CoreXY 3D Printer Has A Scissor-Lift Z-axis So It Folds Down!

October 19, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 25 Comments

We don’t know about you, but one of the biggest hassles of having a 3D printer at home or in the ‘shop is the space it takes up. Wouldn’t it be useful if you could fold it down? Well, you’re in luck because over on Hackaday.io, that’s precisely what [Malte Schrader] has achieved with their Portable CoreXY 3D printer.

The typical CoreXY design you find in the wild features a moving bed that starts at the top and moves downwards away from the XY gantry as the print progresses. The CoreXY kinematics take care of positioning the hotend in the XY plane with a pair of motors and some cunning pulley drives. Go check this out if you want to read more about that. Anyway, in this case, the bed is fixed to the base with a 3-point kinematic mount (to allow the hot end to be trammed) but is otherwise vertically immobile. That bed is AC-heated, allowing for a much smaller power supply to be fitted and reducing the annoying cooling fan noise that’s all too common with high-power bed heaters.

Both ends of the cable bundle are pivoted so it can fold flat inside the frame!

The XY gantry is mounted at each end on a pair of scissor lift mechanisms, which are belt-driven and geared together from a single stepper motor paired with a reduction gearbox. This hopefully will resolve any issues with X-axis tilting that [Malte] reports from a previous version.

The coarse tramming is handled by the bed mounts, with a hotend-mounted BLTouch further dialling it in and compensating for any bed distortion measured immediately before printing. Simple and effective.

As will be clear from the video below, the folding for storage is a natural consequence of the Z-axis mechanism, which we reckon is pretty elegant and well executed—check out those custom CNC machine Aluminium parts! When the Z-axis is folded flat for storage, the hotend part of the Bowden tube feed is mounted to a pivot, allowing it to fold down as well. They even added a pivot to the other end of the cable bundle / Bowden feed so the whole bundle folds down neatly inside the frame. Nice job!

If you want a little more detail about CoreXY kinematics, check out our handy guide. But what about the H-Bot we hear you ask? Fear not, we’re on it.

Left: old and busted. Right: New hotness.

Game Of Theseus Gets Graphics Upgrade, Force Feedback 30 Years On

October 19, 2025 by Tyler August 9 Comments

Indycar Racing 2 was a good game, back in 1995; in some ways, it was the Crysis of the Clinton years, in that most mortals could not run it to its full potential when it was new. Still, that potential was surely fairly limited, as we’re talking about a DOS game from 30 years ago. Sure, it was limited– but limits are meant to be broken, and games are made to be modded. [TedMeat] has made a video showing the updates. (Embedded below.)

It turns out there was a 3D-accelerated version sold with the short-lived Rendition graphics cards. That version is what let the community upscale everything to the absurd resolutions our modern monitors are capable of. Goodbye SVGA, hello HD. Specifically, [sharangad] has created a wrapper to translate the Rendition API to modern hardware. It doesn’t sound like higher-res textures have been modded in, in which case this looks spectacular for graphics designed in 1995. It’s not the latest Forza, but for what it is, it impresses.

The second hack [TedMeat] discusses is a mod by [GPLaps] that pulls physics values from game memory to throw to a modern force-feedback wheel, and it shows just how good the physics was in 1995. You really can feel what’s going on– stopping a skid before it starts, for example. That’s normal these days, but for the kids playing with a keyboard in 1995, it would have been totally mind-blowing.

As tipster [Keith Olson] put it: “What can I say? Fans gonna fan!” — and we’re just as grateful for that fact as we are for the tipoff. If you’re in a fandom that’s hacked its way to keep old favourites alive, we’d love to hear about it: submit a tip.

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Hackaday Links: October 19, 2025

October 19, 2025 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

After a quiet week in the news cycle, surveillance concern Flock jumped right back in with both feet, announcing a strategic partnership with Amazon’s Ring to integrate that company’s network of doorbell cameras into one all-seeing digital panopticon. Previously, we’d covered both Flock’s “UAVs as a service” model for combating retail theft from above, as well as the somewhat grassroots effort to fight back at the company’s wide-ranging network of license plate reader cameras. The Ring deal is not quite as “in your face” as drones chasing shoplifters, but it’s perhaps a bit more alarming, as it gives U.S. law enforcement agencies easy access to the Ring Community Request program directly through the Flock software that they (probably) already use.

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2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Conductive Filament Makes A Meltable Fuse

October 19, 2025 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Everything is a fuse if you run enough current through it. Or at least [JohnsonFarms.us] seems to think so, which has led him to design 3D-printed fuses made from conductive PLA filament.

Conductive filament is a meltable resistor, which, if one squints hard enough, is basically a fuse.

In theory a 3D printed fuse works the same as a normal one: excessive current draw will cause the conductive plastic to briefly become a heater, causing it to self-destruct and break the electrical connection. There’s a risk of melted plastic and perhaps a nonzero combustion risk, but [JohnsonFarms.us] is less interested in whether this is a good idea and more interested in whether it can work at all, and with what degree of predictability and/or regret.

