Need something to keep you busy this weekend? We’ve got you covered. The Weekend Workshop is our weekly column in which we showcase a badass DIY project that you can complete with minimal skills and expertise. We’ve dug through all the online tutorials and gone the extra mile to pinpoint projects that are equal parts easy, affordable, and fun. So put on your work pants, grab your tool belt, and head to the garage. It’s time to start building!
You never quite realize how critical a proper LED flashlight is until you absolutely need one. Making things worse, buying spare batteries is something a lot of us forget to do in this age of rechargeable devices, so a simple AA swap isn’t always an option. However, what is an option is using some old-fashioned elbow grease to boot up that handy light in a mere matter of minutes.
Thanks to some tinkering, an Instructables user by the name of Robo Hub created a hand-powered LED flashlight. With nothing more than an old soda can, some small LED lights, a 12-volt DC motor, and some reflective tape, anyone can easily construct one of these lights in under an hour. Sure, pulling a Maglite out of your backpack while hiking makes you feel cool, but if you really want to wow your friends, show off your hand-cranking skills.
To help you build this innovative flashlight, we’ve gone ahead and sifted through Robo Hub’s walkthrough to piece together an exact build list. As is the case with most projects using a hot glue gun, we recommend having a general understanding of how to use a hot glue gun so as to avoid any injury. If you don’t feel comfortable, find someone to help or skip this project altogether. With that said, here’s what you’ll need to get started:
With the necessary tools and materials at the ready, it’s now time to start piecing together this DIY hand-powered flashlight. Simply follow Robo Hub’s step-by-step Instructables walkthrough and in less than 30 minutes, you’ll have your very own elbow grease ready LED torch. Happy building!
The entire walkthrough for building this DIY hand-powered LED flashlight can be found over at Instructables.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.