Peeling Fruit with the Power of Steam

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Steam power is a staple of the steampunk aesthetic, thermodynamics, and a checkpoint for the budding mechanical engineer studying heat cycles. But because food is largely made of water, steam is also common in the culinary arts. So it’s no surprise that when thermodynamics is applied to cooking, exciting things can happen. 

This particular example of steam-powered culinary happenings is inspired by industrial potato-peeling machines. By adding high-pressure, high-temperature steam to a pressure vessel with potatoes inside, heat can transfer more easily to the inside of the potatoes. Because the pressure is so high, however, the water in the skin won’t...

Scanning for Lifesigns with ESP32 and Raspberry Pi

It’s a sci-fi trope that you can ‘scan for life signs’ and detect if there are humans — or suspiciously human-shaped aliens — present, but in real life it’s harder than that. [The Masked Bear]’s wifisense-pi project isn’t really scanning for signs of life, either, unless you happen to consider breathing a sign of life. Even then, it’s not detecting breathing per se, but the subtle motion that goes with it: it’s a very sensitive motion detector that relies on the fact that we fleshy bags of goo disturb WiFi signals with our presence, and motion alters those disturbances.

Radio Shack Toy Returns to Life

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[The Modern Rogue] found an old childhood friend in a closet: a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic kit. Along with [Josh Nass], he put it through its paces and made a few repairs along the way. As you might expect, the batteries had long ago leaked out their magic juice.

If you missed these, they were a host of real electronic components with springs connected to the leads. To make a circuit, you bend the spring over, insert a wire, and let go of the spring. By changing the wiring, you could make radios, alarms, computer circuits, and more

There were dozens of...

Fully Characterized Systems

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the system?” It’s a good, if lofty, goal, but it also became an inside joke around the hackerspace because YOLO was our MO about 95% of the time. Head crashes on the 3D printer – “not fully characterized”. Forgot to take out the trash last weekend? Was the system fully characterized?

It’s maybe also the difference between theory and practice: In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice,...

ESP32 Music Sequencer is Clearly Nailing the Y2K Aesthetic

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Do you remember back when electronics came in clear cases? Back around the turn of the millennium, when translucency was chic. [3DSage] sure does, which is why he went to great lengths to make a clear case for his Clear Retro Music Sequencer.

The sequencer itself is based around an ESP32-S3 module with a built-in display, and a rotary encoder that handles most of the input. Most, because there’s a second button and a stylophone-like array of brass rods on one edge of the custom PCB he made with his fiber laser that can also handle note input. Other notable features...

GEEKOM IT13 Max Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 26.04 on an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H mini computer

We’ve already checked out the hardware with an unboxing and a teardown of the GEEKOM IT13 Max in the first part of the review, before testing the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H mini PC with Windows 11, so it’s now time to test Linux on the mini computer using Ubuntu 26.04. In this review, we will report our experience running Ubuntu 26.04 on the GEEKOM IT13 Max, after going through feature testing, running system benchmarks and AI benchmarks on the CPU, GPU, and NPU, checking out storage and USB performance, testing 2.5GbE and WiFi 6/7, stress testing the mini PC,...

A Tape Deck Gets a Service

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If there’s an engineer’s equivalent to those YouTube ASMR videos, then perhaps it comes in a good repair or servicing journey filmed without edits at the bench. Relaxing to watch, has an interesting outcome. So it is with [Ken’s Shop], as he performs a full service on a Realistic cassette deck from we are guessing, the late 1970s or early 1980s.

These decks are nothing particularly special and can be found wherever second-hand consumer electronics go to die, but compared to may newer electronic devices they are surprisingly well-built. Their decades-old mechanicals usually only need a good clean and lubricate, their...

Twin Guitar-Playing Robots Will Work for Tab

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Remember Animusic? They were these incredible animated music videos with original tunes being played by computer-generated robots. Well, the MegCell Pulse might be the coolest robots-playing-music thing we’ve seen since Animusic.

Built by [Bruce] over six years’ time, this futuristic wonder features two robots working in concert to play acoustic guitar, just like a pair of human hands would. You just feed them digital tablature, and off go the fraternal twins, with one doing the fretting, and the other doing the plucking via six individual plectrum. It’s digital music producing analog sound from a physical instrument.

How does MegCell Pulse work? It’s...

Модернизация сложной стеклодувной пушки. Фотоотчёт

Настольная горелка — основной инструмент стеклодува, будь то упрощённое изготовление стеклянных сувениров или сложное приборостроение. От конструкции и исполнения стеклодувной горелки зависят возможности мастера, безопасность и удобство его ежедневной работы. Работы, как правило, тонкой и кропотливой. Известна горелка «пушка» — эволюционировавшая паяльная трубка, по схеме которой могут быть построены и крупные мощные «мортиры», и крохотные ручные огни для мелкой пайки стекла. Небольшую пушку для стеклодувных экзерсисов, например, для изготовления химических принадлежностей и некрупной посуды, нетрудно собрать и отрегулировать в полчаса из подручного хлама, однако, гораздо лучше горелки, построенные вдумчиво и основательно, в том числе и с оперативной регулировкой формы и размера...

Blue Pill-Style STM32C5 Board Adds Oberon-2 Firmware Support

Norwegian-based Tenko has released an open-hardware development board based on STMicroelectronics’ STM32C5 microcontroller family. The compact board follows the familiar Blue Pill form factor while adding USB-C power, onboard USB-to-UART connectivity, and an alternative firmware environment based on Oberon-2. The board uses the recently introduced STM32C551CE, a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller operating at up to […]