thread

28 Articles

A person's hand wearing a black glove is shown in the right part of the image, making a series of gestures. A representation of a hand mimics those motions on a laptop screen.

Weaving Circuits From Electronic Threads

October 6, 2025 by 6 Comments

Though threading is a old concept in computer science, and fabric computing has been a term for about thirty years, the terminology has so far been more metaphorical than strictly descriptive. [Cedric Honnet]’s FiberCircuits project, on the other hand, takes a much more literal to weaving technology “into the fabric of everyday life,” to borrow the phrase from [Mark Weiser]’s vision of computing which inspired this project. [Cedric] realized that some microcontrollers are small enough to fit into fibers no thicker than a strand of yarn, and used them to design these open-source threads of electronics (open-access paper).

The physical design of the FiberCircuits was inspired by LED filaments: a flexible PCB wrapped in a protective silicone coating, optionally with a protective layer of braiding surrounding it. There are two kinds of fiber: the main fiber and display fibers. The main fiber (1.5 mm wide) holds an STM32 microcontroller, a magnetometer, an accelerometer, and a GPIO pin to interface with external sensors or other fibers. The display fibers are thinner at only one millimeter, and hold an array of addressable LEDs. In testing, the fibers could withstand six Newtons of force and be bent ten thousand times without damage; fibers protected by braiding even survived 40 cycles in a washing machine without any damage. [Cedrik] notes that finding a PCB manufacturer that will make the thin traces required for this circuit board is a bit difficult, but if you’d like to give it a try, the design files are on GitHub.

[Cedrik] also showed off a few interesting applications of the thread, including a cyclist’s beanie with automatic integrated turn signals, a woven fitness tracker, and a glove that senses the wearer’s hand position; we’re sure the community can find many more uses. The fibers could be embroidered onto clothing, or embedded into woven or knitted fabrics. On the programming side, [Cedrik] ported support for this specific STM32 core to the Arduino ecosystem, and it’s now maintained upstream by the STM32duino project, which should make integration (metaphorically) seamless.

One area for future improvement is in power, which is currently supplied by small lithium batteries; it would be interesting to see an integration of this with power over skin. This might be a bit more robust, but it isn’t first knitted piece of electronics we’ve seen. Of course, rather than making wearables more unobtrusive, you can go in the opposite direction. Continue reading “Weaving Circuits From Electronic Threads” →

Pulling At Threads With The Flipper Zero

July 15, 2025 by 13 Comments

Gone are the days when all smart devices were required an internet uplink. The WiFi-enabled IoT fad, while still upon us (no, my coffee scale doesn’t need to be on the network, dammit!) has begun to give way to low-power protocols actually designed for this kind of communication, such as ZigBee, and more recently, Thread. The downside of these new systems, however, is that they can be a bit more difficult in which to dabble. If you want to see just why your WiFi-enabled toaster uploads 100 MB of data per day to some server, you can capture some network traffic on your laptop without any specialized hardware. These low-power protocols can feel a bit more opaque, but that’s easily remedied with a dev board. For a couple of dollars, you can buy Thread radio that, with some additional hacking, acts as a portal between this previously-arcane protocol and your laptop — or, as [András Tevesz] has shown us, your Flipper Zero.

He’s published a wonderful three-part guide detailing how to mod one such $10 radio to communicate with the Flipper via its GPIO pins, set up a toolchain, build the firmware, and start experimenting. The guide even gets into the nitty-gritty of how data is handled transmitted and investigates potential attack vectors (less worrying for your Thread-enabled light bulb, very worrying for your smart door lock). This project is a fantastic way to prototype new sensors, build complicated systems using the Flipper as a bridge, or even just gain some insight into how the devices in your smart home operate.

In 2025, it’s easier than ever to get started with home automation — whether you cook up a solution yourself, or opt for a stable, off-the-shelf (but still hackable) solution like HomeAssistant (or even Minecraft?). Regardless of the path you choose, you’ll likely wind up with devices on the Thread network that you now have the tools to hack.

A DaVinci Screw-Cutting Machine

September 25, 2024 by 5 Comments

It’s not news that Leonardo DaVinci was somewhat ahead of his time, and over the centuries many of the creations in his sketchbooks have been created and proved quite functional. The guys from the YouTube channel How To Make Everything have been looking at one such sketch, a screw thread-cutting machine. At first glance, it seems a little flawed. Threads are hard to make by hand, and you can see that this thread-cutting machine needs two identical threads operating as a reference to make it work. However, as the guys demonstrate, you can create threads by hand using simple methods.

Starting with an offset blade mounted on a block with a hole through it, a dowel can be scribed with a starter thread. This can then be worked by hand to cut enough of a groove for the application. They demonstrated that the machine was viable using nothing but wood for construction. A metal blade was mounted, and some preload force was applied to it with a spring. The dowel to be cut was loaded, and the machine ran back and forth enough times to create a very nice-looking screw thread. And once you’ve made two identical threaded dowels, you can use them to upgrade the machine or even build a second. Once you have a repeatable way to make such threads, all kinds of applications become more accessible. Need a bench vice? No problem now!

Whilst the demonstration doesn’t precisely follow the plans laid out by the master inventor, they aren’t all that clear on the cutting tool after all, it’s nice to see people still wanting to build his ideas, and we’ll certainly be following along.

