2026-05-22 04:00:14
[Jankbu] needed a new computer, but had little interest in purchasing a modern laptop off the shelf. Instead, it was time to build a cyberdeck with a neat modular design to suit his exact needs.
The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi 5, which provides a good amount of computing power for regular tasks. It’s wrapped up in a 3D-printed enclosure with rail mounts on the back, along with a NOS 450 TKL mechanical keyboard, offering full-travel keys in a compact layout. The 10.1″ IPS touchscreen display is mounted on sliding rails to cover the keyboard when it’s not needed. A smattering of buttons live around the screen, in a manner akin to so many industrial controllers. On either side, the deck has large grab handles, with one side featuring custom horizontal and vertical scroll controls, while the other rocks a trackball. Power is via NP-F batteries, which are more commonly used to run Sony camcorders.
Unlike so many cyberdecks, [Jankbu] didn’t just build the device to look cool—it also serves a practical purpose. It’s great for running Freecad, and the rail mounts on the rear make it perfect for mounting around the workshop during a job as needed. Files are on Github for those eager to learn more.
What’s fun about this build is that it’s not just a show piece, it’s something that gets used every day. That’s a testament to [Jankbu’s] well-reasoned design, that considered what the device was for before it was put together. We’ve featured plenty of other fantastic cyberdecks in the past, too. Video after the break.
2026-05-22 02:30:12
Circa 2015 or so, it seemed like you couldn’t move a finger without being bombarded with ads and articles about ‘smart homes’ and the ‘internet of things’ — all of which would make our lives so much easier and more automated. Fast-forward a decade and this dream has mostly evaporated along with many of the players in the space. Why this happened is the topic of a recent video by [Caya].
An interesting bit of context that the video starts off with is that home automation really kicked off back in 1975, when the X10 protocol and related devices using power lines for signaling began being sold. These fully integrated solutions generally worked reasonably well, but what all changed when the IoT and ‘smart home’ craze kicked off and brought with it an explosion of new standards.
Over the past decade we have seen the concept of a ‘smart home’ collapse into a nightmare of abandoned IoT devices, subscription services, forced ads, privacy violations, and an increasingly more congested 2.4 GHz spectrum that everything from WiFi and Zigbee to Bluetooth and others ended up competing for, with a corresponding collapse in reliability of data transmissions.
As raised in the video, a big issue is that of the financial viability of running the remote services for a smart home solution, even if this is the part that should make it as plug-and-play as a 1990s-era smart home solution. To the average user setting up their own locally hosted smart home solution isn’t really a straightforward option.
Although at the end [Caya] demonstrates using Home Assistant (HA) as a locally hosted alternative, this is still not something that a non-techie will be able to set up or maintain. Even if you shell out a cool two-hundred clams for the Home Assistant Green plug-and-play hardware solution, the average person will be lost the second any of the prescribed steps in provided documentation do not work. Woe to whoever is the person who is ‘good with computers’ in those cases.
Ultimately another problem with ‘smart homes’ is that they’re really not that smart, as you can definitely set up all kinds of rules in HA and similar solutions, but this is more painstaking manual automation with all the excitement of programming PID controllers. Having an actual intelligence behind the system that could react to what’s happening would make it a far easier sell, yet which is where all the ‘smart assistants’ like Alexa keep falling flat.
Currently [Caya] has set up his HA-based lighting configuration to be used by OpenClaw ‘agentic AI’, as a way to add some actual ‘smarts’, but it’s telling that he hasn’t integrated the smart lock of his apartment into the system yet. Nobody wants to have the OpenClaw agent tell you that it ‘cannot open the front door’ for you, after all.
2026-05-22 01:00:00
My old friend Jeff was always vocally upset that he didn’t come up with the idea of a string trimmer, commonly known as a Weed Eater or Weed Whacker. On the one hand, the idea is totally simple: spin some nylon line and cut grass and other relatively soft things. But, it turns out, that making the device actually usable requires a little bit of mechanical engineering.
Of course, the noisy part is a motor. The motor — driven by an engine, a battery, or a power cord — spins a flexible nylon line fast enough that the line becomes rigid from centrifugal force. That’s not the important part.
The humble spool at the bottom of the trimmer is where decades of mechanical engineering, questionable patents, consumer frustration, and genuine cleverness all meet. The earliest string trimmers were primitive. [George Ballas], who patented the Weed Eater in the early 1970s, reportedly got the idea from the rotating brushes in a car wash. Attach flexible cords to a spinning head, and they become cutting tools. In fact, the prototype used a tin can for the head. Elegant. But once the line wears down — which it does constantly — you need a way to expose fresh line. That turns out to be harder than it sounds.
The easiest approach is fixed-length line. Some trimmers still work this way. You cut short pieces of heavy line (or buy it precut) and insert them into holes in the head. No spool. No springs. No moving parts.
These systems are rugged and are popular on commercial units designed to survive abuse. They also work well with thicker lines or even plastic blades. But they are annoying because every time the line wears out, you stop working and manually replace it. Spool-based systems became dominant very quickly.
