General - Open Source Hardware

Create a homemade Nerf gun with step-by-step and crazy modifications

Nerf gun

NERF is a registered trademark for toys. It was created by the Minnesota-based Parker Brothers company in 1969, but is now owned by the Hasbro company. Most of these toys are plastic weapons that can launch foam rubber projectiles or rubber arrows that do not hurt and especially designed for children or not so children .

These kinds of weapons can be bought and are cheap. But you can also create your own Nerf gun or rifle as we will explain here step by step. In both cases, it will be cheap, but the good thing about creating one yourself is that you will have greater ability to modify it to your liking. Many people create them to emulate some weapons from their favorite movies, comic book heroes, etc.

Homemade car simulator: how to assemble it step by step

professional car simulator

You sure are a fan of motor racing, of motorsport. And you probably also like racing simulation games. Generally, motorsport fans tend to satisfy their hobby with this type of driving game that is becoming more and more realistic. In addition, gamers are increasingly immersed in global competitions such as eSports, which can even lead to working for real teams.

For example, Nissan has used Gran Turismo as a means of recruiting drivers for its official team. From the best gamers, it selects the winner to race a real car, i.e. to move from a game to reality. Other programs like McLaren Shadow, which is looking for the best gamers to recruit its future development driver for the Woking simulator, do the same. An extraordinary opportunity for the fans.

FPGA: all about these chips and their programming

Chip FPGA

The FPGAs have become more and more popular in recent times. Even for professional applications, these chips are often used, but also for DIY and makers who want to implement a discrete circuit within a chip with all the advantages that this implies. It is not cheap or easy to find a factory to send your layouts or patterns and have a custom chip made for you.

It is true that some foundries allow to make wafers or multiproject wafers to make chips for individuals or universities to test with them. These types of factories are, as I say, difficult to find, are usually abroad and do not come cheap. After some time, samples of your chips are sent to you at the agreed address, but they do not take care of testing them or making sure they work. It all depends on your design.

Homemade Theremin: how to assemble this peculiar instrument

Sheldon Cooper playing Theremin

Now that the famous and successful series The Big Bang Theory is over, if you’re a fan of it you’ve surely seen the episode where Sheldon Cooper plays one of these strange musical instruments with his hands. A strange instrument that emits a rather peculiar sound just by moving our hands over it. Well, if it caught your eye, in this guide we will teach you how to build your own homemade Theremin and show you how it works.

First we will see what a Theremin is and what principles this strange musical instrument is based on. And after that, we will detail the steps to build a simple Theremin and another one a little more complex, depending on your needs, as it may be simple curiosity and the simplest tutorial is enough or maybe you want to do a more pro one and you want to spend a few hours practicing with these strange tunes.

How to make a home laser cutter

laser cutting machine in action

We all know the possibilities of a laser cutter, and even more so when we like DIY. These types of laser cutters are quite expensive and sometimes only a professional can afford them and they will pay for themselves. However, there are ways to create your own laser cutter and this is what we are going to cover in this new guide. With it we can assemble our own and save a few euros, besides having fun and gain the satisfaction of having created ourselves.

The laser cutter can cut or carve marks on certain surfaces, which is quite practical for some projects. However, it is a machine that must be handled with care due to its dangerousness, so we must take the appropriate precautions to handle it, since we are using a tool that can generate problems if we do not respect the safety measures.

Make your own pinhole camera

The pinhole photography has its public, and for that it is necessary a device or a camera with very particular and different characteristics to those of a conventional camera. If you are thinking about creating a home pinhole camera or you are curious to know this kind of devices, we explain you everything in detail in this guide. Both what is a pinhole camera and the procedure to create one by yourself, step by step.

The pinhole camera is the one that does not have optical systems as other cameras, that is to say, it does not have lenses or objectives based on the refraction of the light. Instead of that, they simply have a hole that is in charge of forming the image. That hole is known as pinhole and makes the image look very peculiar by dispensing with that optic.

Coral Dev Board: competition for the Raspberry Pi, but focused on AI

When we talk about computers, everyone thinks of laptops or desktops. We don’t usually consider 10″ mini-laptops or, what we talk about most in HWLibre, boards like the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino. These boards, whose basic package does not include anything else, serve as a brain for almost anything, such as a multimedia center, a speedometer or a spy camera. But what if we need “more brains”? It seems that’s what Google thought of when they launched the Coral Dev Board.

What’s the point of a new plate if this market is dominated by Raspberry Pi and Arduino? More than we could ever think of at first. Today’s boards are intended for use in devices with common tasks. Among these tasks we may have to run an operating system, as long as it is not a very heavy one. Operating systems, which I think is the most complicated thing existing boards can do, can be complex, but they are nothing compared to AI. The Coral Dev Board has been created thinking about the Artificial Intelligence, so that the developers can carry out their projects in this field.

How to create your own guitar amplifier for $5

It seems like only yesterday I started playing the guitar: my mother bought me an acoustic for about 15,000pts (about 90 ? from today) and at that time I didn’t know a single chord. I started to learn classical guitar, but what I liked was bands like Nirvana or MetallicA. It wasn’t until about 4 years later that I had (and still have) my first amp. It was a Fender that was priced out of my month’s salary at the time, about 80,000pts (about $500 now). In those four years I missed having an amplifier to be able to play with “electricity”.

Today there are many more options. In fact, I don’t use my amp anymore. Instead, I connect my instruments to multi-effect pedalboards that go straight to the computer, where I can record and edit whatever I want. But how much are those footswitches worth? There are many prices, but I have two that once cost me between 300 and 500 euros. I explain this because it’s clear that ‘one of the problems of wanting to play with an amplifier is the price of this one or the devices that replace it. In this article we will show you how to create the cheapest mini amp you can imagine.