TechyMagThings

From laser cutters to 3D printers, having an exhaust duct at the back of a machine is a very common sight. However, these tend to be rather bulky, claiming many centimeters of precious space behind a machine even if you’d want to push it right up against a wall. This issue annoyed [TheNeedleStacker] over on YouTube so much that he had a poke at solving this problem with angled exhaust ducts, all hopefully without impairing its basic function.

Although there are some online offerings for angled exhaust port extenders, these do not quite fit the required 6″ diameter. Reducing the problem to just a matter of cross section area for simplicity’s sake, that means a 19″ wide duct at a depth of 1.5″. Making sure the transition from the tube to the flat duct doesn’t become an impediment is the tricky part, so the approach here was to mostly ignore it and just make a functional prototype to get an idea of how a direct approach worked.

Installing the contraption worked out fine, and subsequent testing showed that although it seems to slightly reduce the effective airflow compared to the flex tubing, it is absolutely rad to look at with the transparent cover and some laser light to illuminate all that’s happening inside.

While some optimization work on the duct transitions can undoubtedly eke out more performance, it’s certainly not bad for a quick project.

The 24 Hours of Le Mans races is an extremely prestigious endurance motorsport event which attracts the best cars and drivers from around the world. It’s one of the longest-running races too, taking place once a year since 1923 (with a few obvious understandable gaps). But, like most motorsports, it’s financially out of reach for most people. One of the more popular attempts to bring racing to the masses has been the 24 Hours of Lemons races, which have price limits on vehicles to keep the barrier to entry low, and an EV truck recently entered one of these races with some interesting results.

The group behind this vehicle is called Team Arcblast, who retrofitted an old Datsun pickup truck to the extreme to enter this race. The modestly sized electric motor is installed in between the cab and the bed for easy access to the driveshaft, with the engine bay repurposed for all of the cooling and radiators needed for endurance racing like this. They’ve also equipped the truck with plenty of efficiency-increasing spoilers and other aerodynamic parts, and rebuilt the cab with not only the required roll cage and other safety equipment, but a modified driving position with steering and other components from various Miatas.

The most impressive part of this build, however, is the battery. The team invented a method of swapping out batteries quickly to avoid having to fast charge the car in the pit area. The system lets a battery slide in to the middle of the truck above the motor and quickly connect to the electrical system allowing for very quick pit stops and the ability to charge other batteries while the race goes on. All of these modifications together allowed the team to break the EV record for a Lemons race.

For a Lemons race, though, even this truck stretches the original spirit that these races were started, however impressive the build. We published a primer to these types of races a while back which includes much more affordable internal combustion options.

Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!

All the cool new 3D printers have tool-changing heads. Instead of multiplexing filament through one hot end, you simply park one hot end and pick up another. Or pick up a different tool, depending on what you need. There are many advantages to a system like that, but one disadvantage: cost. [Ultimate Tool Changer] has been working on a design for what he calls a simple, cheap changer, and it appears to be working well, as you can see in the video below.

This is one of those things that seems easy until you try to do it. He talks about a lot of the failures and dead ends along the way.

We worry that the tolerances are tight enough that wear over time might affect some of the key components, but how long that might take or if it will happen at all, we can’t say. Regardless, the system does appear to work, and we have no doubt you could keep it aligned or periodically replace parts to work around any wear issues.

One of the problems we have nowadays is that our main printers are plug-and-play boxes that are difficult to modify significantly. But if you have a homebrew printer or something made to expand like a Voron or old-school commercial printer, it seems like this would be something you could adapt.

We’ve seen homebrew tool changers, of course. Many times, actually.

It seems like everybody takes their turn doing an ESP32-based weather display, and why not? They’re cheap, they’re easy, and you need to start somewhere. With the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) and modules like it, you don’t even need to touch hardware! [likeablob] had the CYD, and he’s showing weather on it, but the Cydintosh is a full Macintosh Plus Emulator running on the ESP32.

The weather app is his own creation, written with the Retro68k cross-compiler, but it looks like something out of the 80s even if it’s getting its data over WiFi. The WiFi connection is, of course, thanks to the whole thing running on an ESP32-S3. Mac Plus emulation comes from [evansm7]’s Micro Mac emulator, the same one that lives inside the RP2040-based PicoMac that we covered some time ago. Obviously [likeablob] has added his own code to get the Macintosh emulator talking to the ESP32’s wireless hardware, with a native application to control the wifi connection in System 3.3. As far as the Macintosh is concerned, commands are passed to the ESP32 via memory address 0xF00000, and data can be read back from it as well. It’s a straightforward approach to allow intercommunication between the emulator and the real world.

The touchpad on the CYD serves as a mouse for the Macintosh, which might not be the most ergonomic given the Macintosh System interface was never meant for touchscreens, but evidently it’s good enough for [likeablob]. He’s built it into a lovely 3D printed case, whose STLs are available on the GitHub repository along with all the code, including the Home Assistant integration.

