David Huang’s Ultra-Low-Cost Wearable Tension Sensor Is Built From String and Pencil Graphite

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Just rub some string against a pencil lead and you too can have your own low-cost, wearable tension sensor.

Maker David Huang has shared a trick for creating a surprisingly capable tension sensor at practically zero cost — by rubbing some string over a pencil.

“Our goal is use the cheapest and the easiest way to make your own sensor for your project,” Huang explains by way of introduction. “The sensor we are making today is a tension sensor. A tension sensor will react to a pulling motion. The most common material we use for the tension sensor is conductive rubber, or weaved conductive rubber wire – but the problem is the conductive rubbers are very expensive, and they are also hard to get.”

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InfiniLED Illuminates for Years

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This tiny LED magnet runs for five years on a single coin cell battery.


LEDs are extremely efficient sources of light. They can even be used with a coin cell battery, draining these cells after a few days or weeks. After finding an experiment that explored optimization of perceived brightness versus power consumption, BelgianEngineer came up with the InfiniLED, and now the InfiniLED v2, which can function for much longer.

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Become the Next Jack Johnson with This Guitar AutoStrummer

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Fortunately for aspiring folk rock stars that lack strumming skill, Jacob Stambaugh designed a DIY guitar AutoStrummer.

We all know that people who can play guitar are very cool, but it takes a lot of dedication to practice to actually get good at it. It’s easy enough to play power chords for some punk rock head banging, but learning all of the finger positions for the real chords requires perseverance. Strumming is usually considered the easy part of playing the guitar, because you just need to make sure you’re hitting the right strings. But even that can be tricky if the strumming pattern is complex. Fortunately for aspiring folk rock stars that lack strumming skill, Jacob Stambaugh designed a DIY guitar AutoStrummer.

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Raspberry Pi Used to Build Beautiful Music Table

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Redditor Dtphantom used a Raspberry Pi to build this awesome “music table” that is reminiscent vintage stereo consoles.

Back before smartphones, video games, and even TVs, families would gather around the stereo to listen to music and radio dramas. Stereos from that era were often built into large pieces of furniture, called consoles. They would usually be the centerpiece of a room, in the same way that we mount our TVs as the focal point of living rooms today. Stereo consoles are rare now, since music players and speakers have become miniaturized. But some people still like to focus on the music, which is why Redditor Dtphantom used a Raspberry Pi to build this awesome “music table” that is reminiscent of those vintage stereo consoles.

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These DIY Smart Glasses Put an Arduboy in Front of Your Eyeballs

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Kevin Bates has been on a two-year quest to build smart glasses that are hacker and wallet friendly, and the Arduglasses are the result.

Google Glass will go down in history as the first pair of smart glasses to hit the consumer market and also one of the most infamous tech flops. They had some really impressive technology, but they were probably a bit ahead of their time when they first released in 2013. Privacy concerns combined with a high price tag ensured that they never really caught, but they did prove that the technology was feasible. Technically, you can still purchase an enterprise version of the Google Glass smart glasses, but nobody does. Kevin Bates has been on a quest to build smart glasses that were more hacker and wallet friendly, and the Arduglasses are the result.

Pi-KVM – Open and cheap DIY IP-KVM on Raspberry Pi

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A very simple and fully functional Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP that you can make with your own hands without any soldering!

This device helps to manage servers or workstations remotely, regardless of the health of the operating system or whether one is installed. You can fix any problem, configure the BIOS, and even reinstall the OS using the virtual CD-ROM or Flash Drive.

It only costs between $30 and $100 depending on the features desired. Even the most expensive configuration will be cheaper than a $500 commercial IP-KVM.

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This Quad-Screen Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Is the Best Kind of Overkill

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Multi-monitor setups are commonplace among desktop computer users, but, with very few exceptions, manufacturers limit portable devices to just a single measly screen. There are a couple of dual-screen laptops on the market and there have been handful of cell phones with more than one screen, even going back to the dark ages of dumb phones. But Redditor Holistech must have laughed in the face of those devices when they built this crazy quad-screen Raspberry Pi cyberdeck, which is the best kind of overkill.

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The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect is here

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It was back in January that we first introduced you to the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. The first Arduino board to include Raspberry Pi silicon. It’s been a roller coaster ride getting it to you, and enthusiasm during the wait has been incredibly encouraging. The wait, you’ll be glad to hear, is over.

The RP2040 Processor

Working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation is nothing short of a pleasure. The teams there make some incredible devices, and their first in-house silicon is no exception. These guys get it.

This system-on-a-chip is a 32-bit dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, clocked at 133MHz and is powerful enough to run TensorFlow Lite. It’s young, but proving to be incredibly popular with makers, as well as electronics manufacturers. It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see how the Arduino community reacts to it. We can only imagine what you guys can achieve with the extra features of the Nano RP2040 Connect board.

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New RK3566 Android Tv Box with 8GB of Ram! The New SOC We Needed?

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We finally have a new arm CPU for these Android Tv boxes and Single-board computers but is it any good?
In this video, we take a look at the X88 pro 20 Android Tv box powered by the all-new RK3566 SOC and 8GB of ram! The Rk3566has 4 cores running at 1.8GHz and backed by the Mali G52 2EE GPU capable of 4k 60FPS and 8K 24FPS video playback is this the new CPU we need? let’s find out.

We run some benchmarks test out some native android games and finally see how well the RK3566 handles some of our favorite emulators like PPSSPP for PSP, Redream, and Flycast for Dreamcast.

Mr Innovative’s resistor cutting machine is ‘reely’ awesome

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If you need some help separating out lots of resistors, then Mr Innovative’s latest automated rig is the perfect solution for you. At the heart of his homemade device is an Arduino Nano, along with a multipurpose PCB for electrical connections and a touchscreen user interface.

The machine advances the reel of resistors through a slot via a stepper-driven rod and o-ring friction wheel assembly. When properly positioned, it cuts off the correct number of resistors using a pair of razors, set in motion by two stepper motors and corresponding linkage systems.

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