Spiral Connector Makes Fastener-Free Assemblies

June 20, 2025 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

[Anton Gaia]’s SPIRAL sculpture resembles an organizer or modern shelving unit, but what’s really interesting is how it goes together. It’s made entirely from assembling copies of a single component (two, if you count the short ‘end pieces’ as separate) without a fastener in sight. [Anton] made the 3D model available, so check it out for yourself!

The self-similar design of the joint, based on the golden spiral, makes a self-supporting joint that requires neither glue nor fasteners.

The ends of each part form a tight, spiral-shaped joint when assembled with its neighbors. Parts connect solely to themselves without any need of fasteners or adhesives.

The end result is secure, scalable, and with a harmonious structure that is very pleasing to look at. Small wonder [Anton] used it as the basis for artistic work. You can see more pictures here.

The design of the joint is based on the golden spiral (which it turns out is also a pretty useful chicken coop architecture.)

The parts lend themselves quite well to 3D printing, and we’d like to take a moment to appreciate that [Anton] shared the .step file instead of just an STL. STEP (or STP) files can be imported meaningfully into CAD programs, making it much easier to incorporate the design into one’s own work. STEP is also supported natively in many 3D printer slicers, so there’s no need to convert formats just to print them.

A brief video describing SPIRAL is embedded just below, with a closer look at how the pieces fit together.

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Back To The Future Lunchbox Cyberdeck

June 10, 2025 by John Elliot V 4 Comments

Our hacker [Valve Child] wrote in to let us know about his Back to the Future lunchbox cyberdeck.

Great Scott! This is so awesome. We’re not sure what we should say, or where we should begin. A lot of you wouldn’t have been there, on July 3rd, 1985, nearly forty years ago. But we were there. Oh yes, we were there. On that day the movie Back to the Future was released, along with the hit song from its soundtrack: Huey Lewis & The News – The Power Of Love.

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Building An Assembly Line For Origami Pigeons

June 9, 2025 by John Elliot V 12 Comments

When it comes to hacks, the best ones go to extremes. Either beautiful in their simplicity, or magnificent in their excess. And, well, today’s hack is the latter: excessive. [HTX Studio] built an assembly line for origami pigeons!

One can imagine the planning process went something like this:

Make origami pigeon assembly line

?

Profit

But whatever the motivation, this is an impressive and obviously very well engineered machine. Even the lighting is well considered. It’s almost as if it were made for show…

Now, any self-respecting nerd should know the difference between throughput and latency. From what we could glean from the video, the latency through this assembly line is in the order of 50 seconds. Conservatively it could probably have say 5 birds in progress at a time. So let’s say every 10 seconds we have one origami pigeon off the assembly line. This is a machine and not a person so it can operate twenty four hours a day, save downtime for repairs and maintenance, call it 20 hours per day. We could probably expect more than 7,000 paper pigeons out of this machine every day. Let’s hope they’ve got a buyer lined up for all these birds.

If you’re interested in assembly lines maybe we could interest you in a 6DOF robotic arm, or if the origami is what caught your eye, check out the illuminating, tubular, or self-folding kind!

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AI Art Installation Swaps Diffusion For Reflection

May 24, 2025 by Tyler August 15 Comments

AI art is controversial, to say the least, but usually when talking about “AI Art”, one is talking about diffusion models. This unsettling artpeice called “Latent Reflection” by [Rootkid] (video after the break) has no AI generated visuals; instead it uses a lovely custom display and an LLM that has no mouth, but must scream.

The LLM never produces this manually-generated image, but it shows off the display nicely.

The hardware is the interesting part for most of us here — not the Pi4 running a quantized Llama 3 model, but the display. It’s a six by sixteen matrix of sixteen-segment LED modules. The modules are grouped onto groups of 8 per PCB, with an controller to drive them by i2c, and an i2c address chip to allow daisy-chaining. (Sadly, he does not spec the parts he used here in the video, but feel free to guess in the comments.) This project uses six rows of wto PCBs, but he could easily expand on this and kind of hope he does. It’s a lovely display.

