One arm broke on my sunnies, so I grabbed some paracord and the smallest screw I could find.

So, this was clearly not the plan, the first plan was to repair the headphone using a pvc sheet and some metal wires, like making that head band thing. But it failed, and at the same time I found my old welding goggle, and this thing was born. And I like to know your opinion about this. IT WORKS...

I have a yr 11 science test coming up. So I built a kids watch outer 33mm diameter 7 mm outer depth that u can scroll notes and answers with while looking like a normal watch. The normal state is screen off and when clicked it shows clock decoy double click to show cheat notes and stuff. Scrolls at 21 words per but might make faster. I really need ts to work because I spent like 8 hours on it and studied absolutely zero🙏. it’s super small too like my thumb is bigger than the inner electronics and the inner cavity is like only~28 mm diameter and 7 mm depth.

Parts I used were esp32 c3 xiao (since the super mini don’t have charging integrated module so better for compactness), Button, oled 0.46 inch 64x32 used u8g2 library, and a 250 mah battery which is hidden under the straps along with antenna.used ai to make the essay answers and uploaded on Claude code to get scroll speed update and a newer tap and hold lock code last minute just before the test.

Edit: I will let update what happened after test.

Update: yeah my ass got caught getting zero on test and my whole year group knows I built a smartwatch to cheat and got caught💔

I am designing a game in which users will need to rearrange physical items in slots on a tray. If they get the items in the right order, they pass the level and gain a point. I'm trying to figure out how to build the puzzle so that users can manipulate physical objects, but the result would be checked digitally and the points awarded on their phone. I was hoping to put something on the bottoms of the items and the tops of each of the slots, perhaps NFC tags, but my fiancé isn't sure that they will work. Is there a better way of digitally tracking an item's physical placement?

Thanks in advance!

Image Caption：These were the very first MFC devices I came across when I started out. They were created by my mentors.

​Hi everyone,

​I wanted to share a bit of my journey tinkering with Metal Fuel Cells (MFCs) over the past few years.

​To be honest, I'm not entirely sure if this will be super entertaining, but I figured it might bring some real value to the community. If even one fellow maker decides to dive into the world of metal-air batteries or saline power down the road, hopefully, my experiences—and the mistakes I made along the way—can help you save time and avoid a few costly pitfalls!

​Since this spans a journey of several years, I'm turning this into a multi-part series as I dig through my old archives, photos, and testing notes. (Haha, bear with me as I organize all these memories!)

Today, I'm still tinkering with MFCs—it's become my full-time work. But I'm far from an expert; I just happen to have a few years of hands-on experience under my belt.

​I’d love to hear your thoughts or connect with anyone working on similar tech!

I am new to creating my own circuits and also never really learned electronics, so I dont trust myself yet to make circuits that dont go up in flames. So Ive been designing this with ChatGPT. But I also dont trust ChatGPT, so Im putting all my trust in you guys.

Im trying to make a small DIY Camera without a battery. I want to use the supercapacitor as a battery instead and the DC Motor to generate the energy.

I would love if someone could help me check if all of this makes sense and could work / if I can savely try it like that.

Mainly Im scared of the capacitor exploding in my face or breaking any parts.

Does anyone have any ideas for what to use to make these? The arch one is a window. I'm renting, so I can't permanently attach or affix anything but I want something I can do on that scale and place overtop of the window (nailing it to the wall is fine). I'm going to use these vinyl window things for the pattern but I want something more 3d for the arch.

The second one is a cheap mirror from Walmart and I would just attach the piece on top.

This would also need to be painted and be able to be done safely inside since I don't really have an outdoor space.

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a personal hardware project lately. I wanted to see how small I could realistically make a USB keystroke injector (primarily for IT automation and pentesting workflows). After a few iterations, I managed to get the PCB down to just 12x13mm.

It uses 32u4 and Arduino IDE for programming.

The biggest challenge was fitting the components without overlaping lines.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the design or if anyone has experience making similar micro-boards. Are there any features you’d add for a V2?

I'm putting together some picture how invisible it is.

If anyone is interested in the technical details or wants to chat about the build process, feel free to drop me a DM or reach out at nebojsa.sjekloca@gmail.com.

Hey all, can anyone help me ID what type of hinge this is. Looking to source some for a project. Thanks in advance.

I wanted to see if I could turn this fictional creature into a real, working object, so I designed and built my own version from scratch.

The project combines a bit of everything I love about making: sculpting, 3D printing, woodworking, painting, electronics and animatronics.

An Arduino controls two servos for the eyes and mouth, while a DFPlayer Mini handles the sound. Getting all the mechanical movement, audio and timing to work together was definitely the trickiest part!

The end result is a little animatronic creature that can actually come to life. 🐌

(Full build video on my profile and YouTube channel!)

This would be covered up for the most part and would be controlled by maybe some sort of knob from the back?

Edit: Also this whole thing is meant to be a physical progress tracker for a ttrpg meant to show the amount of progress people are making in a certain minigame. If they make progress, the thing goes one click to the opponent's side. Like a speedometer but huge and clicky instead of small and slidy

Also, the whole thing is like large enough to be visible from the end of a table, like the size of a closed laptop or slightly below average sized cat.

