laser

Styropyro tests an eBay laser tattoo removal device and finds it is a roughly million-watt pulsed laser, powerful enough to ignite air in the beam. He had bought it hoping to salvage an Nd:YAG laser cavity.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows that a plain laser diode can measure sub-micron vibrations from centimeters away using self-mixing interferometry, and can also be used for range-finding.

Royal Institution lecture by Dr Kate Lancaster on the most powerful lasers in the world and the extreme conditions they create. It includes live demonstrations and covers applications from industry to fusion.

A short National Geographic piece showing a laser system that tracks and kills mosquitoes, filmed in slow motion, as part of anti-malaria efforts. It comes from Intellectual Ventures' 2010 work.

Brandon Thomas demos Laser Pong, a game he built on a laser projector and projected onto buildings around Atlanta. It was a weekend project.

AlphaPhoenix shows off a new camera that films at two billion frames per second and uses it to film a laser pointer pulse. He investigates a strange quirk in how the speed of light appears on camera.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

A clip from the 1985 comedy Real Genius in which a laser ignites a giant container of popcorn inside a house.

A spoof commercial by the Groen Brothers for a Star Wars-style laser defense system against mosquitoes.

Real Engineering explains the materials science behind metal 3D printing, including crystal structure, laser sintering, and why printed parts develop fatigue cracks. It shows how process imperfections limit the strength of printed metal.

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.

A Dutch parody commercial from the Groen Brothers for a supposed Star Wars style mosquito defense system. It mimics the style of infomercials with laser-armed anti-mosquito technology.

Matt Adereth's Clojure/conj talk covers the history of keyboards and how he used Clojure generating OpenSCAD to design and build his custom Dactyl ergonomic keyboard, including 3D printing and laser-cut parts.

Maker's Muse designs a 3D-printed and laser-cut puzzle box to test whether wild sulphur-crested cockatoos can solve it. He documents how the birds work it out.

Asianometry explains the EUV light source inside ASML's lithography machines, where lasers hit falling tin droplets twice to produce 13.5 nm light. It walks through the engineering of the droplet generator, the pre-pulse and main laser, and the plasma that results.

Huygens Optics experiments with etching tiny patterns in glass, covering hydrofluoric acid risks, buffered oxide etch, photoresist and chromium masks, and laser-induced etching. It ends with attempts at microscopic Tesla valves.

DIY Perks builds a realistic artificial sun for dark winters, using a powerful water-cooled LED, a satellite dish reflector for near-parallel rays, and a scattering layer to mimic the blue sky. The video explains the optics behind why most lamps do not look like sunlight and shows the build and its results.

A maker's time-lapse of building a working computer inside a LEGO-style brick, using a tiny 0.42-inch OLED screen, with a demo at the end.

First of an 18-part lecture series by engineer Dan Gelbart on building prototypes. The series covers practical mechanical design and fabrication of precision machines.

A roughly 90-minute film of John Dobson building a Dobsonian telescope step by step, including hand-grinding the mirror.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

The first lesson of MangoJelly's FreeCAD 0.20 beginner course, covering setup, preferences and navigation. The series teaches fundamentals through complete workflows such as sketching, Part Design and STL export.

The introduction to MangoJelly's beginner course for FreeCAD 1.0. The course teaches solid modeling with the Part Design, Sketcher and Part workbenches.

DIY Perks shows how to turn old or smashed TVs and monitors into realistic artificial window lights, using the backlight and Fresnel lens to simulate distant daylight.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build flat panel speakers from exciters and foam board, with construction guidelines, measured SPL comparisons and a complete system playing music.

Zack Freedman gives advice on why makers fail to finish projects, including scrapping bad ideas, showing work publicly and writing a plan that keeps projects fun. It is aimed at hardware DIY but generalizes.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

DIY Perks builds a webcam mod using a two-way mirror in a box so the camera sits behind the screen image. This allows real eye contact on video calls.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.

Zack Freedman introduces Gridfinity, his free, open-source modular workshop storage system of 3D-printable bins and baseplates. The video walks through the design, the parametric templates and the many module types that fit parts, tools and accessories.

Tech Ingredients explains the principles of magnetohydrodynamics and builds several demonstrations, including propelling liquid metal and electrolytes with magnets and a railgun-style setup.

Part 10 of Dan Gelbart's prototype-building lecture series, covering flexures: flexible joints that give precise, frictionless motion. It shows how a cheap piece of aluminum can become a nanometer-accurate mechanism.

A two-minute demo of SmartKnob View, an open-source input knob built from a brushless gimbal motor, magnetic encoder and round LCD. Closed-loop torque control gives software-defined detents and end stops.

The trailer for Tim Hunkin's series The Secret Life of Components, eight guides to mechanical and electromechanical parts for designers and makers.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.

Mark Rober builds a hot tub filled with sand fluidized by air blown from below, so that the sand behaves like a liquid. He explains how fluidized beds work and shows people swimming in them.

The Plasticity creator explains what a geometry kernel is and compares commercial options C3D, ACIS, and Parasolid, describing his months of research and why he chose as he did.

William Osman describes helping build parts of the MrBeast Squid Game event, including hacking together hundreds of wifi-controlled blood packs in about three weeks. He covers the chaos and near-failures along the way.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

LightningOnDemand revives a pulsed Lorentz plasma cannon, using modern capacitors to extend its range and increase the delivered energy. It is a high-voltage, high-current hobby demonstration.