Bike Spokes, Made of Rope

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=6hXOYfnhStI

We know this one is a few years old, but unless you’re deep into the cycling scene, there’s a good chance this is the first time you’ve heard of [Ali Clarkson’s] foray into home made rope spokes. 

The journey to home-made rope spoke begun all the way back in 2018, shortly after the company Berd introduced their very expensive rope spokes. Berd’s spokes are made of a hollow weaved ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) rope with very low creep. They claim wheels stronger than steel spoke equivalents at a fraction of the weight. Naturally forum users asked themselves, “well why can’t...

Hackaday Links: January 25, 2026

If predictions hold steady, nearly half of the United States will be covered in snow by the time this post goes live, with the Northeast potentially getting buried under more than 18 inches. According to the National Weather Service, the “unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm will bring heavy snow from the central U.S. across the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and through the northeastern U.S. for the remainder of the weekend into Monday.” If that sounds like a fun snow day, they go on to clarify that “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts can be expected”, so keep that in mind. Hopefully...

Infineon AIROC ACW741x Wi-Fi 7 ultra-low power tri-radio IoT SoC family support MLO, Wi-Fi sensing, BLE 6.0, and Thread

Infineon has introduced the AIROC ACW741x tri-radio Wi-Fi 7 wireless SoC family designed for IoT and smart home devices. The company mentions it’s the first Wi-Fi 7 solution with a “20 MHz” 1×1 Wi-Fi 7 radio, Bluetooth 6.0 (including Channel Sounding), and an 802.15.4 radio for Thread and Matter support, in a 7×7 mm QFN package. When we think of Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), we usually picture high-end routers and smartphones with gigabits of data over the huge 320 MHz channels. But the standard also includes features specifically designed for low-power IoT devices. Infineon’s new AIROC ACW741x family, which they claim...

Balancing a Turbine Rotor to 1 Milligram With a DIY Dynamic Balancer

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=oMzTQzkCGVw

Although jet engines are theoretically quite simple devices, in reality they tread a fine line between working as intended and vaporizing into a cloud of lethal shrapnel. The main reason for this is the high rotational speed of the rotors, with any imbalance due to poor manufacturing or damage leading to undesirable outcomes. It’s for this reason that [AlfMart CNC Garage] on YouTube decided to spend some quality time building a balancer for his DIY RC turbine project and making sure it can prevent such a disaster scenario.

In the previous part of the series the turbine disc was machined out...

Mecha Comet is an open-source hardware, modular Linux handheld computer (Crowdfunding)

Mecha Comet open-source hardware modular Linux handheld computer can be used as a gaming console, a Linux terminal, an electronic measurement tool, and more, thanks to a 40-pin magnetic expansion connector for modules such as a gamepad, a QWERTY keyboard, a 40-pin GPIO header, and more. The Mecha Comet is powered by an NXP i.MX 8M Plus or i.MX 95 Arm SoC, ships with up to 8GB RAM and 128GB flash, but also supports MicroSD and NVMe storage. It also features a 3.91-inch touchscreen display, a mini HDMI 2.1 port, an 8MP camera, a dual-mic array and a speaker, a...

Glowing Polyhedrons

Building wireframe polyhedra made from LED filaments, using graph theory to devise geometry and driving strategies.

Read the article on my hugo blog

FOSDEM 2026 schedule – Embedded, RISC-V, Robotics, Rust, Open Hardware, and more

FOSDEM 2026 will take place on January 31-February 1, with thousands of developers meeting in Brussels to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. The free-to-attend “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting” gets more traction every year, and in 2026, there will be at least 1,113 speakers, 1,016 events, 70 tracks, and potentially close to 10,000 attendees. As usual, I’ll create a virtual schedule with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms, including “RISC-V”, “Robotics and simulation”, and “FOSS on...

Innodisk Releases EXEC-Q911 Development Kit with Qualcomm QCS9075

Innodisk, in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, has released the EXEC-Q911, a ruggedized development kit built around a COM-HPC Mini module mounted on a dedicated carrier board for industrial edge workloads. Part of the company’s “AI on Dragonwing” series, the platform targets robotics, smart infrastructure, and edge LLM applications. The compatible COM-HPC Mini Module EXMP-Q911 is […]

Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit

In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) operates on 16-bit values, performing arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction, as well as logic operations including bitwise AND, OR, and XOR. The 8086's ALU is a complicated part of the chip, performing 28 operations in total.1

In this post, I discuss the circuitry that controls the ALU, generating the appropriate control signals for a particular operation. The process is more complicated than you might expect. First, a machine code instruction results in the...

Стеклодувные горелки. От истоков к современности. Краткий экскурс

Несмотря на архаичность ручной формовки стекла, стеклодувное дело ещё отчасти живо и привлекает своих адептов, в том числе и как хобби, домашние любительские экзерсисы. Сегодня ремесло это довольно громоздкое и дорогостоящее, так, однако, было не всегда — взять хотя бы горелки — первое, о чём задумывается будущий стеклодув. Рассмотрим же, с помощью чего творили предки и как развивалось огневое оснащение стеклодувного дела со времён царя Гороха, до дней нынешних, взглянем заодно на интересные примеры и вообще, полюбуемся огнями. За мной, мои дорогие пироманы, за мной!