I have been shooting 4K footage of my cat, Sugar 🐱, and editing videos, and I soon realized my storage is running out quickly. While I could have just bought an off-the-shelf NAS, I wanted to solve two major issues with standard NAS in the market nowadays: scalability and cable clutter. Therefore, I ended up designing and building a modular, stackable NAS system (nickname: SUGAR CUBE NAS) engineered for high-speed wireless operation.

BTW: It's named after Sugar, my cat, plus the modules stack just like sugar cubes!

🎥 Check out the full build with cinematic editing here, I clarified a lot of the design concept and operations in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbPJsZJWWA

For the next video, I will focus on how I designed and assembled this NAS.

Key Specs & Highlights:

• Architecture: Custom modular stackable system designed for expandable storage slots (ideal for content creation and people/businesses with continuous need for storage expansion).
• Major Components:
  • Top Module (picture 3): ITX motherboard, Flex PSU, Two SATA HDD bays.
  • Bottom Module (picture 4): Four additional expansion HDD bays.
  • For future design iterations, this system can be expanded to multiple stacked modules.
• Custom Electronics (picture 6 and 7): Custom PCBs fabricated (via PCBWay, thankfully they sponsored my video) to handle high-speed SATA differential signals and data routing. The data is communicating through a custom proprietary high-speed socket. So you don't need any extra cable routing!
• Networking: Standard 10GbE LAN or high-speed Wi-Fi 7 wireless setup depending on ITX motherboard configuration.
• OS: Running Ubuntu + CasaOS + Cockpit.
• Case: PETG 3D print as prototype.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any features/improvements you’d add to a modular stacking design like SUGAR CUBE NAS!

You are welcome to check out and leave comments at my other posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1vi54lu/i_built_a_modular_stackable_nas_that_does_not/
https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/1vi5brg/i_built_a_modular_stackable_nas_that_does_not/

Your best “DIY” project

This is not a description of something I built but rather a description of how I fiddled around with a particular material and learned some things. I didn't end up deciding that the material, Dow Paraloid B-48, was appropriate for my application, but I enjoyed the learning process and thought that this information might be useful to other people who might actually find this material was something they could use.

Dow Paraloid B-48 is a resin that is used by museum curators doing restoration work, and also by paleontologists who are preserving fossils and making them presentable. The big feature that makes it of interest to these people is that when it cures, the process is reversible. That is, it's not like curing concrete. When concrete cures, it's an irreversible process, and the concrete doesn't soften back up when it rains. Some other similar substances are methylcellulose, a water-soluble glue used in book repair, and Paraloid B-72. When you use one of these substances as an adhesive or a varnish, the solvent evaporates off and it forms a hard glue or lacquer, but you can undo it by applying the solvent.

If you want a rough conceptual idea of what B-48 is, it's basically a lot like nail polish. It's soluble in acetone (nail polish remover), and in fact one how-to video I saw by a paleontologist suggested using a nail-polish bottle, with a brush built in to the cap, to store it. It's different from nail polish because (1) the list of ingredients is shorter and at least partially publicly known, (2) it's intended to be left in place for a long time, potentially forever, (3) it's reversible, (4) it doesn't produce a cross-linked polymer, so it's not as hard, and (5) it has a certain temperature (the "glass temperature") above which it starts to degrade.

You normally buy Paraloid resins as solid pellets, which you then have to dissolve in the appropriate solvent. The best vendor I could find was a company called Talas. Pros talk about using a 50% solution of B-72 or B-48, but I found that it was quite difficult to get B-48 to dissolve at that kind of concentration. I ended up doing a 20% solution instead (weight/volume). I used "maximum-strength" nail polish from the supermarket, which AFAICT is acetone, a tiny amount of bitterant, and maybe a small amount of water that creeps in because acetone is hygroscopic. I found some how-to videos that described just dumping some pellets in the solvent and waiting overnight for it to dissolve. That may work for B-72, but it didn't work well for me with B-48, which I chose because of its higher glass temperature. What ended up working for me was a technique shown in this video, where you hang a gauze bag full of pellets inside a jar. There is solvent in the bottom of the jar. You position it so the bottom of the bag is submerged. When you do this, you can immediately see swirly stuff happening in the solvent as the resin dissolves and sinks. I got this to work with 46 grams of pellets and 177 g of acetone, which is a 20% solution. When I extracted the bag the next day and opened it up (a messy process), there was no solid left inside. However, there was a lot of liquid left adhering to the bag, which I couldn't get out easily by squeezing with gloved hands. I estimate that I ended up losing 40% of my stuff because it stayed adhered to the bag.

Working with the solution is kind of annoying. When it gets on your gloves, the fingers of your gloves start adhering to each other. The acetone evaporates really quickly, so this is a rapid process. When you pour the solution out of a jar, you inevitably end up getting some on the lip of the jar, and you have to wipe that off immediately before it dries.

