Misc Hacks

4186 Articles

Wago’s Online Community Is Full Of Neat Wago Tools

December 2, 2025 by 40 Comments

Wago connectors are somewhat controversial in the electrical world—beloved by some, decried by others. The company knows it has a dedicated user base, though, and has established the Wago Creators site for that very community.

The idea behind the site is simple—it’s a place to discover and share unique little tools and accessories for use with Wago’s line of electrical connectors. Most are 3D printed accessories that make working with Wago connectors easier. There are some fun and innovative ideas up there, like an ESP8266 development kit that has a Wago connector for all the important pins, as well as a tool for easily opening the lever locks. Perhaps most amusing, though, is the project entitled “Hide Your Wago From Americans”—which consists of a 3D-printed wire nut lookalike designed to slide over the connectors to keep them out of view. There’s also a cheerful attempt at Wago art, that doesn’t really look like anything recognizable at all. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

It’s great to see Wago so openly encouraging creativity among those that use its products. The sharing of ideas has been a big part of the 3D printing movement, and Wago isn’t the first company to jump on the bandwagon in this regard. If you’ve got some neat Wago hacks of your own, you can always let us know on the tipsline!

[Thanks to Niklas for the tip!]

Hydrofoil Bikes Are Harder To Build Than You Think

November 27, 2025 by 7 Comments

Hydrofoils are perhaps best known for their application on boring ferries and scary boats that go too fast. However, as [RCLifeOn] demonstrates, you can also use them to build fun and quirky personal watercraft. Like a hydrofoil bike! Only, there are some challenges involved.

Hydrofoils work much like airfoils in air. The shape of the foil creates lift, raising the attached vehicle out of the water. This allows the creation of a craft that can travel more quickly because the majority of its body is not subject drag from the water. The key is to design the craft such that the hydrofoils remain at the right angle and depth to keep the craft lifted out of the water while remaining stable.

The hydrofoil bike is created out of a combination of plywood, foam, and 3D printed components. It uses a powerful brushless motor for propulsion, and that’s about it. Sadly, despite the simplicity, it wasn’t an instant success. As you might expect, balancing on the bike is quite difficult, particularly when trying to get it started—as the foils need some speed to actually start generating meaningful lift.

After further research into commercial hydrofoil bikes, [RCLifeOn] realized that the buoyancy of the bike made it too hard to straddle when starting out. Some of the 3D printed foils also proved more than a little fragile. It’s back to the drawing board for now—the power system is likely up to snuff, but the dynamics of the platform need work. It’s perhaps no surprise; we’ve covered the challenges of hydrofoil stability before. If you want to go fast on water, you could go the easier route and just build an electric surfboard. Video after the break.

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Build A High Voltage Supply For Vacuum Tube Work

November 25, 2025 by 12 Comments

If you work on simple digital projects, just about any bench supply will offer the voltage and current you’re looking for. However, if you’re working with valves, you’ll often find yourself needing much higher voltages that can be tricky to source. [Chappy Happy] has shared a design for a simple HV power supply that should prove useful to vacuum tube enthusiasts.

The build is fairly basic in nature, lacing together some commonly available parts to generate the necessary voltages for working with common vacuum tubes from a 12 volt DC input. Inside the supply is a UC3843A DC boost converter, set up to output high voltage up to around 300 volts DC, with a ripple filter added for good measure. The output can be adjusted with a knob, with a voltmeter on the front panel. There’s also a 12-volt output, and a LM2596 step down converter to produce 6.3 volts for the filament supply. The whole project is built in an old Heathkit project box, and he demonstrates the supply with a simple single-tube amplifier.

If you find yourself regularly whipping up tube circuits, you might like to have something like this on your workbench. Or, you might even consider cooking up your own tubes from scratch if you’re more adventurous like that. Video after the break.

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Hacking A Pill Camera

November 18, 2025 by 28 Comments

A gastroscopy is a procedure that, in simple terms, involves sticking a long, flexible tube down a patient’s throat to inspect the oesophagus and adjacent structures with a camera fitted to the tip. However, modern technology has developed an alternative, in the form of a camera fitted inside a pill. [Aaron Christophel] recently came across one of these devices, and decided to investigate its functionality.