Friends, there will likely come a time in your life when you have trouble sleeping. When this happens, it may behoove you to do some writing, any kind of writing. But consider that a physical journal will force you to turn past pages you’ve already filled, which may leave you deflated if you happen to read them.

So the answer lies in a sort of journalistic deposit box. That’s basically what we have here. [Simon Shimel]’s Bee Write Back writerdeck was inspired by sleepless nights, so you know it’s effective. The form factor is so great for [Simon], in fact, that he has developed more apps and functions for it, including a Claude client.

Inside is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w, and input comes from an Air40 keyboard with quite awesome low-profile key caps. The display is a 5.5″ AMOLED, which leaves just enough room for a pair of the cutest bees ever. Be sure to check out the short video below for the build guide to accompany the build guide (PDF), and head over to GitHub for the full details.

Want to go even smaller and BYOK? Here’s a cheap writerdeck with an e-ink display.

Thanks to [Kaushlesh Chandel] for the tip!

Although the number of uses for a 2009-era Mac Mini aren’t very long, using them to run new-and-upcoming operating systems like Haiku on would seem to be an interesting use case. This is what [The Phintage Collector] recently took a swing at, using both the 2024 Beta 5 release and a current nightly build. The focus was mostly on the 32-bit build, as this has binary compatibility with BeOS applications, but the 64-bit version of Haiku was of course also installed.

One of the main issues with these Mac systems is that they use EFI for the BIOS, so you’re condemned to either take your chances with the always glitchy CSM ‘classical BIOS’ mode, or to make Haiku and EFI get along. While for the 64-bit version of Haiku this wasn’t too much of a struggle, the 32-bit version ran into the problem that the 64-bit EFI BIOS really doesn’t like 32-bit software. After a while the 32-bit version of Haiku was thus abandoned for a later revisit.

With the 64-bit version a lot of things just work, though audio couldn’t be made to work even with a USB dongle, and there’s no hardware acceleration for graphics, so gaming isn’t really going to happen either. The positive thing here is probably that as a test system for 64-bit Haiku such a Mac Mini isn’t too crazy, it being just an Intel system with an Apple-flavor EFI BIOS.

If you’re into giving it a shot yourself, the video description page contains a lot of resources to consult.

At this point, we’ll assume you already know that four humans took a sightseeing trip around the Moon and made their triumphant return to Earth on Friday. Even if you somehow avoided hearing about it through mainstream channels, we kept a running account of the mission’s highlights stuck to the front page of the site for the ten days that the crew was in space.

On the assumption that you might be a bit burned out with space news at this point, we won’t bring up it up in this post… other than to point out that excitement for the lunar flyby has driven the number of simultaneous players of Kerbal Space Program to its highest count ever — nearly 20,000 armchair astronauts spent this weekend trying to cobble together their own rocket in honor of the Artemis II mission.

With so many folks focused on the Moon it would be the perfect time for a company to sneak out some bad news, which is perhaps why Amazon picked this week to announce they would be dropping support for Kindles released before 2012. Presumably there aren’t too many first and second generation Kindles still out there in the wild, but the 2012 cutoff does mean the first iteration of the Paperwhite will be one of the devices being put out to pasture come May 20th.

Amazon says the pre-2012 Kindles that are currently in user’s hands will still function, but they’ll no longer be able to purchase or download new books. The bigger issue is that you won’t be able to register these older devices after May. So if you have to factory reset your own Kindle, or want to buy one on the second hand market that’s already been wiped, you won’t be able to link it to your account to download books you’ve purchased.

Frankly, the idea that Amazon will no longer have their nose in these devices doesn’t bother us one bit. In fact, it sounds like an improvement over the status quo. If you own one of the device’s in question, now would be a fantastic time to download Calibre and start managing your own offline ebook library. In fact, even if your Kindle is new enough to not be affected by this change, you should still download it. Seriously, just use Calibre.

On the subject of software, an entry for XChat has recently popped up on Apple’s App Store. No, not that XChat. Instead of connecting to your favorite IRC server, the new mobile app will let you send messages to… whoever it is still actively using Twitter X. Confusingly, there’s also an XChat on the Google Play Store, but that appears to be a totally different thing altogether.

Finally, we’ve been seeing a lot of chatter online this weekend about France ditching Windows and switching over to Linux. While we applaud any mainstream push towards open source software, it’s worth digging into the details for this one. The directive says that the Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) will be switching its desktop machines over to Linux, but that only represents a few hundred machines.

The experience gained during this roll-out will help shape a larger scale migration in the future, with the rest of the government asked to come up with a migration plan before the end of the year. When those other agencies, and the thousands of machines they use, will actually be penguin-powered is not clear. It’s possible they could come back and say a full migration would take a decade to complete.

So it’s certainly a step in the right direction, but it will likely be quite some time before any significant part of France’s infrastructure is divorced from the Redmond giant.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.