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Products that do what A 2mm micro-bearing ring that spins like a real fidget spinner does
My motivation was pretty simple: every “spinning ring” I tried felt a bit fake. They don’t actually spin — not like a real bearing. So I wanted to see if I could make one that truly does. At the end of the day it’s still just a ring. A small, minimal piece of jewelry. But it happens to hide a tiny bearing that can hit around 800 RPM with a single flick. That contrast is what makes it fun. The way I think about it is this: it’s like a normal-looking car that quietly turns out to fly. Nothing loud or showy — until you decide to reveal what it can actually do. If you’ve used a good fidget…
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Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with how small a functional bearing-based mechanism can get while still feeling smooth, durable, and useful. This project started from a simple question: How thin can a real, free-spinning bearing be while still handling continuous rotation? Most “spinner rings” you see online cheat by simulating rotation — there’s no real bearing, just loose tolerance metal sliding on metal. True micro-bearing rotation needs precision, tight tolerances, and high surface finish, which is difficult when everything needs to be wearable on a finger. So I tried to…
Nov 2025
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Aug 2026 · github.com
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The little particles will gravitate to your cursor (or touch location), and can even enter stable orbits if the conditions are right! Mainly an excuse for me to experiment with wasm and WebGL, but it makes for a surprisingly good fidget toy.
2024 · aestuans.github.io
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I’m building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air. I’ve worked on other projects in robotics and object tracking (perception for self driving cars), but this has a whole different set of challenges. Nerf rival rounds travel at over 100 feet per second and shooting them out of the air requires aiming systems that are precise to less than half the width of a human hair and timing precision of 600 times faster than the blink of an eye. This is the first part of the series of me building the project (and my first video!) so I’d love to hear what you think!
2022 · youtube.com
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I am not sure if this is fits the HN community, but I am posting it here if people are interested. This is the current iteration of the car: http://i.imgur.com/ko8YBh.jpg Details: I wrote a simple android app that streams the accelerometer data from the phone to the pi over a simple socket. The pi then uses this data to drive the DC motor and the servo motor. Tilting the phone to control the car feels very natural. In this[0] pic you can see the wifi dongle I've used. I am using Adafruit Occidental v0.2[1] as my OS because it has support for my wifi dongle. It also makes some hardware…
2012
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