Alternatives
Products that do what Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS does
(This was previously submitted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246856) The Ravenna Ultra-Low-Altitude Vehicle is a backyard rocketship treehouse nestled in the Seattle neighborhood of Ravenna. Click the link to see a demo video (http://rocket.jonh.net). The hexagonal treehouse is about 6.5 feet (2 meters) across at its widest point. The frame is welded mild steel with riveted aluminum siding. It contains nearly 800 LEDs forming dozens of numeric displays spread across 14 control panels, each with an acrylic face laser-cut and etched with labels such as…
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Repainting the iconic IKEA PS 2014 lamp into the Deathstar from Star Wars has been a popular IKEA hack for quite some time. This variant additionally replaces the manual, rope-operated mechanism to open and close the lamp with a remote-controlled motor. The firmware is based on ESPHome, and its excellent Home Assistant integration enables one to implement higher-level features, like a "sundial" where the aperture of the Deathstar follows the sun elevation throughout the day (see the timelapse video). That said, I will not consider this project as complete until the Imperial March can be…
2025 · gitlab.com
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Me and a few friends made this design document as part of our entry to the UK CanSat competition where a high school team is required to build a probe to be launched. The probe must serve some purpose, and ours was to map the temperature and pressure of the air at different altitudes. We had the opportunity to launch it a week ago and you can find the video of our launch here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16bsLzxjP7OWRqVvCB62cLv7QYLR... During the launch we reached 400m above sea level, and the can pulled 70gs successfully. The parachute and can stayed intact.…
2025 · drive.google.com
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Hi HN, I'm Anton, founder of Luna Rail. I've always thought night trains are a fantastic, sustainable alternative to short-haul flights, but they're often held back by a lack of privacy, comfort, and poor economics due to low passenger capacity. I became overly fascinated with this puzzle. I view it as a kind of night train Tetris (my wife less charitably calls it "sardinology"). I spent way too much time learning about and sketching various layouts, trying to figure out how to fit the maximum number of private cabins into a standard railcar, while making them attractive for both day and…
2025 · luna-rail.com
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See the website for a demo video: https://oasis-terrarium.com This project is an enclosure for growing plants. Features include: - high-power LED lighting - a built-in water tank and mister - fans for airflow - temperature and humidity sensing - wi-fi connectivity and a web-based interface for control and monitoring (see https://oasis-terrarium.com/docs/usage_guide/#web-interface) The entire project is open-source: - electronics: designed in KiCad - 3D models: designed in CadQuery - software: written in Rust I initially started this project during COVID and…
2025 · github.com
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Hello HN, these Mini Trees have a custom circuit board with WS2812 addressable LEDs on one side and a controller using an RP2040 microcontroller on the other, all inside a CNC'd Foamex PVC case. They stand around 23cm (9") tall. The firmware is written in MicroPython, which can be modified or replaced. Power is provided via USB-C, which is also used for programming. There is also a web-based animation sequencer to create lighting sequences in time to arbitrary audio, examples of which are on the linked page. This is similar to xLights (https://xlights.org/), but much less…
2022 · pixo.lighting
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Today is the 55th anniversary of Apollo 8. I figured it would be fun to make a CAD model with a space for a model rocket engine and also as an augmented reality model. The tutorial is for Fusion360 but the steps can be adapted to most CAD programs. I would love to know what you all think!
2022 · makezine.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 made this site using R3F (https://github.com/pmndrs/react-three-fiber), a React renderer for 3JS (https://threejs.org/). The celestial bodies are Three.JS meshes. I used loaders (namely 'useLoader' from R3F and 'GLTFLoader' from 3JS) to import 3D models, such as International Space Station. More on loading models in R3F: https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/tutorials/loading-mod... I've future plans for this side project. It would be great to hear from the HN community before diving into them. Enjoy! P.S: Getting an empty…
2022 · spaceinbrowser.com
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Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…
Nov 2025 · radi8.dev
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