His experiments so far show that printed fuses are essentially meltable resistors with values between 300 Ω and 1250 Ω, depending on shape. What it takes to bring those to roughly 60 °C, where PLA softens, and around 150 °C, where PLA melts, is next on the to-do list.

Whatever conclusions are reached, it is interesting to think of conductive filament as a meltable resistor, and ponder what unusual applications that might allow.

Most conductive filaments have high resistance, but not all. Some, like Electrifi by Multi3D, have extremely low resistance and were used in a project that made 3d-printed logic gates.

The MSL10 Mechanosensor Makes Venus Flytrap Plants Touchy

October 19, 2025 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Carnivorous plants are a fascinating part of the natural world, especially species like the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) that rely on what is effectively a spring-loaded trap to ensnare unsuspecting prey. As also seen with species like the waterwheel plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa), species like sundews are a lot more chill with movement in the order of seconds, excluding D. glanduligera which displays a similar sub-second response as the Venus flytrap. Over the years there has been much speculation about the exact mechanism that enables such a fast response, with [Hiraku Suda] and colleagues offering an explanation, via a recently published paper in Nature Communications.

The calcium response in a Venus flytrap with the DmMSL10 knockout variant. The ant is allowed to just waddle around. (Credit: Hiraku Suda et al., Nature Comm, 2025)

The sensory hairs that line the Venus flytrap’s leaves are finely tuned to respond to certain kind of stimuli using calcium threshold signals. This is something which was previously known already, but the exact mechanism still proved to be elusive.

This new study shows that a mechanosensor called DmMSL10 lies at the core of the touchiness of these plants by breeding a version where this particular stretch-activated chloride ion (Cl^–) channel is absent.

While the mechanical action of the sensor hair triggers the release of calcium ions in both the wild- and knockout dmmsl10 variant, the action potential generation rate was much lower in the latter, while the former continued to generate action potentials even after major stimulation had ceased. This demonstrates that DmMSL10 is essential for the processing of slight stimulation of the sensor hairs and thus prey detection.

A subsequent experiment with some ants being allowed to wander around on the leaves of the wild- and knockout type plants further served to demonstrate the point, with the wild type catching the first ant to waddle onto the leaf, while the knockout type leaf didn’t even twitch as four successive ants failed to propagate the calcium signal sufficiently to close the leaf.

With this knowledge we now have a likely mechanism for how D. muscipula and friends are able to generate the long range calcium signals that ultimately allow them to snack on these tasty protein-and-nitrogen packets on legs. Further research is likely to illuminate how exactly these mechanisms were evolved in parallel with similar mechanisms in animals.

A frame from the two billion frames per second camera

Filming At The Speed Of Light, About One Foot Per Nanosecond

October 19, 2025 by John Elliot V 26 Comments

[Brian Haidet] published on his AlphaPhoenix channel a laser beam recorded at 2 billion frames per second. Well, sort of. The catch? It’s only a one pixel by one pixel video, but he repeats it over and over to build up the full rendering. It’s a fascinating experiment and a delightful result.

For this project [Brian] went back to the drawing board and rebuilt his entire apparatus from scratch. You see in December last year he had already made a video camera that ran at 1,000,000,000 fps. This time around, in order to hit 2,000,000,000 fps at significantly improved resolution, [Brian] updated the motors, the hardware, the oscilloscope, the signalling, the recording software, and the processing software. Basically, everything.

One of the coolest effects to come out of this new setup is how light appears to travel noticeably faster when coming towards the camera than when moving away from it. It’s an artifact of the setup: laser beams that reflect off of fog particles closer to the camera arrive sooner than ones that bounce back from further away. Or, put another way, it’s special relativity visualized in an experiment in [Brian]’s garage. Pretty cool.

If you found all this intriguing and would like to know more, there’s some bonus material that goes into much more depth.

Decoding A 350 Year Old Coded Message

October 19, 2025 by Al Williams 3 Comments

Usually, a story about hacking a coded message will have some computer element or, at least, a machine like an Enigma. But [Ruth Selman] recently posted a challenge asking if anyone could decrypt an English diplomatic message sent from France in 1670. Turns out, two teams managed it. Well, more accurately, one team of three people managed it, plus another lone cryptographer. If you want to try decoding it yourself, you might want to read [Ruth’s] first post and take a shot at it before reading on further here: there are spoilers below.

No computers or machines were likely used to create the message, although we imagine the codebreakers may have had some mechanized aids. Still, it takes human intuition to pull something like this off. One trick used by the text was the inclusion of letters meant to be thrown out. Because there were an odd number of Qs, and many of them were near the right margin, there was a suspicion that the Qs indicated a throw-away character and an end of line.

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