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3D Printable Lenticular Indicators

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You can 3D print all kinds of things, from Yoda heads to little models of Pikachu. Eventually, though, most of us get to a point where we want to print something a little more interesting. The lenticular prints developed by MIT CSAIL are very much that. (h/t Core77 ). The ShiftLens concept is simple enough—there’s a lens layer printed in transparent material. Beneath that, lives a patterned layer in alternating colors, corresponding with the linear lenses of the layer above. Then, there’s an actuation mechanism that can shift the lens layer relative to the pattern layer. This creates a changing color effect as the mechanism is shifted. The actuation mechanism can be a knob, switch, or roller—anything that moves the layers relative to each other. On its own, it’s a bit of a curio—but there are some fun demos. In particular, using the lenticular printing on a bottle to form an indicator for when the container is closed properly. There isn’t a publicly available de...

Local LLMs Can Work Better Than Claude, At Least For Some

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This is going to be a very personal question, because when you’re talking cloud vs local anything, it comes down to this: how much are you willing to pay for independence? The local option might save you long term, or it might never pay off the capital investment. It will almost certainly cost you your time to set up and maintain your own system — but what you get back is independence. With LLMs, traditionally you lose quite a bit of performance, but as [Anurag Singh] points out on XDA Developers , a lesser model might actually let you get more done, depending on your workflow. [Anurag] had been on the 20$/month plan with Anthropic when he decided that the scratch just wasn’t worth the sniff– he was hitting usage limits he couldn’t stand at that level, but couldn’t justify a higher tier of access. So he decided to try a local LLM, even though all he had was a 16 GB MacBook Air M5, not a beefy workstation. Since his workflow isn’t so much ...

Reverse Engineering The Philips PM5139

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The Philips PM5139 is not famous. It won no great victories on the battlefield, nor was instrumental in changing the political landscape. It was just a useful function generator that you might find on a workbench somewhere, doing its job quietly and relatively accurately. [doctormord] has been doing the work to reverse engineer this humble piece of hardware . The PM5139 is poorly documented; the only existing service manual out there is for the PM5138A, a less-capable sister model. Hence, there was some value in reverse engineering the device to understand it better. Work started with two EPROM dumps capturing what Philips put in the box all the way back in the early 1990s. From there, the code was examined and tinkered with until [doctormord] felt confident to modify it and improve upon what was already there. This was achieved with the aid of an 8051 emulator that could run the code to make it obvious what was going on. The result was a custom “V2.0” firmware that adds si...

FLOSS Weekly Episode 881: Eating Its Own Tail

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This week Jonathan chats with Olivier Vernin of Updatecli, the tool that helps you update everything! Need to roll out dependency updates intelligently? Or even automatically deploy to a server on changes? Updatecli can help! https://www.updatecli.io/ https://github.com/updatecli/updatecli/ Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here . Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/xtTpDal

The Different Ways To Look at Negative Resistance

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[lcamtuf] has an in-depth look at the concept of negative resistance that goes somewhat further than one might expect. Normally, as voltage across a resistance increases so too does the current. Negative resistance is the concept of current decreasing as voltage increases. But beyond the raw concept, there are a few other ways to look at this idea. The usual way to think about it is negative differential resistance (NDR) . Not everything has a linear relationship between voltage and current, and for a device to exhibit NDR means that in certain ranges the I–V curve actually slopes downward; increasing one of voltage or current decreases the other. This kind of thing occurs in neon lamps. Once they are glowing, increasing current can result in decreasing voltage. True negative resistance, that of a literal -100 Ω resistor, does not exist. Not in the sense of a passive component, anyway. Such a device would supply power into a circuit rather than dissipating it, and would therefore ...

Anti-Doomscroll Tamagotchi Only Lives if You Do

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The odds are, you have a device deliberately designed to be addictive in your pocket or on the table next to you if you aren’t staring at it right now– your smartphone. We’ve seen a number of projects that try and help people control or moderate their phone usage using a variety of techniques; this vitual pet by [brenpoly] does it by weponizing human empathy, and our bizzare ability to pack-bond with literally anything. The virtual pet itself is based on an ESP32 in a cutesy 3D-printed case, and we think it would probably work well enough if it just had hard-coded behaviors based on hooks in what you’re doing on your phone– the “my little buddy is sick because I’m doomscrolling” should be effective enough on its own, and that part is hardcoded on the ESP32 along with the regular virtual pet behaviour–but this is the year of our Llama 2026, so there has to be an LLM in there somewhere, right? Some people would leave this part out,...

Are Desktop PC-ABS Prints Outperformed by Industrial FDM? Not Really

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[Igor] of [My Tech Fun] set out to discover what differences, if any, can be found between parts printed in PC-ABS filament on an industrial 3D printer, and those from prosumer-grade machines and filament. His video is full of his usual attention to detail as he compares a test suite of parts printed at home in Polymaker PC-ABS with those from a Stratasys Fortus 450mc using proprietary PC-ABS filament. PC-ABS is a filament that strives to deliver the benefits of both polycarbonate and ABS. It’s durable and has fantastic impact resistance, but it costs a bit more than either PC or ABS and requires a heated chamber. In the end, PC-ABS from a home printer compares favorably to an industrial system, at a fraction of the price. [Igor] has previously compared industrial ABS with comsumer ABS , but what made him curious about PC-ABS in particular was the large difference in print temperatures between Polymaker PC-ABS, and Stratasys’s own proprietary PC-ABS. [Igor] prints Polym...