3D Printed Hose Sprayer Sets Phasers To Suds

The weather is warming up, and for many of us that means more time spent working out in the yard. You probably won’t find any new life or new civilizations out there, but if you’ve spent the last few months indoors on your computer, the garden may as well be a strange new world. In that case, you’d do well to equip the members of your landing party with this Star Trek: The Original Series hose sprayer designed by [Curt Turner].

If you’re wondering how [Curt] managed to 3D print a functional hose sprayer, the short answer is that he didn’t. Once assembled, the printed parts cleverly attach to the top of a standard sprayer, specifically the model 56516 “Pro Flo” from Orbit. Without the design constraints that would have come from trying to make the thing actually contain pressurized water, [Curt] was free to focus on the aesthetics, and it shows.

Even with a garden variety — no pun intended — sprayer strapped to the bottom, it’s remarkable how much the “Sprayser” looks like the real thing. Well, not real, but you know what we mean.

[Curt] has also done an excellent job documenting this project for others that want to imagine they’re fighting off Romulans in their backyard. He’s got assembly diagrams that break down which color each of the principle components is to be printed in, as well as a build video that we’ve embedded below.

We’ve seen a fair number of Star Trek props built over the years, some of which have packed in considerably more functionality than anything they would have had back on the set. These days you can even by an officially licensed tricorder that can actually do some of the things the fictional versions were capable of.

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The metal comm badge and M5stick on an LCARS mousepad

Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge

One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation he uses to control his smart home.

This hack is as slick as it is simple. The shiny comm badge is actually metal, purchased from an online vendor that surely pays all appropriate license fees to Paramount. It was designed for magnetic mounting, and you know what else has a magnet to stick it to things? The M5StickC PLUS2, a handy ESP32 dev kit. Since the M5Stick is worn under the shirt, its magnet attached to the comm badge, some features (like the touchscreen) are unused, but that’s okay. You use what you have, and we can’t argue with how easy the hardware side of this hack comes together.

[Spanner] reports that taps to the comm badge are easily detected by the onboard accelerometer, and that the M5Stick’s microphone has no trouble picking up his voice. If the voice recordings are slightly muffled by his shirt, the Groq transcription API being used doesn’t seem to notice. From Groq, those transcriptions are sent to [Spanner]’s Home Assistant as natural language commands. Code for the com-badge portion is available via GitHub; presumably if you’re the kind of person who wants this, you either have HA set up or can figure out how.

It seems worth pointing out that the computer in Star Trek: TNG did have a wake word: “computer”. On the other hand it seemed the badges were used to interface with it just as much as the wake word on screen, so this use case is still show accurate. You can watch it in the demo video below, but alas, at no point does his Home Assistant talk back. We can only hope he’s trained a text-to-speech model to sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. At least it gives the proper “beep” when receiving a command.

This would pair very nicely with the LCARS dashboard we featured in January. Continue reading “Control Your Smart Home With Trek-Inspired Comm Badge”

2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting The Final Frontier Keynote Event

In the history of entertainment, few properties have made the sort of indelible mark on popular culture as Star Trek has. In 950 episodes across the twelve television series that have carried the name, the franchise has made a spectacle not of explosions and machismo, but of competent professionals working together to solve complex problems. In the world of Star Trek, the coolest people in the room are the scientists, engineers, physicists, and doctors — is it any wonder so many in the sciences credit the show for putting them on their career path?

Hardware hacker, maker, and Trekkie Andrew [MakeItHackin] will lead the panel.
To celebrate the impact of Star Trek, we’re proud to announce our keynote event for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon: Crafting the Final Frontier. This round-table discussion led by Andrew [MakeItHackin] will bring together some of the artists that have helped cultivate the look and feel of the final frontier since Star Trek: The Next Generation and all the way into the modern era with Star Trek: Picard.

While the art direction of the original Star Trek series from 1966 was remarkably ahead of its time, these are some of the key individuals who were brought in to refine those early rough-hewn ideas into cultural touchstones. Their work ended up becoming more than simple entertainment, and ultimately helped inspire some of the real-world technology we use on a daily basis. The iconic LCARS computer interface predicted the rise of the touch screen, while its impossible to look at props such as the PADD and Tricorder and not see the parallels with modern tablets and smartphones.

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Trekulator: A Reproduction Of The 1977 Star Trek Themed Calculator

A recent project over on Hackaday.io from [Michael Gardi] is Trekulator – Where No Maker Has Gone Before.

This is a fun build and [Michael] has done a very good job of emulating the original device. [Michael] used the Hackaday.io logging feature to log his progress. Starting in September 2024 he modeled the case, got his original hardware working, got the 7-segment display working, added support for sound, got the keypad working and mounted it, added the TFT display and mounted it, wired up the breadboard implementation, designed and implemented the PCBs, added some finishing touches, installed improved keys, and added a power socket back in March.

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Hackaday Links: April 13, 2025

It’s been a while since we’ve dunked on an autonomous taxi foul-up, mainly because it seemed for a while there that most of the companies field testing driverless ride-sharing services had either ceased operation or curtailed them significantly. But that appears not to be the case after a Waymo robotaxi got stuck in a Chick-fil-A drive-through. The incident occurred at the chicken giant’s Santa Monica, California location at about 9:30 at night, when the autonomous Jaguar got stuck after dropping off a passenger in the parking lot. The car apparently tried to use the drive-through lane to execute a multi-point turn but ended up across the entrance, blocking other vehicles seeking their late-evening chicken fix. The drive-through-only restaurant ended up closing for a short time while Waymo figured out how to get the vehicle moving again.

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Next time on Star Trek: EmptyEpsilon... (Credit: EmptyEpsilon project)

Build A Starship Bridge Simulator With EmptyEpsilon

Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.

Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.

The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also available on Steam. The game isn’t limited to just Trek either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.

Obviously building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional, but it certainly looks like more fun that way.

Photos from ODYSSEUS, an amazing-looking LARP using EE.

Retro Calculator Panders To Trekkies… Or Trekkers

Back in 1976, when calculators were not common or cheap, a company named MEGO made the Star Trekulator: a calculator sporting a Star Trek theme. However, it was a bit odd since the calculator didn’t correspond to anything you ever saw on the TV show. It was essentially a very simple calculator with a Star Trek picture and some blinking LEDs. [Computer History Archives Project] has two examples of the rare calculator and shows them off, including the insides, in the video below. We’ve also included a vintage commercial for the device a little farther down.

Inside the 5-inch by 9.5-inch cabinet was an unremarkable printed circuit board. The main component was a TI calculator chip, but there were a surprising amount of other components, including three that [Computer History Archives Project] could not identify.

MEGO was known for making Star Trek toys, including a cassette player that (sorta) looked like a tricorder and communicator walkie-talkies. We wish they’d made the calculator look like some sort of prop from the show, although the beeping noises, we suppose, were supposed to sound like the Star Trek computers.

Honestly, we want to 3D print a case to replicate this with modern insides that can drive a display to put different Trek clips and sound effects out. Now, that would be something. Maybe [Michael Gardi] can take a look at it when he’s got a spare minute. If anything, the calculator looks too advanced to be on the original series. They should have gone VFD. Although Mr. Spock has been seen with a flight slide rule (an E6-B, if we recall). We prefer our props to look like the real ones, thank you.

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