External News

That Hidden LED Light On Your Nintendo Switch Controller Finally Has A Use

by

The Nintendo Switch has been on the market for more than two and half years now, but one of its available functions hasn’t had any use (officially, at least) in all that time. Now, though, the time has finally come for that little function to shine.

On your right-hand Joy-Con and your Pro Controller, you’ll notice that the HOME button has a ring around the edge. As you may or may not already be aware, that ring is actually an LED light; we’ve seen it light up before but only when a Pro Controller connects to Steam.

Read more…

Printing ABS with an open frame 3D printer?

by

People are often asking in comments how I print ABS on open frame 3D printers. For many prints, producing them in ABS is just a matter of upping the bed and nozzle temps and turning off the cooling fan. Other models, however, are destined to failure. In this guide, I explore ABS printing successes and failures, and explain why ABS can be so difficult to print using some custom animations.

Build a Tricopter to Inspect the Health of the Plants in Your Garden

by

Keeping up with a garden can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly if you have a large garden — even more so if you have a farm. Checking on every individual plant yourself requires a lot of labor, and a plant’s health isn’t always obvious just from looking at it with your unaided human eyes. Fortunately if you can see in the infrared spectrum, it becomes a lot easier. To do that on a large scale, you can follow Imetomi’s tutorial to create a tricopter drone to inspect your plants.

Read more…

Georgia Tech’s Shape-Shifting Robot Is Built From Smaller Robots Known as ‘Smarticles’

by

When building robots, we tend to think of using the same standard components — motors, actuators, limbs, and onboard computers — all coming together to form the construct. Researchers from Georgia Tech are changing that view by developing a large robot created by smaller robots known as Smarticles (smart active particles), which offer a potentially new locomotion technique. The tiny 3D-printed robots were designed with a pair flat arms that only do one simple thing, flap back and forth, but when five of the robots are confined in a circle, the nudge each other and form a larger robot, known as a Supersmarticle, capable of moving itself.

Read more…

Air:bit Is a Micro:bit-Powered Quadcopter Kit

by

Since its release in 2016, the micro:bit has been helping students take the first steps into the world of coding, and has spawned a number of interesting projects. Its built-in Bluetooth radio and accelerometer mean that it could even be used as the heart of a quadcopter setup, which is exactly what MakeKit is has accomplished with their aptly named Air:bit drones.

Read more…

3.5 Inch 60FPS Touch Screen For The Raspberry Pi 4! iUniker Screen + Case

by

In this video, I take a look at and show you how to set up the all New iUniker Raspberry Pi 4 Touchscreen, 3.5 inch 60+fps 480×320 Resolution HD Raspberry Pi Touchscreen with Cooling Fan and Case for Raspberry 4 Model B/Pi 4b. This is great for retro pie handheld projects or monitoring software for the new Raspberry pi 4! Let’s see how it performs. 

3.5inch 60FPS 480×320
3.5inch 60FPS 800×480

Raspberry Pi 4

This YouTuber Built His Own 8-Axis Camera Crane Robot

by

If you’ve ever wondered how cinematographers are able to capture those amazing dynamic shots where the camera is able to smoothly follow an actor as they move through a scene, the answer is often complex camera cranes. They’re usually controlled by an operator, but have sophisticated motor controllers to keep the camera stable. Unfortunately, those are wildly expensive and far out of reach for amateurs — and even many indie filmmakers. That’s why YouTuber Mingul decided to build his own 8-axis camera crane robot.

Read more…