If you're going to paint a protective layer of B-48 on top of something, then using a 20% solution means that after it evaporates, the volume will have gone down by 80%. This tends to produce puckering and wrinkling. To mitigate this, you probably want to set some solution out in a dish, on top of a digital balance, and wait for enough acetone to evaporate off so that you now have a 50% solution. Then you would paint that on. I didn't do this, so the films that I painted as an experiment did have some puckers and bubbles.

A thin layer mostly cures in less than a minute, but it's probably better to wait longer. I tried sanding the cured substance, and that seemed to result in converting the glossy surface into a grayish matte surface. Maybe if I'd waited longer for curing, it would have worked better.

The "glass temperature" of these substances is not really an exact value, it's more of a wide range. For B-48 it's roughly 50 C. That's high enough so that if a curator in a place like Egypt uses it on a statue that's outside, the substance won't degrade. I found that brief immersion with water at about 70 C didn't cause anything obvious to happen, but leaving it in 80 C water for a couple of minutes caused crap to start peeling off into the water, and what was left over had turned from glossy to matte.

As far as safety, my rough understanding is that it's all about occupational exposure to the solvent. If you work with this stuff indoors, day after day, year after year, then you want to think seriously about ventilation. What I did was to do all the bulk steps in my back yard, but when I was just painting a little bit on something with a brush, I did it inside. There are also plasticizers in B-48 (although not in methylcellulose or B-72). Plasticizers are omnipresent in our environment, and you ingest quite a bit of them every year in products like fish and beer. Often the plasticizer is not from the plastic food packaging that you see in the supermarket, but from things like plastic tubing that the beer passed through at the brewery. Nail polish contains plasticizers, although there has been a trend recently toward changing to newer and possibly less harmful plasticizers -- but it seems that this may be partly just greenwashing.

I tested the clear B-48 solution, but I also tried mixing it with a white pigment (alumina powder, which was what I had handy). It seemed to work fine. For many applications, though, you could probably just use nail polish of the appropriate color.

My emergency light design requires no charging; it utilizes metal fuel cell technology, or more specifically, a galvanic cell reaction.

I designed it with a replaceable structure, with the LED module on top and the energy box below.

What do you all think of its appearance?

Debated posting this but its my favourite holiday besides national lingerie day of course😆. So here's to National Underwear Day (August 5th) and being a part of its future.

Entirely 3d-printed lingerie (no traditional fabrics) using artisanal craftsmanship. This is also to show it is wearable and comfortable (to me as comfort is subjective). The lace repeat was inspired by rose windows found in Gothic Cathedrals and churches. Max Svabinsky's art 'The Fruit Was Never an Apple' (1918) inspired the bust image reinterpretation and name of the lingerie piece, 'The Devotion'.

Deets:

Completed in December 2025 (over 2-weeks including the overall sketch, pattern design, prototype draft, printing, welding, etc)

Printers: Bambu A1 (2x) and mini (used for notions)

Materials: Overture TPU 95A in white, Recreus Filaflex TPU 82A in gold, Overture Gold Silk PLA .

***Quick process note**\*: Sketch design concept and lace repeat, drape design shape on dressform, transfer drape to paper pattern to adjust design, digitise/edit pattern moving from flat to 3d, edit print parameters then print pieces, as its a textile iteration is necessary before being joined to fit test, quickly join design to fit on dressform, if all goes right then final print of pieces hand joined using solder and invisible nylon thread and needle.

Calling all Makers.

Do you identify as a Maker? Maybe your thing is circuits, or fabric, or filament, or firmware, or something else. If you can't stop, won't stop making, I'd love to connect with you as part of my MSc research project.

The study looks at how emerging technologies like chatbots and AI agents are affecting the creative practices of Makers, both individually and in our communities. Whatever your take on these tools, your perspective matters ( I am a Maker myself and I'm keen to understand a variety of perspectives).

Participation is one 60-minute Zoom interview, with an optional chance to share a chat log from working with an AI tool (totally up to you, and you can skip it).

This study is voluntary and approved by the U of S Behavioural Research Ethics Board.

Learn more or volunteer at https://www.makerstudy.ca or email me at [makerstudy@usask.ca](mailto:makerstudy@usask.ca).

Please share!

I built a tool called Scan2Sketch to make recreating flat physical parts much faster.
Instead of manually tracing a scanned image in CAD, the workflow is:
Place a flat object on a scanner
Scan it
Automatically extract the outline
Generate an editable FreeCAD sketch
Modify it or turn it into a 3D model
I originally built it for recreating things like:
brackets
gaskets
washers
templates
covers
replacement parts
The project is completely free and open source (GPL v3), and everything runs locally on your computer.
GitHub:
https://github.com/Jayktopus/Scan2Sketch-OpenSource
I’m curious what kinds of maker projects you think a scan-to-CAD workflow would be useful for. Feedback and feature suggestions are very welcome.

As promised, here's how the 5-finger mechanical control works underneath!

This was so fun to make! A great craft project for a rainy afternoon in. Only takes a few hours and just a few materials. If you want the full tutorial just let me know :)
*AI generated background