Elliot Williams

5 days ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

Every time we end up talking about 3D printers, Al Williams starts off on how bad he is in a machine shop. I’m absolutely sure that he’s exaggerating, but the gist is that he’s much happier to work on stuff in CAD and let the machine take care of the precision and fine physical details. I’m like that too, but with me, it’s the artwork. I can’t draw to save my life, but once I get it into digital form, I’m pretty good at manipulating images.

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

Dan Maloney and I were talking on the podcast about his memories of the old electronics magazines, and how they had some gonzo projects in them. One, a DIY picture phone from the 1980s, was a monster build of a hundred ICs that also required you to own a TV camera. At that time, the idea of being able to see someone while talking to them on the phone was pure science fiction, and here was a version of that which you could build yourself. Still, we have to wonder how many of these were ever built.

3 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

This week, the hackerverse was full of “vibe coding”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. Only, with the current state of LLMs, it’ll probably work after a while of iterating back and forth with the machine.

1 month ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

A dog may be man’s best friend, but many of us live with cats, fish, iguanas, or even wilder animals. And naturally, we like to share our hacks with our pets. Whether it’s a robot ball-thrower, a hamster wheel that’s integrated into your smart home system, or even just an automatic feeder for when you’re not home, we want to see what kind of projects that your animal friends have inspired you to pull off.

1 month ago | hackaday.com | Elliot Williams

Earlier this year, I bought one of those K40-style laser machines that was listed at a ridiculously low price, and it arrived broken. Well, let me qualify that: the laser tube and the power supply work perfectly, but that’s about the best you can say about it. On first power-up, it made a horrible noise, the Y-axis was jammed, the X-axis was so off-square that it was visibly apparent, and it turned out that as I fixed one of these problems after the other, that it was just the tip of the iceberg.