The Lowly Wall Wart Laid Bare

April 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Getting a look at the internals of a garden variety “wall wart” isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to excite the average Hackaday reader. You’ve probably cracked one open yourself, and even if you haven’t, you’ve likely got a pretty good idea of what’s inside that sealed up brick of plastic. But sometimes a teardown can be just as much about the journey as it is the end result.

Truth be told, we’re not 100% sure if this teardown from [Brian Dipert] over at EDN was meant as an April Fool’s joke or not. Certainly it was posted on the right day, but the style is close enough to some of his previous work that it’s hard to say. In any event, he’s created a visual feast — never in history has an AC/DC adapter been photographed so completely and tastefully.

[Brian] even goes so far as to include images of the 2.5 lb sledgehammer and paint scraper that he uses to brutally break open the ultrasonic-welded enclosure. The dichotomy between the thoughtful imagery and the savage way [Brian] breaks the device open only adds to the surreal nature of the piece. Truly, the whole thing seems like it should be part of some avant garde installation in SoHo.

After he’s presented more than 20 images of the exterior of the broken wall wart, [Brian] finally gets to looking at the internals. There’s really not much to look at, there’s a few circuit diagrams and an explanation of the theory behind these unregulated power supplies, and then the write-up comes to a close as abruptly as it started.

So does it raise the simple teardown to an art form? We’re not sure, but we know that we’ll never look at a power adapter in quite the same way again.

Generative Art Machine Does It One Euro At A Time

March 22, 2025 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

[Niklas Roy] obviously had a great time building this generative art cabinet that puts you in the role of the curator – ever-changing images show on the screen, but it’s only when you put your money in that it prints yours out, stamps it for authenticity, and cuts it off the paper roll with a mechanical box cutter.

If you like fun machines, you should absolutely go check out the video, embedded below. The LCD screen has been stripped of its backlight, allowing you to verify that the plot exactly matches the screen by staring through it. The screen flashes red for a sec, and your art is then dispensed. It’s lovely mechatronic theater. We also dig the “progress bar” that is represented by how much of your one Euro’s worth of art it has plotted so far. And it seems to track perfectly; Bill Gates could learn something from watching this. Be sure to check out the build log to see how it all came together.

You’d be forgiven if you expected some AI to be behind the scenes these days, but the algorithm is custom designed by [Niklas] himself, ironically adding to the sense of humanity behind it all. It takes the Unix epoch timestamp as the seed to generate a whole bunch of points, then it connects them together. Each piece is unique, but of course it’s also reproducible, given the timestamp. We’re not sure where this all lies in the current debates about authenticity and ownership of art, but that’s for the comment section.

If you want to see more of [Niklas]’s work, well this isn’t the first time his contraptions have graced our pages. But just last weekend at Hackaday Europe was the first time that he’s ever given us a talk, and it’s entertaining and beautiful. Go check that out next. Continue reading “Generative Art Machine Does It One Euro At A Time” →

Chemistry Meets Mechatronics In This Engaging Art Piece

March 20, 2025 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

There’s a classic grade school science experiment that involves extracting juice from red cabbage leaves and using it as a pH indicator. It relies on anthocyanins, pigmented compounds that give the cabbage its vibrant color but can change depending on the acidity of the environment they’re in, from pink in acidic conditions to green at higher pH. And anthocyanins are exactly what power this unusual kinetic art piece.

Even before it goes into action, [Nathalie Gebert]’s Anthofluid is pretty cool to look at. The “canvas” of the piece is a thin chamber formed by plexiglass sheets, one of which is perforated by an array of electrodes. A quartet of peristaltic pumps fills the chamber with a solution of red cabbage juice from a large reservoir, itself a mesmerizing process as the purple fluid meanders between the walls of the chamber and snakes around and between the electrodes. Once the chamber is full, an X-Y gantry behind the rear wall moves to a random set of electrodes, deploying a pair of conductors to complete the circuit. When a current is applied, tendrils of green and red appear, not by a pH change but rather by the oxidation and reduction reactions occurring at the positive and negative electrodes. The colors gently waft up through the pale purple solution before fading away into nothingness. Check out the video below for the very cool results.

We find Anthofluid terribly creative, especially in the use of such an unusual medium as red cabbage juice. We also appreciate the collision of chemistry, electricity, and mechatronics to make a piece of art that’s so kinetic but also so relaxing at the same time. It’s the same feeling that [Nathalie]’s previous art piece gave us as it created images on screens of moving thread. Continue reading “Chemistry Meets Mechatronics In This Engaging Art Piece” →

Using Four Rolls Of Film To Make One Big Photo

March 1, 2025 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Typically, if you’re shooting 35 mm film, you’re using it in an old point-and-shoot or maybe a nice SLR. You might even make some sizeable prints if you take a particularly good shot. But you can get altogether weirder with 35 mm if you like, as [Socialmocracy] demonstrates with his “extreme sprocket hole photography” project (via Petapixel).

