Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD
Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…
A researcher shares a behind-the-scenes account of developing a sensor from 3D printer filament as part of their electrical engineering PhD work. The post documents the one-year project that represents roughly… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 2
3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work! This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes! It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations,…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!
2025 · muffinman.io · its alternatives →
- 4
Wow, half a year has passed since my last blog. I have to admit, during this period I was a bit disconnected from the physical AI world. I transitioned to a different team at work after their two data scientists were reassigned to other teams, and I had to ramp up quickly to take over…
Dec 2025 · airoboticist.blog · its alternatives →
- 5IW
2021 · designingelectronics.com · its alternatives →
- 6AM
I started https://signalprocessingjobs.com/ to organize a couple of side projects I have: - a job board for signal processing engineers - Journal2MATLAB: a blog that turns academic papers into MATLAB code - some work on using cocotb for verifying DSP HDL - and some MATLAB code snippets i keep coming back to Hope others in the community find it useful :)
2023 · signalprocessingjobs.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Measuring and interpreting audio data, and data sonification
2016 · oreilly.com · its alternatives →
- 8HT
2015 · achariam.com · its alternatives →
- 9TY
I was just browsing through the "Who got hired?" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36160198) and it caused me to think about all of the things that happened in my real life due to HN. In 2012 I was hired from a post in the "Who's Hiring" thread that turned out to be a complete life and career transformation. It was at a very famous company that everyone here has heard of and used. They were pre-IPO and I got to be a "part" of that IPO. It exposed me to people smarter than I had ever met, and allowed me to learn from them. It allowed me a path into "big tech" that I…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 10IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012 · readwriteweb.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Just finished a super-nerdy amateur hobby project: An exhibit and website to show kids how cool mechanisms are! Sadly, kids don't get much tangible experience with machines anymore. Ideally, this exhibit will inspire some to explore engineering, even if they are not "book learners". The website provides content to back up the exhibit, with videos and 3D printing files. The project is inspired by engineering exhibits from the past. Check out the research page for more. The project will be open-sourced to enable people to make their own and extend it. If you want to collaborate, LMK. --Steve
2025 · mechanical-library.org · its alternatives →
- 12IW
I've spent years watching hardware teams make the same mistakes — tooling committed before thermal was resolved, manufacturing processes not validated in PVT that only showed defects at volume, components going EOL unnoticed until the factory tried to order them. The pattern was always the same. The costs were always avoidable. Nobody had written it down. The result is The Hardest Hardware Lessons — covering the full journey from first prototype to end-of-life: EVT/DVT/PVT, factory evaluation, supply chain risk, mass production operations, field failures, and product lifecycle…
Mar 2026 · thehardesthardwarelessons.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Job hunting is tough – I’m busy until February 2022 but already feeling anxious about finding the next gig. That’s why I wanted to give myself a bit of an incentive – a visible indicator of success. I decided that whenever someone visits my portfolio site, I wanted an LED to
2021 · circusscientist.com · its alternatives →
- 14IC
I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.
2024 · bell-boy.github.io · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16
Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai · its alternatives →
- 181P
This project took me 1 year to complete, all by my lonesome self. What do you think? Comments appreciated! www.enrad.io
2016 · its alternatives →
- 19
I wrote up a retrospective on my time working as a founder at DirectAI (https://directai.io). We learned a lot and I wanted to share some things I wish I had known ~18 months ago.
2024 · brooks.team · its alternatives →
- 20MP
Hi I'm the developer of UX-App if you have any questions then fire away :) Just thought I'd give you all some background. I'm a high school teacher by day and developer by night. I was bitten by the start-up bug a few years ago and UX-App is my first product launch. In between a full time job and a 5 month old at home it has taken about 3.5 years to complete the project. I'd like to think its a unique product that holds its own against the existing competition and even has some features that no other tool has. My favorite aspect is the visual code builder which allows designers to easily…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 21
- 22IB
Hi HN, I’ve been tinkering with this for a while and finally have it in a decent state. It’s a plotter robot that draws caricatures from photos. I trained a diffusion model (Flux Kontext LoRA) on caricature images, 3D-printed a Sharpie mount for my Ender 3, and hacked together a pipeline that goes photo → caricature → G-code. After a lot of trial and error it’s working pretty well, and I put up a little site where you can try it out. Happy to answer questions or hear any feedback. Thanks!
2025 · caricature-bot.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Over the past three months, I’ve been working with my dad on this app as a way to learn Cursor, shadcn/ui, and Next.js. I’m currently studying UX design at the University of Michigan, and I’ve been really impressed by how much vibe-coding tools have advanced over the last six months. This work journal includes private AI-generated insights with scheduled summaries that can be shared with your team or manager. You can also choose to make a summary public—like I’ve done here for my work on this web app: https://www.workjourney.ai/summary/mkblt2zt-hn2kdbus If anyone has…
Jan 2026 · workjourney.ai · its alternatives →
- 24
Here's a video of it in action https://twitter.com/i/status/1667355251773526016 I didn't end up using it that much back then and no one else seems to have cared it existed, but it was a project I used to derust my programming skills and I'm to this day proud of the flamboyant design. To anyone reading this: you don't have to let your old code rot away in the graveyard of distant memories just because times change. With enough persistence and a little perseverance anything is possible. Code doesn't have an expiration date. -day
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →