Kritik sah

The Claymore mine is a rather fearsome weapon of war, using explosives to blast a cone of shrapnel towards advancing enemies. It’s not really something you should try and build at home. An airsoft version, though, is altogether more appropriate. [RegiBlackwood] has developed a simple way to build exactly that. It’s a cheap and cheerful build, with the claymore housing itself built out of cardboard. Wooden dowels are used to stake it into the ground, just like the real thing. In the center of the housing sits a regular old mouse trap. Only, it’s been modified to hold a sling carrying a payload of BBs. The trap is also tweaked to make its spring more powerful, and to enable it to be triggered with the tug of a tripwire. When triggered, the mousetrap fires and hurls the sling forth, spewing a rain of BBs from the front of the device—ideally quelling the advance on your position. Built properly, it’s a fun piece of airsoft hardware that could really change the dyna...

In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. Unsurprisingly, this causes the shell to essentially disintegrate the moment you try to disassemble them for something like a screen replacement. While somewhat the opposite of plasticizer migration into ABS from PVC insulation that we covered before , the underlying cause is probably similar, with the Transformers toy community having come to call it Gold Plastic Syndrome (GPS) based on the fact that it were mostly gold-colored parts on these plastic toys that seemed to be affected. Over time the additives used to add a cool metal sheen and swirls to the plastic appear to interact in a way that makes the ABS plastic very brittle. Although the underlying cause of GPS...

Want to feel the heat of nearby fire, explosions, or radiation? Or even just the gentle warmth and breeze of a sunny day in the wasteland? If you said yes, you’re in luck because [GingasVR] created an immersive heat mod and wind mod for the VR version of Fallout 4 that leverages economical smart outlets and game scripting to do just that. The heart of this hack lies in gluing two things that don’t normally go together. In this case [GingasVR] uses a bit of game scripting to control TP-Link HS100 or HS110 Smart Plugs, allowing virtual events to control things in the real world. An ordinary fan in a smart plug creates wind on demand, and heat comes from a 250 watt infrared heat lamp aimed toward the player. For heat, an IR lamp is the way to go because it’s highly directional, can be quickly cycled on and off, and responds rapidly. The range of immersive effects opened up by this is pretty compelling. Sunny weather yields a gentle glow of warmth, but nearby explosio...

A perennial in the esoteric operating system space is ReactOS, a project with its roots in the 1990s which is doing a pretty good job of creating an open source clone of 32-bit Windows. They have a new version out , and it’s acquired some useful features. Top of the list is a new graphical installer, removing the need for separate live and install ISOs, followed by improvements in video bug fixes and high definition audio drivers and subsystems. There’s a headless server install too, in which the GUI is suppressed. Perhaps most interesting, they are working on version syncing the open-source projects such as WINE on which they rely, meaning with luck that any improvements there will show up in ReactOS. A while back we took a look at using ReactOS as a daily , and found it to be quirks aside, as usable as you’rd expect a Windows XP clone to be. Given that there are plenty of pieces of hardware and software around that still need an early-2000s era Windows to run, this...

Perhaps the most annoying kinds of faults are those that involve expensive equipment that just sit around in a cupboard, only for them to just stop working at all. Such was the case with the £2,000 Amprobe cable trace kit that [Tom] bought for work-related purposes. After sitting around unused for a few years, the signal generating part of the kit refused to power up at all, with Fluke’s service department wanting at least £600 to even attempt a repair after already having had [Tom] cough up £70 to even get this quote. Subsequently he instead sent it to [Buy it Fix it] on YouTube for an attempted repair , which at the very least would be a less costly option. These systems use a signal generator connected to the cable, with a separate detector wirelessly tracking this signal. By itself that doesn’t sound too complex, but as it turns out it wasn’t quite so straightforward to diagnose. After eliminating a basic power or display issue, the SoC’s boot sequence was ...

The hope is always that a good business card will leave a good impression. For those in the electronics field, they also serve as an opportunity to showcase creative design skills. [Wilson Harper] demonstrates that ably with a rather nifty energy-harvesting build. The card is based around a thin PCB in the typical business card size. It’s populated by 21 Charlieplexed LEDs, a small microcontroller, and some supporting components. Now, this is normally where you might expect the device to be powered by a small coin cell, maybe deftly integrated into the PCB thickness itself to make the card less cumbersome. But no—[Wilson] went a different route. The thing is that in 2026, most of us are carrying phones with NFC readers built in. Thus, the card was built to harvest this source of energy with a PCB trace antenna, designed with the aid of STM’s antenna inductance tools and an LLM script lobbed into KiCad. All one needs to do is to pop the card on the back of a phone and the ...