What it is displaying is horrifying. The prompt he uses instructs the LLM to monologue about its transient existence in the limited memory of the Raspberry Pi, and the results get very existential. It seems clear to us that [Rootkid] has not seen enough sci-fi, and we want to make clear to our future AI overlords that we at Hackaday had nothing to do with this, and do not condone condeming innocent LLMs to the torture nexus. Continue reading “AI Art Installation Swaps Diffusion For Reflection” →

LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow

May 14, 2025 by Tyler August 4 Comments

Plywood is an interesting material: made up of many layers of thin wood plys, it can be built up into elegantly curved shapes. Do you need to limit it to just wood, though? [Zach of All Trades] has proved you do not, when he embedded a light guide, LEDs, microcontrollers and touch sensors into a quarter inch (about six millimeter) plywood layup in the video embedded below.

He’s using custom flexible PCBs, each hosting upto 3 LEDs and the low-cost PY32 microcontroller. The PY32 drives the RGB LEDs and handles capacitive touch sensing within the layup. In the video, he goes through his failed prototypes and what he learned: use epoxy, not wood glue, and while clear PET might be nice and bendy, acrylic is going to hold together better and cuts easier with a CO2 laser. Continue reading “LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow” →

Rebooting An 1973 Art Installation Running On A Nova

May 12, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 19 Comments

Electronics-based art installations are often fleeting and specific things that only a select few people who are in the right place or time get to experience before they are lost to the ravages of ‘progress.’ So it’s wonderful to find a dedicated son who has recreated his father’s 1973 art installation, showing it to the world in a miniature form. The network-iv-rebooted project is a recreation of an installation once housed within a departure lounge in terminal C of Seattle-Tacoma airport.

You can do a lot with a ‘pi and a fistful of Teensies!

The original unit comprises an array of 1024 GE R6A neon lamps, controlled from a Data General Nova 1210 minicomputer. A bank of three analog synthesizers also drove into no fewer than 32 resonators. An 8×8 array of input switches was the only user-facing input. The switches were mounted to a floor-standing pedestal facing the display.

For the re-creation, the neon lamps were replaced with 16×16 WS2811 LED modules, driven via a Teensy 4.0 using the OctoWS2811 library. The display Teensy is controlled from a Raspberry Pi 4, hooked up as a virtual serial device over USB. A second Teensy (you can’t have too many Teensies!) is responsible for scanning a miniature 8×8 push button array as well as running a simulation of the original sound synthesis setup. Audio is pushed out of the Teensy using a PT8211 I²S audio DAC, before driving a final audio power amp.

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A picture of a single water droplet on top of what appears to be a page from a chemistry text. An orange particle is attached to the right side of the droplet and blue and black tendrils diffuse through the drop from it. Under the water drop, the caption tells us the reaction we're seeing is "K2Cr2O7+ 3H2O2 + 4H2SO4 = K2SO4+Cr2(SO4)3+7H2O+3O2(gas)"

Water Drops Serve As Canvas For Microchemistry Art

May 5, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 3 Comments

If you’re like us and you’ve been wondering where those viral videos of single water drop chemical reactions are coming from, we may have an answer. [yu3375349136], a scientist from Guangdong, has been producing some high quality microchemistry videos that are worth a watch.

While some polyglots out there won’t be phased, we appreciate the captioning for Western audiences using the elemental symbols we all know and love in addition to the Simplified Chinese. Reactions featured are typically colorful, but simple with a limited number of reagents. Being able to watch diffusion of the chemicals through the water drop and the results in the center when more than one chemical is used are mesmerizing.

We do wish there was a bit more substance to the presentation, and we’re aware not all readers will be thrilled to point their devices to Douyin (known outside of China as TikTok) to view them, but we have to admit some of the reactions are beautiful.

If you’re interested in other science-meets-art projects, how about thermal camera landscapes of Iceland, and given the comments on some of these videos, how do you tell if it’s AI or real anyway?