The basic spool idea is straightforward enough. Wind a long nylon filament onto a reel. Some reels have two sections to feed line out on two sides of the rotating head. As the line wears away, feed out more line from the spool. But how do you do that while the thing is spinning at several thousand RPM?
If you’ve ever lightly smacked the bottom of a running trimmer against the ground, you’ve used a bump feed mechanism.
Inside the head is a spool loaded with line and pressed upward by a spring. The line exits through eyelets on the side of the head. Under normal operation, friction and centrifugal force keep the spool from turning freely.
When you bump the bottom of the head against the ground, inertia momentarily compresses the spring and disengages locking tabs or detents. The spool can rotate briefly, paying out a short amount of line. When you release pressure, the spring re-engages the lock.
At least, that’s the theory. In practice, bump heads have to balance several competing requirements. The spool must not unwind accidentally. The line can’t bind. Dirt and grass clippings can’t jam the mechanism. The head must survive repeated impacts with concrete, rocks, and fence posts because users inevitably abuse them.
And then there’s the line itself. Nylon trimmer line is more complicated than it looks. Different diameters, shapes, and stiffnesses affect how well the feed works. Star-shaped line cuts aggressively but tangles more easily. Round line feeds smoothly but cuts less efficiently. Humidity even matters because nylon absorbs water. Anyone who has left old trimmer line in a garage for years has probably discovered brittle line snapping constantly. We’ve heard people suggest you soak the line — especially old line — in water overnight before loading it.
The bump feed mechanism has another subtle trick. Many heads rely on centrifugal force not only to stiffen the line but also to help lock the spool during operation. At speed, the line pulls outward hard enough to increase friction on the spool. When rotation slows, the spool loosens slightly. A simple mechanical solution.
Of course, they don’t always work and when that happens, you might find some troubleshooting advice in the video from [Will Shackleton] below.
Of course, someone decided bump feed was too much work and, thus, the automatic feed was born. These heads attempt to sense when the line has become too short and feed more automatically. These systems are common on electric consumer trimmers.
There are several ways to do this, but many use a ratchet-like mechanism tied to motor speed. When the load on the motor changes because the line becomes shorter, the system advances the spool slightly. Some units feed line every time the motor starts. Others use centrifugal clutches or vibration-sensitive mechanisms. Great when it works.
Part of the problem is that the operating environment is terrible. Grass juice, dirt, vibration, heat, and impacts are all happening simultaneously. It is hard enough to make reliable machinery in a clean factory. Designing a precise mechanism that lives inches from flying mud is another matter entirely. That’s why many professionals prefer simple bump heads despite the inconvenience. Simpler systems usually fail less dramatically.
You can see several head styles in the video below.
One overlooked component is the eyelet where the line exits the head. That little metal or ceramic ring takes an enormous amount of abuse. The line is moving at perhaps 200 miles per hour at the tip, vibrating continuously, and carrying abrasive dirt particles. A plain plastic hole would wear out quickly.
Some trimmers use hardened steel inserts. Others use aluminum oxide ceramics. The better heads often have replaceable eyelets because manufacturers know they are consumable parts.
The angle matters, too. The line should exit smoothly with minimal friction but still maintain enough control to prevent tangling. You probably don’t notice how important the eyelet is, but you’d notice if it were poorly designed.
Anyone who has reloaded a spool badly knows the pain of internal tangles. The spool effectively stores torsional energy. If the line is wound unevenly or crosses over itself, it can dig into lower layers under centrifugal load. Once that happens, the line jams. Pulling harder only makes it worse.
This is why most spools have directional arrows molded into them. The line must wind in the correct direction, so rotational forces tighten the winding instead of loosening it.
Modern “easy load” heads try to solve this by allowing users to thread the line straight through the head and then twist a knob to wind it automatically. These systems are genuinely better than older designs, although many still become incomprehensible the first time you disassemble one accidentally.
One trick we’ve heard is that if you spray a lubricant like WD-40 into the eyelet before you use the trimmer, it will help the mechanism feed more smoothly. Let us know if you’ve ever tried that and how it works.
Cordless electric trimmers have altered feed mechanism design in subtle ways. Gas trimmers typically run at nearly constant speed, which makes centrifugal systems predictable. Battery trimmers vary speed more often due to electronic controls and power-saving logic. That means newer designs increasingly depend on passive mechanical systems rather than RPM-sensitive tricks. Electronic control also allows some high-end trimmers to detect load changes more intelligently.
Ironically, while motors and batteries have become dramatically more sophisticated, the line feed mechanism is still mostly springs, friction surfaces, tabs, and molded plastic. No microcontroller. No electronic sensors. Go figure.
The string trimmer looks like a brute-force tool. But hidden inside that disposable-looking plastic head is a surprisingly nuanced mechanical system balancing centrifugal force, friction, vibration, inertia, wear, and user abuse. Poor [George Ballas]. He took his prototype to toolmakers, who were all uninterested in the invention. He started the Weed Eater company and launched a lucrative product category.
We love finding all the strange tech around us, from shopping carts to gas pumps.
