Dave Jones from the Electronics Engineering Video Blog shows us what tools he recommends for a starter electronics lab. He makes a few surprisingly inexpensive recommendations for multimeters, oscilloscopes, function generators, bench power supplies, soldering stations, and many other tools and supplies. I, for one, am taking very careful notes on this excellent video since […]
We have covered a lot of bike-related content over the years, and a lot of bike-repair-related content. Trouble is, we don’t have a separate repairs-only category, so assembling this round-up required manual cherry-picking from the many pages of our Bicycle category archive. I then picked my ten favorites, tabulated the pageviews for each, and counted the days since it was posted, and divided to get an average-traffic-per-day figure for each post. So this is probably my most scientifically-organized Top 10 to date. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Friday!
If you’ve ever struggled to locate the center of a circular plate or a piece of round stock using a ruler or a square, you know it can be a tricky proposition. My usual ham-fisted method involves marking the midpoint of several diameters and kind of visually averaging all those sloppy centers to get roughly in the middle of the thing. If I need more accuracy, I try to sandwich the circle between two framing squares and then draw lines between opposing corners–lines which, at least in theory, should bisect each corner at 45 degrees and intersect in the middle of the circumscribed circle. In theory.
Make subscriber Scott House wrote in to let us know about BikeCAD and associated cycle design software from BikeForrest. BikeCAD is a parametric CAD tool used to design hardtail mountain bike and road bike frames. Other variants of the software are available to help produce full suspensions, recumbents, tandems, and custom wheels.
This looks so fun: make your own paint brushes with the help of this guide by missannie. The best tools are the ones you make yourself!
Overall, I like the Shinwa 78610. Even though I have a decent capacitative stud finder, I often seem to end up using a 1/16″ drill to probe for studs, anyway. And if I’m looking for joists in the ceiling instead of studs in the wall, mechanical probing is pretty much my only option, because inevitably the ceilings in my homes seem to have popcorn texture which prevents the use of any kind of instrument you have to slide across the surface. So for that use alone, I’m glad I’ve got the Shinwa in my toolbox and think it’s worth the $15.
Remember MakerBeam, the T-slot variant that began as a Kickstarter project? MakerBeam is a Mini-T open-source building system. Mini-T is a miniature version of T-slot (a technology that is widely used for industrial automation, robotics and machine enclosures.) Not only is it small enough to work as a model building system, but it’s also precise […]
