power is applied to rapidly move the sled through the channel, akin to a steam piston with a steam catapult.

Model airplane sparking its way through the launcher’s channel. (Credit: Tom Stanton, YouTube)

For [Tom]’s design, permanent magnets are used along both sides of the channel in an alternating north/south pole fashion, with the sled using a single wound coil that uses brushes to contact metal rails along both sides of the channel. Alternating current is then applied to this system, causing the coil to become an electromagnet and propel itself along the channel.

An important consideration here is the number of turns of wire on the sled’s coil, as this controls the current being passed, which is around 90 A for 100 turns. Even so, the fastest sled design only reached a speed of 44 mph (~71 km/h), which is 4 mph faster than [Tom]’s previous design that used coils alongside the channels and a sled featuring a permanent magnet.

One way to increase the speed is to use more coils on the sled, with a two-coil model launching a light-weight model airplane to 10.2 m/s, which is not only a pretty cool way to launch an airplane, but also gives you a sense of appreciation for the engineering challenges involved in making an electromagnetic catapult system work for life-sized airplanes as they’re yeeted off an aircraft carrier and preferably not straight into the drink.

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How Sony Mastered The Transistor

September 4, 2024 by 35 Comments

When you think of Sony, you probably think of a technology company that’s been around forever. However, as [Asianometry] points out, it really formed in the tough years after World War II. The two people behind the company’s formation were an interesting pair. One of them was a visionary engineer and one was a consummate businessman.

While it is hard to imagine today, securing a license to produce transistors was difficult in the early days. What’s worse is, even with the license, it was not feasible to use the crude devices in a radio.

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