[Aaron’s] first video involves a simple teardown of the camera. The small plastic pill is a marvel of miniaturization. Through the hemispherical transparent lens, we can see a tiny camera and LEDs to provide light in the depths of the human body. Slicing the camera open reveals the hardware inside, however, like the miniature battery, the microcontroller, and the radio hardware that transmits signals outside the body. Unsurprisingly, it’s difficult to get into, since it’s heavily sealed to ensure the human body doesn’t accidentally digest the electronics inside.

Unwilling to stop there, [Aaron] pushed onward—with his second video focusing on reverse engineering. With a little glitching, he was able to dump the firmware from the TI CC1310 microcontroller. From there, he was able to get to the point where he could pull a shaky video feed transmitted from the camera itself. Artists are already making music videos on Ring doorbells; perhaps this is just the the next step.

Smart pills were once the realm of science fiction, but they’re an increasingly common tool in modern medicine. Video after the break.

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Micro:Bit Gets Pseudo-Polyphonic Sound With Neat Hack

November 18, 2025 by 4 Comments

The Micro:bit is a fun microcontroller development platform, designed specifically for educational use. Out of the box, it’s got a pretty basic sound output feature that can play a single note at a time. However, if you’re willing to get a bit tricky, you can do some pseudo-polyphonic stuff as [microbit-noob] explains.

The trick to polyphony in a monophonic world? Rapidly alternating between the different notes you want to be playing at the same time. Do this fast enough and it feels like they’re playing together rather than seperately. [microbit-noob] demonstrates how to implement this with a simple function coded for the Micro:bit. Otherwise, it uses the completely stock sound hardware. However, the IR receiver is added to the device in order to allow a simple remote control to be used to command the notes desired, along with some extra tactile buttons to add further control.

Is it chiptune? Well, it’s a chip, playing a tune, so yes. Even if it is through a tiny speaker stuck to the PCB. In any case, if you’re trying to get some better bleeps and bloops out of the Micro:bit, this is a great place to start. If you’ve got other hacks for Britain’s educational little board, let us know on the tipsline!

Building A Smart Speaker Outside The Corporate Cloud

November 17, 2025 by 15 Comments

If you’re not worried about corporate surveillance bots scraping your shopping list and manipulating you through marketing, you can buy any number of off-the-shelf smart speakers for your home. Alternatively, you can roll your own like [arpy8] did, and keep your life a little more private.

The build is based around an ESP32 microcontroller. It connects to the ‘net via its inbuilt Wi-Fi connection, and listens out for your voice with an INMP441 omnidirectional microphone module. The audio data is trucked off to a backend server running a Whisper speech-to-text model. The text is then passed to Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash large language model. The response generated is passed to the Piper Neural Voice text-to-speech engine, sent back to the ESP32, and spat out via the device’s DAC output and a speaker attached to an LM386 amplifier. Basically, anything you could ask Gemini, you can do with this device.

By virtue of using a commercial large language model, it’s not perfectly private by any means. Still, it’s at least a little farther removed than using a smart speaker that’s directly logged in to your Amazon/Google/Hulu/Beanstikk account. Files are on Github for those eager to dive into the code. We’ve seen some other fun builds along these lines before, too. Video after the break.

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What Do You Call An Ekranoplan With An Outboard Motor?

November 13, 2025 by 6 Comments

If there’s one thing [rctestflight] likes, it’s… probably radio controlled test flights. If there are two things [rctestflights] likes, the second one is probably ground-effect vehicles, AKA Ekranoplans. Tired of having them flip over and crash, he’s trying an an innovative solution: stick a planing hull on it.

Ekranoplans have a stability problem because the center-of-pressure isn’t static: as the wing gets closer to the ground, the high pressure cushion of air that creates the ground effect tends to put more lift rearwards. The net effect of that is to torque the vehicle nose-down, which is kind of a self-limiting problem at a fraction of a wingspan’s altitude. The opposite problem is more concerning: the higher the ekranoplan gets, the more it wants to nose up, and there’s nothing to stop it. That leads to the vehicle flipping over. Continue reading “What Do You Call An Ekranoplan With An Outboard Motor?” →