CubeAMSPro100 has completed a UNI-T UT61E Backlight Touch Mod which adds some interesting features to the UNI-T meter. With a wave of a hand over the top of the meter he can now command the backlight to turn on or off. This isn’t a simple hack and it involved installing a custom PCB to handle the magic.

Pop bottles normally find their way into the trash or recycling but if you have some time you can make some interesting rockets with them. The 2 stage water rocket above was launched to a height of 864 feet.

 
This one quick to build the rocket portion, most of the bottle work is for looks and a bit of stable flight purpose. The neck of the bottle is simply friction fit to the multiple wraps of duct tape on the pipe that increased the diameter to provide a snug fit. The end of the tube has a cork stuffed in the end with a bottle cap and filler nozzle glued in place. This adds some safety since the cork can easily pop out if over pressured. An alternative would have been to glue an end cap to the pipe and drill a hole to mount the filler nozzle.
 

 

 
This Oobleck filled water rocket didn’t behave the way I expected. Oobleck is liquid and can be poured but when a hard force is applied it firms up. The Oobleck reacts to the high pressure and delays the launch until it is slowly forced out of the nozzle.

 
This alcohol powered rocket is great since it can be fired with the push of a button. A simple BBQ lighter is used as the spark source, a bit of rubbing alcohol fumes is used to power it but this design should be great with other things such as propane and hair spray.
 

 
There are lots of uses for MOTs (microwave Oven Transformers).  The guys from Make it Extreme have come up with a great new use. Convert them to a Heavy Lift Magnet. They take a number of transformers, chop the top off the laminated core and weld them to a heavy base plate. They are then wired to a common power source and the surface of the transformer that will touch the metal being lifted is machined flat. The only limitation that I can see is that not all of the transformer sections might be touching the metal object being lifted. The lifting capacity for some free MOTs is quite impressive!

Thanks for the tip Curt

Instead of going out climbing wall or the movies this virtual experience system can provide you a variety of experiences in one facility. The user uses VR for the immersive visual experience and physical objects for the tactile environment.

Mark Nesselhaus is building a computer the hard way, by using handfuls of transistors and cardboard.

“Attempt to build a computer using cardboard and brass paper fasteners as the base material for all of the logic circuits. Why? Well, the cardboard is free as my workplace puts it in the dumpster and I do not have the funds to buy better material. All of the electronic parts thus far were given to me by a friend who passed away and what better tribute than to build a computer. Except for the ALU all gates are either Nand or Nor using DTL. The transistors used are npn 2n2222 type or pnp 2n3906”

 
This Interactive Alexa Raspberry Pi Christmas Tree was built using an Amazon Alexa Dot, Raspberry Pi Zero, and a Neo Pixel LED strip.

“I’ve programmed my custom Alexa Skill to recognize three seasonal phrases and then send a message over MQTT to the Pi. These are defined in speechAssets – part of the Alexa Skill SDK.

Alexa tell Christmas Tree [to] change to red/green/blue
Alexa tell Christmas Tree to turn off
Alexa tell Christmas Tree to set brightness to 60 percent”

Debuglive takes a look how Dr Abrasive’s cracked the Sega Saturn CD system. The original copy protection of the system uses a physical wobble in the outer edge of the official game CDs. This makes copying the disks impossible since blank disks have this portion pressed into it when you get it. After a lot of reverse engineering and some custom hacking the system is now able to do lots of things that it was never intended to do.