Make it last, Oct 7
A thin night with one thread: keeping the things around you working, and knowing them well enough to rebuild when they break.
A thin night, but one thread holds it together: making the things around you last, and knowing them well enough to fix or rebuild when they break. The stories tonight are small. A headset, a board of lumber, a capacitor, a pigeon. Each one is about keeping something going with what is at hand.
When her commercial headsets kept snapping at the same thin plastic joint between earpiece and headband, Hackaday writer Jenny List stopped buying replacements and drew her own. "The whole headset relied on a tiny piece of plastic in the centre," she writes. Her version, done in OpenSCAD, prints in place as a single part: a sliding headband and zig-zag leaf-spring joints, no separately assembled weak points. She went with springs over ball or rotating joints to "spread the load of an earpiece over considerably more material." The drivers, microphone and electronics come from broken headsets, and the design files are on GitHub.
Two Family Handyman pieces, both published 6 October, teach you to read a board before you buy it. James Fitzgerald says the grade stamp tells you more than the price tag, and urges readers to "stop picking your lumber based on how it looks." Alex Shoemaker explains the paint on board ends, which "may help control drying or identify a mill's product." A day earlier, a chimney sweep shared, through writer Ally Childress, "the cleaning and maintenance habits that keep your home safe all burning season long." Routine care, not a one-off repair.
The power builds are about failing gracefully. Marco Tabini's Dr. PD, covered by List, sits inline between a USB-C Power Delivery source and sink, or emulates a sink to test a charger, handling multiple protocols up to 48 volts and 240 watts. It reveals devices that ignore the standard, cannot supply their rated current, or deliver the wrong voltage. Geekworm's Supercapacitor UPS HAT, reported by Nick Bild, stores just enough energy for a Raspberry Pi 5 to "shut down safely and avoid SD card corruption" when the supply is cut. Not to keep running, just to stop cleanly.
Communication ran low-tech. Gareth Halfacree reports that a data packet carried by pigeon under RFC 1149, the "Avian Carrier" standard, is going to auction. The method was "never more than a joke until a group of Norwegian hackers made it real." He also covers RFOXiA's MultiNav Pro+, a long-range, mesh-capable Bluetooth LE module built on an STMicroelectronics STM32 and "tested to multiple miles line of sight," pitched against LoRa mesh systems like Meshtastic.
Two more round out the night. Inevati Systems built a low-power scientific calculator from scratch, with graphing, matrix math and a custom keyboard. And Shoemaker warns that wind "can put more strain on trees before leaves fall, especially when rain has soaked the soil," a full canopy and saturated ground working together. Small things, built or watched closely. That is the whole point of learning to make it last.
Sources
- A Headset Fit For A Hackaday Writer · Hackaday
- Fireplace Tips To Keep Your Home Warm and Safe This Winter · Family Handyman
- That Stamp on Lumber Tells You More Than the Price Tag · Family Handyman
- The Painted Lumber Ends You’ve Always Overlooked Have a Very Specific Purpose · Family Handyman
- USB-C PD Tamed with this Analyzer · Hackaday
- Why Wind Is More Dangerous When the Leaves Are Still on Trees · Family Handyman
- Protect Your Raspberry Pi 5 From Sudden Power Losses · Hackster.io News
- A Piece of Internet History Goes Up for Auction: A Packet Transmitted by RFC 1149 "Avian Carrier" · Hackster.io News
- RFOXiA Picks STMicroelectronics' STM32 to Build a Long-Range, Mesh-Capable Bluetooth LE Module · Hackster.io News
- Building a Modern Scientific Calculator From Scratch · Hackster.io News