Hackaday

USB wasn’t even a gleam in an engineer’s eye when the Sega Master System hit the market in 1985. Today, we’re up to USB 4 or something, and the USB C connector is becoming a defacto standard for just about everything except desktop computers. [Retrostalgia] is embracing this by m...

Solid state batteries, we are told, are the new hot battery technology that will replace lithium-ion batteries. Soon. Not that we haven’t heard that before. One reason it isn’t dominating the market today is that it’s prone to short circuits during charging. [Dr. Yuwei Zhang and others have

Ultrasonic levitation is by now a familiar trick: one or more ultrasonic transducers create a standing wave, and small objects can be held in the nodes of this standing wave. With a sufficiently large array of transducers, it’s even possible to control the movement of the object. This isn’t the only form of ultrasonic levitation, however, as [Steve Mould] demonstrated with h...

Springs are great, but making them out of plastic tends to come with some downsides, for fairly obvious reasons. Creating a compliant mechanism that can be 3D printed and yet which doesn’t permanently deform or wear out after a few uses is therefore a bit of a struggle. The complaint toggle mechanism that [neotoy] designed

When building a project to operate on battery power for long periods of time, having a microcontroller with a reliable and extremely low-power sleep mode is critical. When processing power isn’t needed, it should be able to wait around using almost no energy until an interrupt triggers it. Once triggered, the CPU performs its tasks and then puts itself right back to sleep, ma...