Featured image: “String trimmer” by Hedwig Storch
2026-05-21 23:30:59
[Nick Electronics] had an idea to build a stylish lamp that could transform its shape while lit. This goal was achieved beautifully with the aid of many, many filament LEDs.
If you’re unfamiliar with filament LEDs, they’re basically thin plastic filaments stuffed with lots of individual LEDs that are very close together. This effectively creates a continuous, flexible, glowing string that can be used for all sorts of creative purposes.
[Nick] packed the lights into an interlocking stack of PCBs that make up the lamp’s structure. Each PCB layer hosts four filaments mounted around the outer edge, and has a pin that locks into a groove in the next layer to allow them to tug each other around as they turn. The PCBs rotate around a central shaft, with power passed from one to the other via interlinking wires. Drive is via a stepper motor on top of the lamp, controlled by an A4988 driver. There’s also an ATmega48 microcontroller onboard, which is the brains of the operation. A DC-DC converter onboard steps up the 5 V input voltage from USB-C to 10 volts for the stepper motor.
It’s neat to watch the lamp in action, glowing and slowly shifting in patterns as the layers catch and rotate in and out of alignment. We’ve seen interesting builds in this vein before, like this fantastic origami lamp from a few years ago.
2026-05-21 22:00:28
If you were around tech in the bad old days, magnets could be really bad news. They were fine on the fridge, no problem at all. Put one near a floppy disk, or a hard drive, or even a computer monitor, though, and you were in for some pain. You’d lose data, possibly permanently destroy a disk or drive, or you’d get ugly smeary rainbow effects all over your screen.
The solid state revolution has eliminated a lot of these problems. We all use SSDs, flash drives, and LCD monitors now, all of which care a lot less about flirting with magnets. However, the same can’t be said about all our modern hardware, for a magnet could cause your smartphone some major grief indeed.
As you might expect, the magnetic susceptibility of certain modern smartphones once again comes down to non-solid state parts. Now, there aren’t exactly a lot of phones out there that are packing hard drives or floppy drives or any sort of magnetic storage. Instead, it all comes down to cameras.
Take the modern iPhone line, for example. Apple is quite careful to warn against carelessly using magnetic accessories with the smartphone, because it can interfere with the cameras. Specifically, it’s because of the optical image stabilization (OIS) and closed-loop autofocus systems that are built into the cameras themselves. These devices use magnetic position sensors to determine lens position to compensate for focus, vibration, and movement, and use magnetic voice coil actuators to move optical elements, in order to take the best possible photos and videos at all times. If there’s a strong magnetic field in the vicinity of the lenses, it can interfere with this operation.
Few of us are sticking fridge magnets on our iPhones, to be sure. However, there are a lot of magnetic cases and mounts and other accessories that give people a great reason to stick magnets on their phone. In the cases of some third-party accessories that are poorly designed, it’s possible for these to cause problems with the camera if the magnets are too strong or too close to the key hardware. It’s worth noting that in typical use, something like a magnetic case or other small magnet won’t cause a lot of permanent harm. It will generally just degrade the operation of the camera until the magnet is removed.
This isn’t solely an iPhone problem, either. It can affect any phone that has any sort of magnetic sensing or actuation involved in the camera mechanism. Indeed, Samsung has even filed a patent on ways to mitigate this problem through carefully orientating the magnets used in folding phone mechanisms, and the appropriate use of shielding. Ultimately, similar camera technology is used in a great many phones, all of which are susceptible to this problem.
It’s true that in day to day use, you’re probably not going to run into a lot of problems waving around a magnet near your smartphone. Nor did floppy disks fail en masse in the 90’s, unless one of your colleagues was feeling vindictive and wiped them all with a fridge magnet on their lunch break. Still, like the oddball helium problem that because apparent with smartphones a few years ago, it’s funny to think that magnets could be causing trouble with computer hardware today. The fact is that a modern smartphone contains multitudes, and thus can surprise you with its edge case frailties.
2026-05-21 19:00:16
The overall adoption and implementation of Wayland — intended as a replacement for the decades-old X11 windowing system — in the Linux world has been full of fits and starts. But perhaps the most surprising adopter we’ve seen yet is this Minecraft patch which brings a full Wayland compositor into the game.
This software project, called Waylandcraft, is the brainchild of a developer known as [EVVIE] who spent a considerable amount of time and effort getting this to work. According to a post on GamingOnLinux it was also done the old fashioned way, with no AI involved.
Users wanting to run this compositor need a Linux system to run Minecraft, as well as the Fabric mod loader and a few other tools. For those wishing to show off to their friends, though, they’ll need to do so in-person as streaming the Wayland windows to other users in the server is not possible.
With everything running, you’ll be able to launch arbitrary programs and have the windows placed within the Minecraft world as if they were in-game. Users can place the windows in any orientation and can interact with them like any other desktop environment. [EVVIE] has released all of the code under the GPL for anyone wanting to try it out or build on the project itself.
If you haven’t spun up a Minecraft server at all yet, all you really need is something like an ESP32 to get started.
