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180 Shots on a Roll with the Little Stupid Camera

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If you want to play with the coolest kids on the block when it comes to photography, you have to shoot film. Or so say the people who shoot film, anyway. It is very true though that the chemical medium has its own quirks and needs a bit of effort in a way digital cameras don’t, so it can be a lot of fun to play with. It’s expensive though — film ain’t cheap, and if you don’t develop yourself there’s an extra load of cash. What if you could get more photos on a roll? It’s something [Japhy Riddle] took to extremes, creating a fifth-frame 35mm camera in which each shot is a fifth the size of the full frame. We’re slightly worried about that much sticky tape next to the shutter, but hey. Standard 35mm still film has a 24x36mm frame, in modern terms not far off the size of a full-size SD card. A standard roll of film gives you 36 exposures. There are half-frame cameras that split that frame vertically to give 72 exposures, but what he’s done is make a quarter-frame camera. It’s a si...
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Welding Nuts Inside Metal Tubes, Painlessly

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[Jer Schmidt] needed a way to put a lot of M8 bolts into a piece of square steel tubing, but just drilling and tapping threads into the thin steel wouldn’t be strong enough. So he figured out a way to reliably weld nuts to the inside of the tube, and his technique works even if the tube is long and the inside isn’t accessible. Two smaller holes on either side. Weld through the holes. A little grinding results in a smooth top surface. Essentially, one drills a hole for the bolt, plus two smaller holes on either side. Then one welds the nut to the tubing through those small holes, in a sort of plug weld. A little grinding is all it takes to smooth out the surface, and one is left with a strong threaded hole in a thin-walled tube, using little more than hardware store fasteners. The technique doesn’t require access to the inside of the tube for the welding part, although getting the nut back there in the first place does require a simple helper tool the nut can slot into. [Jer] mak...
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Driving Sim Handbrake Based on Load Cell

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Simulator-style video games are designed to scale in complexity, allowing players to engage at anything from a casual level to highly detailed, realistic simulation. Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, can be played with a keyboard and mouse, a controller, or a huge, expensive simulator designed to replicate a specific airplane in every detail. Driving simulators are similar, and [CNCDan] has been hard at work on his DIY immersive driving sim rig, with this hand brake as his latest addition . For this build, [CNCDan] is going with a lever-style handbrake which is common in motorsports like drifting and rallying. He has already built a set of custom pedals , so this design borrows heavily from them. That means that the sensor is a load cell, which takes input force from a lever connected to it with a spring mechanism. The signal is sent to an Arduino for processing, which is set up to send data over USB like any joystick or controller. In this case, he’s using an Arduino that was...
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Fidget Clicker Becomes Miniature Game Console

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Fidget toys are everywhere these days. A particularly popular type simply puts some keyboard switches on a plate to provide a certain type of clicky satisfaction. [wjddnjsdnd] took that concept a step further, building a keychain-sized fidget toy that actually has games on it. The build is based around six key switches in a 2 x 3 array. The key switches are notable in this case for being magnetic shaft keys. Rather than using a mechanical switch to indicate a keypress, the keycap instead merely moves a magnet which triggers a signal in a hall effect sensor beneath the key. In this case, the build uses A3144 hall effect sensors, which are read by the Arduino Nano running the show. The Nano is also hooked up to a small SSD1306 OLED display over I2c, which it uses for displaying the game state. There’s also a TP4056 module to handle charging the attached 380 mAh lithium-ion battery which powers the pocket-sized device. The Arduino Nano is not a powerful platform for gaming, but it can ...
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Hackaday Podcast Episode 356: Nanoprinting, Vibe Coding, and Keebin’ with Kristina, IN HELL!

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This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so. We found no news to speak of, except that Kristina has ditched Windows after roughly 38 years. What is she running now? What does she miss about Windows? Tune in to find out. On What’s That Sound, Kristina thought it was a jackhammer, but [Statistically Unlikely] knew it was ground-tamper thingy, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations! After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with 3D printing on the nano scale, and a couple of typewriter-based hacks.  Then we take a look at the beauty of the math behind graph theory, especially when it comes to circuit sculptures and neckties. We also talk display hacking, macro pads with haptic feedback knobs, and writing code in Welsh. Finally, we discuss the Virtual Boy, and ponder whether vibe coding is killing o...
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A Deep Dive Into Inductors

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[Prof MAD] runs us through The Hidden Power of Inductors — Why Coils Resist Change . The less often used of the passive components, the humble and mysterious inductor is the subject of this video. The essence of inductance is a conductor’s tendency to resist changes in current. When the current is steady it is invisible, but when current changes an inductor pushes back. The good old waterwheel analogy is given to explain what an inductor’s effect is like. There are three things to notice about the effect of an inductor: increases in current are delayed, decreases in current are delayed, and when there is no change in current there is no noticeable effect. The inductor doesn’t resist current flow, but it does resist changes in current flow. This resistive effect only occurs when current is changing, and it is known as “inductive reactance”. After explaining an inductor’s behavior the video digs into how a typical inductor coil actually achieves this. The basic idea is that the induc...
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Gimmick Sunglasses Become Easy Custom Helmet Visor

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[GizmoThrill] shows off a design for an absolutely gorgeous, high-fidelity replica of the main character’s helmet from the video game Satisfactory . But the best part is the technique used to create the visor: just design around a cheap set of full-face “sunglasses” to completely avoid having to mold your own custom faceplate. One of the most challenging parts of any custom helmet build is how to make a high-quality visor or faceplate. Most folks heat up a sheet of plastic and form it carefully around a mold, but [GizmoThrill] approached the problem from the other direction. After spotting a full-face sun visor online, they decided to design the helmet around the readily-accessible visor instead of the other way around. The first thing to do with the visor is cover it with painter’s tape and 3D scan it. Once that’s done, the 3D model of the visor allows the rest of the helmet to be designed around it. In the case of the Satisfactory helmet, the design of the visor is a perfect mat...
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