DIY Bread Slice Paper Goes Against The Grain

February 17, 2021 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

It’s the dead of winter here in the northern hemisphere, and between the pandemic and the polar vortex, we’re getting pretty tired of staring at the same four walls and eating incessantly. It’s the perfect recipe for trying something new and low-calorie, like baking a loaf of bread-shaped note paper from the stuff in the recycling bin.

[SusanLand] likes to make paper out of whatever discarded things she has on hand, including old jeans. When she tried making paper out of nothing but toilet paper tubes, it didn’t work so well, but it gave her an idea for cooking up some offbeat stationery. She beefed up the pulp with shredded office paper and corn starch, and dialed in the whole wheat hue with a pinch of yellow and orange paper. Once the pulp was ready, she poured it into bread-shaped molds made from a plastic milk jug.

This tidy introduction to making your own paper covers everything from pulping techniques to drying methods. Once the slices are dry, [SusanLand] embellishes them with a scoring tool, colored pencils, and a handful of seeds to complete the look. Check out that process in the videos after the break.

Don’t want to make paper out of your paper? Use it to weigh your car, or fold up a fleet of airplanes.

Continue reading “DIY Bread Slice Paper Goes Against The Grain” →

Remoticon Video: Making Glowy Origami With Charlyn Gonda

December 21, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass No comments

Hacking is about pushing the envelope to discover new and clever ways to use things in ways their original designers never envisioned. [Charlyn Gonda]’s Hackaday Remoticon workshop “Making Glowly Origami” was exactly that; a combination of the art of origami with the one of LEDs. Check out the full course embedded below, and read on for a summary of what you’ll find. Continue reading “Remoticon Video: Making Glowy Origami With Charlyn Gonda” →

Paper Keyboard Is Self-Powered

September 9, 2020 by Al Williams 12 Comments

Building a keyboard isn’t a big project these days. Controller chips and boards are readily available, switches are easy to find, and a 3D printer can do a lot of what used to be the hard parts. But engineers at Purdue have printed a self-powered Bluetooth keyboard on an ordinary sheet of paper. You can see videos of the keyboards at work below.

The keyboards work by coating paper with a highly fluorinated coating that repels water, oil, and dust. Special inks print triboelectric circuits so that pressing your finger on a particular part of the paper generates electricity. We were skeptical that the Bluetooth part is self-powered, although maybe it is possible if you have some very low-power electronics or you manage the power generated very carefully.

Continue reading “Paper Keyboard Is Self-Powered” →

DIY Large Format Book Press Puts On The Pressure

March 3, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

For those in the audience who aren’t well versed in wrangling dead trees, a large press with a lot of clamping pressure can be used for binding books or printing. It can even be used to squeeze the water out of homemade paper. It’s an important tool for anyone looking to make or repair books, but they also tend to be fairly expensive. Which is why [Paul] decided to make his own.

Despite the preconceived notions you might have about the type of guy who binds his own books, it seems like [Paul] is a rather modern fellow. He actually designed the press in CAD and made many of the parts for it on his CNC router. That’s not strictly required, though we do think cutting out the hole for the monstrous lead screw nut would be a bit tricky if you had to do it by hand. But beyond that, the design is pretty straightforward and the video after the break provides a very clear step-by-step guide on how to build your own.

In the past we’ve seen how a similar, if much smaller, book press can be used to make bound books of all those PDFs littering your computer. These sort of projects are getting more rare in an increasingly paperless world, but we always like to see people keeping the old ways alive. If the revolution comes and we end up needing to publish Hackaday on hand-pressed paper, we’ll know who to call.

Continue reading “DIY Large Format Book Press Puts On The Pressure” →

3D Printing Paper — Sort Of

December 26, 2019 by Al Williams 31 Comments

There are only a few truly ancient engineered materials, and among the oldest is paper. Traditionally, paper is flat and can be bent into shapes. However, paper can be molded into for example packing material or egg cartons. [XYZAidan] has a process that can recycle paper into 3D cardboard-like objects. You need a 3D printer, but it doesn’t actually print the paper. Instead, you use the printer to create a mold that can form paper pulp you make out of recycled paper and a blender.

[Aidan] provides seven different molds ranging from a desk tray and a dish to simple cubes and coasters. The molds are made in three parts to assist in removing the finished product.

Continue reading “3D Printing Paper — Sort Of” →

Rock, Paper, Neural Net

July 9, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

You might think the game of Rock Paper Scissors is just the random chance, but that’s not true. There is a strategy for Rock Paper Scissors, multiple ones in fact, and the best human players can consistently beat any Joe Schmoe off the street. But what about computers? [Paul] answered that question with a tiny little keychain dongle that can beat you at Rock Paper Scissors.

This is a neural network, and you need to train a neural network, so where did [Paul] get all that data? roshambo.me offers thousands of paper rock scissor games, and trained the network on more than 85,000 human games, along with about 10,000 simulated games. Rock Paper Scissors isn’t a complicated game at all, and the entire neural network is stored on an ATtiny1614 microcontroller. The calculations are done as floats, even. That’s how non-computationally intensive this project is.

Building a neural network is one thing, but putting it in a handy keychain enclosure is something else. This handsome device fits on a PCB just larger than a 2032 coin cell battery and is enclosed in a 3D printed case. The buttons are 3D printed as well, with some clever application of fiber optic as light pipes for the LEDs. The end result is something that is slightly better than random chance at Rock Paper Scissors and shows off some matrix programming skills. Check out the video below.

Continue reading “Rock, Paper, Neural Net” →

Simple Automata Extravaganza

February 2, 2019 by Anool Mahidharia 15 Comments

[Federico Tobon] from [Wolfcat Workshop] spent Makevember in 2017 building a series of fascinating automata using the most basic of craft supplies and simple tools in his workshop. Using a combination of rigid materials such as wooden cubes, popsicle sticks, and paper clips and pliable ones like paper and rubber bands, his creations are way more delightful to play with compared to fidget spinners.

There are no assembly guides, instructions or building plans, but for a hacker, one look at these designs ought to be enough to glean how to build one, with some trial and error to get it right. And that is exactly what [Tobon] found to his delight. After sharing animated GIFs of his creations on social media, numerous other hackers built and shared their own versions of his designs as well as building some new ones.

He posts several other useful resources, some of which were the inspiration that got him started making these automata. All of them are pretty interesting, so do take a look at them too. There is a lot that young kids can learn from building these little machines, given some guidance and help from the elders. But the way we see it, it’s likely the old folks will enjoy them more.

The video after the break compiles all of the little machines for six minutes of viewing pleasure.

Continue reading “Simple Automata Extravaganza” →