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Thermoacoustic Sterling Engine is Now Fully 3D Printable

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Would you like to make your own energy? Why, who doesn’t in this era of rising costs! A sterling engine always looks like a good fit for that: highly efficient, with no risk of a boiler explosion. A thermoacoustic sterling engine looks even better, since it has only one moving part at the output end. A thermoacoustic sterling engine you can 3D print yourself looks best of all, and that’s what [my engines] has on offer , now that even the burner and hot end of his thermoacoustic engine are designed for SLA metal printing. We previously reported on the open-source engine , but there’ve been some improvements worth talking about. For one thing, he’s integrated a biogas/methane burner directly inside the 3D-printable hotend. For another, that 3D-printed design allows for an excellent heat exchange geometry that would be very hard to get any other way. The whole thing is open source with plans available at OwnEnergy.org , where you can find links to the apparently-ma...

PVC Pipe Turned DIY Digital Telescope

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[Makestreme] had always wanted to own a nice telescope, but found that budget would not stretch to anything above a cheap model with a limited 50 mm aperture. Wanting a better view of the heavens, the way forward was obvious— it was time to build a better telescope, instead! The build is based around a 114 mm diameter mirror sourced from Amazon. It’s assembled inside a length of 5-inch PVC pipe of just under a meter to suit the 900 mm focal length of the concave reflector. 3D printed components are used to mount the mirror and control its position for proper focus and collimation. Traditionally, a reflector based telescope would use a mirror and eyepiece to provide a view to the user. However, [Makestreme] built this as a smart telescope, instead integrating a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 at the focal point. It’s connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, running off an 18650 lithium-ion cell and a 5 V boost module for portability. The Pi runs a Python script that hosts a small w...

Superconducting Temperature Record set at Ambient Pressure

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An interesting type of superconductors available to us today are the ones that achieve this property at room temperature, with only the small snag that they require crushing pressures that would render biological lifeforms into a very thin layer of molecules. What these however suggest is that something in these materials changes at these high pressures, and if we could retain that state upon releasing said pressure, we might be able to have our superconducting cake and eat it too. This is effectively what researchers recently achieved, with a research article in  PNAS Physics by [Liangzi Deng] et al. covering the pressure-quench protocol (PQP) that they used for this feat. There is also an associated easy-to-read press release by Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) as well as one by the University of Houston. Target material was a cuprate, specifically HgBa 2 Ca 2 Cu 3 O 8+δ , also known as the HBCCO series or Hg1223 for short. Hg1223 has been the subject of much research and expe...

Samsung Printer is the Next Frontier Of Minecraft Servers

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While DOOM remains the undisputed champion of ‘game you play on every piece of hardware’ it seems that the role of ‘game you play on everything just because you can’ is slowly being shifted to Minecraft, as we have yet another Minecraft server somewhere Minecraft has no business being served– in this case, a Samsung Printer. The hack actually requires opening up the printer to get at the debug ports to bang your way in via serial, but as any security expert will tell you, once the black hats have physical access to a machine, they own it. That isn’t to say it’s easy– [vimpo] had to dump the firmware and find an exploit. Since it’s 2026 [vimpo] tried to get an LLM to do all that hard work for him, and while it helped with identifying functions in the dump, ultimately the hacking still fell upon [vimpo]’s human intelligence, though not before burning through millions of tokens.  Having found a good old fashioned UDP overflow exp...

Homebrew 68K Machine Has A PCI Bus

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The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus was first introduced all the way back in 1992. It quickly became the standard way to interface add-on cards on the PC platform, supplanting earlier buses like ISA and various other oddball standards. You wouldn’t expect to see a PCI bus on a Motorola-based machine, but [maniek86]’s homebrew rig offers just that.  That’s a lot of soldering. This computer is a beautiful piece of homebrew engineering, constructed out of protoboard and loose wires rather than any fancy PCB. At the heart of the build lies a Motorola 68000 running at 10 MHz. It’s got 1 MB of SRAM, 4 KB of ROM, and a MC68681P acting as a UART, timer source, and I/O controller. Where things get special, though, is in the inclusion of a Xilinx Spartan II FPGA (XC2S100), which acts as a PCI bridge. It provides the machine with two 32-bit 5-volt PCI slots which are interrupt capable, albeit with no bus mastering. A XC95144XL CPLD also sits present to act as ...

Foldable OLED Displays and the Bane of Dust

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Much like Apple’s once vaunted super-slim butterfly keyboard, today’s range of portable devices featuring flexible OLED displays – which can fold said display into a much smaller form factor – are a marvel of engineering. The foldable phone after a dusty encounter. (Credit: iFixit, YouTube) Unfortunately engineering can only do so much against fundamental flaws. In the case of both these flexible OLEDs and butterfly keyboards the main issue is that of dust intrusion, with a recent teardown by [iFixit] going over the reasons for this . As test subject we got a Galaxy Z Fold 8, as an example of a modern-day foldable smartphone-tablet hybrid. This phone has an IP48 rating, meaning that it’s water-resistant, but not dust-resistant for particles smaller than 1 mm. To test this, [iFixit] used UV-reactive dust particles, making sure that they got literally everywhere inside the phone’s hinge mechanism. After this treatment, trying to fold the phone cause...

Quick Share Implemented On A Kindle

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Quick Share is a useful tool for flipping files between Android smart phones in a fuss-free wireless manner. [unrealJune] has now implemented the feature on Kindle devices. You’ll need a jailbroken Kindle to use this, which is running the Kindle Unified Application Launcher and KOReader as well. You’ll also want SSH access, and a machine that has Go and Docker for you to build the project. [unrealJune] steps through the steps to compile and install the Quick Share plugin to KOReader, as well as explaining how it works. Notably, it’s receive only—so you can spit files onto the Kindle, but you can’t send them from the Kindle to other devices. The Kindle will also automatically accept files, which is worth noting if you’re security conscious. If there’s no network, the Kindle is also able to appear as its own AP if needed. Think of this as a nifty convenience if you find yourself regularly trying to truck files on to your jailbroken Kindle. It’s ...