The concept is simple enough. [Socialmocracy] wanted to expose four entire rolls of 35 mm film all at the same time in one single shot. To be absolutely clear, we’re not talking about exposing a frame on each of four rolls at once. We’re talking about a single exposure covering the entire length of all four films, stacked one on top of the other.

To achieve this, an old-school Cirkut No.6 Outfit camera was pressed into service. It’s a large format camera, originally intended for shooting panoramas. As the camera rotated around under the drive of a clockwork motor, it would spool out more film to capture an image.

[Socialmocracy] outfitted the 100-year-old camera with a custom 3D-printed spool that could handle four rolls of film at once, rather than its usual wide single sheet of large format film. This let the camera shoot its characteristic panoramas, albeit spread out over multiple rolls of film, covering the sprocket holes and all. Hence the name—”extreme sprocket hole photography.”

It’s a neat build, and one that lets [Socialmocracy] use more readily available film to shoot fun panoramas with this old rig. We’ve featured some other great film camera hacks over the years, too, like this self-pack Polaroid-style film. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Using Four Rolls Of Film To Make One Big Photo” →

Automating The Process Of Drawing With Chalk

January 31, 2025 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

Chalk is fun to draw with, and some people even get really good at using it to make art on the sidewalk. If you don’t like tediously developing such skills, though, you could go another route. [MrDadVs] built a robot to scrawl chalk pictures for him, and the results speak for themselves.

The robot is known as AP for reasons you’ll have to watch the video to understand. You might be imagining a little rover that crawls around on wheels dotting at the pavement with a stick of chalk, but the actual design is quite different. Instead, [MrDadVs] effectively built a polar-coordinate plotter to make chalk pictures on the ground. AP has a arm loaded with a custom liquid chalk delivery system for marking the pavement. It’s rotated by a stepper motor with the aid of a 3D-printed geartrain that helps give it enough torque. It’s controlled by an ESP32 running the FluidNC software which is a flexible open-source CNC firmware. [MrDadVs] does a great job of explaining how everything works together, from converting cartesian coordinates into a polar format, to getting the machine to work wirelessly.

Building a capable sidewalk chalk robot seems like a great way to spend six months. Particularly when it can draw this well. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Automating The Process Of Drawing With Chalk” →

Tensegrity construction with Adafruit led strands

The Jell-O Glow Tensegrity Toy You Didn’t Know You Needed

January 30, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 5 Comments

If you’re looking to add a pop of glowing whimsy to your workspace, check out this vibrant jiggly desk toy by [thzinc], who couldn’t resist the allure of Adafruit’s NOODS LED strands. [thzinc]’s fascination with both glowing LEDs and levitating tensegrity designs led to an innovative attempt to defy gravity once again.

The construction’s genius is all about the balance of tension across the flexible LED strands, with three red ‘arms’ and a blue ‘hanger’ arm supporting the central hub. [thzinc]’s early designs faced print failures, but by cleverly reorienting print angles and refining channel designs, he achieved a modular, sturdy structure. Assembly involved careful soldering, tension adjustments, and even a bit of temporary tape magic to perfect the wobbling equilibrium.

But, the result is one to applaud. A delightful, wobbly desk toy with a kind of a Jell-O vibe that dances to your desk’s vibrations while glowing like a mini neon sign. We’ve covered tensegrity constructions in the past, so with a little digging through our archives you’ll be able to find some unique variations to build your own. Be sure to read [thzinc]’s build story before you start. Feel free to combine the best out there, and see what you can bring to the table!

Continue reading “The Jell-O Glow Tensegrity Toy You Didn’t Know You Needed” →

Digital Paint Mixing Has Been Greatly Improved With 1930s Math

January 30, 2025 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes green paint. Try doing that in Photoshop, and you’ll get something altogether different—a vague, uninspiring brownish-grey. It’s the same story in just about every graphics package out there.

As it turns out, there’s a good reason the big art apps haven’t tackled this—because it’s really hard! However, a team of researchers at Czech Technical University has finally cracked this long-standing problem. The result of their hard work is Mixbox, a digital model for pigment-based color mixing. Once again, creative application of mathematics has netted aesthetically beautiful results!

Continue reading “Digital Paint Mixing Has Been Greatly Improved With 1930s Math” →