If you like these “from scratch” builds, you’ll like this other one. Leonardo’s work wasn’t just about machines; he was also very interested in science. Here’s a recreation of his demonstration of gravity as a form of acceleration.

Continue reading “A DaVinci Screw-Cutting Machine” →

Tensioning 3D Prints For Lightweight, Strong Parts

August 6, 2023 by 28 Comments

Desktop 3D printers have come a long way over the past decade. They’re now affordable for almost anyone, capable of printing in many diverse materials, and offer a level of rapid prototyping and development not feasible with other methods. That said, the fact that they are largely limited to printing different formulations of plastic means there are inherent physical limitations to what the machines are capable of, largely because they print almost exclusively in plastic. But augmenting prints with other building techniques, like this method for adding tensioning systems to 3D printed trusses can save weight and make otherwise unremarkable prints incredibly strong.

The build from [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing consists of printed modular sections of truss which can be connected together to make structural components of arbitrary length. To add strength to them without weight, a series of Kevlar threads are strung from one end of the truss to the other on the interior, and then tensioned by twisting the threads at one end. Similar to building with prestressed concrete, this method allows for stronger parts, longer spans, less building material, and lighter weight components. The latter of which is especially important here, because this method is planned for use to eventually build a 3D printer where the components need to be light and strong. In this build it’s being used to make a desk lamp with a hinged joint.

For other innovative 3D printer builds, [Jón] has plenty of interesting designs ranging from this dual extrusion system to this 3D printed wheel for a full-size passenger vehicle. There’s all kinds of interesting stuff going on at that channel and we’ll be on the edge of our seats waiting to see the 3D printer he builds using this tensioned truss system.

Continue reading “Tensioning 3D Prints For Lightweight, Strong Parts” →

3D Printed Machine Shows How Braiding Is Done

June 21, 2023 by 8 Comments

If there’s something more fascinating than watching cleverly engineered industrial machines do their work, we don’t know what it could be. And at the top of that list has to be the machines that do braiding. You’ve probably seen them, with spools of thread or wire dancing under and around each other in an endless ballet that somehow manages to weave a perfect braid. It’s kind of magical.

For those who haven’t seen such a thing, now’s your chance, with this twelve-spool braiding machine. The building methods that [Fraens] used — mainly 3D printing and laser-cut acrylic — make the workings on this machine plain, even to those of us who never learned to manually braid even three strands. It’s far easier to understand by watching the video below than by trying to describe it, but basically, each vertical supply spool runs along a continuous track around a central point by a series of six meshed gears, passing under each other as they progress around the carousel and forming the braid.

There are a ton of details that go into making this work. Chief among them is the thread tensioning mechanism, which is a lever arm and spring-loaded axle that lives at the very center of each spool. The gears that form the inside-outside tracks are quite clever too, as are the worm-gear-driven takeup reel and output tensioner. We also appreciated the gate used to load the spool carriers into the track.

We can recall a couple of braiding machines before, including this one made entirely from Lego Technics.

Continue reading “3D Printed Machine Shows How Braiding Is Done” →

The Nuts And Bolts Of Nuts And Bolts

April 28, 2023 by 23 Comments

If you’re a mechanical engineer, the material covered in this video on the basics of bolted joints probably won’t cover any new ground. On the other hand, if you aren’t a mechanical engineer but still need to bring a little of that discipline to your projects, there’s a lot to learn here.

If there’s one takeaway lesson from [The Efficient Engineer]’s excellent examination of the strength of bolted joints, it’s the importance of preload. Preload is the tensile force created by tightening a bolt or a screw, which provides the clamping force that keeps the joined members together. That seems pretty self-obvious, but there’s more to the story, especially with joints that are subject to cycles or loading and unloading. Such joints tend to suffer from fatigue failure, but proper preloading on the bolts in such a joint mitigates fatigue failure because the bolts are only taking up a small fraction of the total cyclical force on the joint. In other words, make sure you pay attention to factory torque specs.

Continue reading “The Nuts And Bolts Of Nuts And Bolts” →

The Goalie Mask, Reenvisioned

April 26, 2023 by 12 Comments

The goalie mask, at least the retro-styled fiberglass types from the 60s and 70s, hasn’t been used in hockey for about 50 years —  it’s instead made many more appearances in horror movies than on ice rinks. Since then, though, there’s been very little innovation surrounding the goalie mask even though there’s much more modern technology that could theoretically give them even greater visibility. [Surjan Singh] is hoping to use his engineering and hockey backgrounds to finally drive some improvements.

The “uncage” is based on Dyneema thread, a polyethylene fiber known for its strength and durability. It’s often used in applications that demand high strength with minimal weight, such as for sails or backpacking equipment. Using strands of Dyneema woven through a metal support structure is what gives this mask its high strength while also improving the visibility through it dramatically. [Surjan] has been prototyping this design extensively, as there were some issues with the fibers chafing on attachment points on the metal frame, but most of these issues have been ironed out or are being worked on currently.

In the meantime, [Surjan] has been looking for a professional-level goalie to help refine his design further and does seem to have some interest, but it doesn’t seem to have progressed past testing in the more controlled test environments yet. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine this as the future of goalie masks in professional hockey though since some innovation after 50 years of relative stagnation seems to be due. For something more accessible to those of us not currently playing in the NHL, though, you can wheel, snipe, and celly on this air hockey table instead.

Continue reading “The Goalie Mask, Reenvisioned” →