Samwise Makers' News
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Making Better Rubies At Home
Growing synthetic rubies at home requires more than blasting aluminium oxide with a laser — which produces hollow, murky gem geodes instead of solid crystals. [Gems of Science] uses the flux crystal growth method: dissolving chromium oxide and aluminium oxide in molybdenum oxide at kiln-achievable temperatures. Cr3+ ions give ruby its red colour in an Al2O3 matrix. Getting there required trialling multiple crucible types — alumina crucibles shattered, silica contamination ruined one batch — before settling on platinum crucibles with flux stabilisers and temperature cycling to encourage larger crystal formation. End result: solid rubies up to 10 mm, with minor internal flux inclusions still to address.
Straight Talk On 3D Printing Footwear At Home
Printing your own shoes is more feasible than it might seem — provided you have the right setup. A detailed guide via Snapmaker’s blog walks through 3D-printing TPU 90A clogs at home, using rigid PLA as a support structure that peels away cleanly from flexible filament. Hackaday flags that PETG supports are generally risky with flex materials, since PETG tends to bond aggressively to TPU. Getting the sole squish right calls for a gyroid infill pattern at 15% density — tuned by changing the pattern rather than the percentage. TPU must also be kept bone-dry before printing. Cost-effective versus buying Crocs? Probably not. Rewarding? Absolutely.
3D-Printed Skin Gives Robots The Sensation Of Touch
Researchers have developed a 3D-printable artificial skin for robots that replicates the sense of touch using electrical impedance tomography (EIT). The flexible outer layer, printed in TPU with embedded conductive fabric patches and just 16 electrodes, generates a pressure map whenever the skin is contacted. EIT measures how applied current changes as objects press against the material, reconstructing spatial contact data without cameras or dense sensor arrays. Detailed in arXiv preprint 2608.02080v1 by Haofeng Chen et al., the approach is fully 3D-printable and scalable, making it significantly more accessible than existing tactile skin systems for humanoid and collaborative robot platforms.
Combining Photogrammetry Utilities Into A Simple GUI Tool
Photogrammetry pipelines typically require stitching together multiple open-source tools — Colmap, OpenMVS, mvs-texturing, PoissonRecon, and others — in a way that frustrates artists wanting to simply turn photos into 3D meshes. [Edin Spiegel]’s Simple Photogrammetry GUI (github.com/edin45/simple_photogrammetry_gui) wraps all of them behind a unified Flutter interface, supporting both traditional photogrammetry and Gaussian splatting workflows. CUDA acceleration is used where available, with CPU fallback supported but significantly slower. Linux compatibility via AppImage (over 1 GB) is still maturing, while the Windows package for v1.1.5 is 207 MB. The author is actively seeking testers to report bugs and help polish the workflow.
The Casio F-91W As A Contactless Payment Device
The Casio F-91W is already legendary in the hardware hacking community, but [Matteo P] has added a genuinely novel trick: contactless payment. The build replaces the original front face with an SLA-printed panel housing a 13.56 MHz NFC chip — the same type found in payment cards — positioned above the display, with a pickup coil routed around the watch’s perimeter. Unusually, the write-up goes deep on the RF engineering: designing the coil geometry for good inductive coupling at resonance, which is where most casual NFC builds fall short. The finished watch works as a functional tap-to-pay device, packed into a watch that retails for under $20.
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
1. HeyGears G1 3D Printer — $13.5M raised, Kickstarter
2. Beni Camera Robot — $2.95M raised, Kickstarter
3. IFMAKER M5 CNC — $1.07M raised, Kickstarter
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
1. Optocam Zero — 800★
2. PypelineC — 740★
3. OpenSCAD fillet utils — 672★
Upcoming Events
Hackaday Supercon 2026 — Nov 6–8, Pasadena CA
Supercon CfP deadline — Aug 26, 2026 (tomorrow!)
hackaday.io/superconference
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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