Unless you’re into circuit sculptures, generally speaking, a working circuit isn’t the end-point of a lot of electronics projects. To protect your new creation from grabby hands, curious paws, and the ravages of nature, you’ll probably want some kind of enclosure. These days a lot of us would probably run it off on the 3D printer, but some people would rather stay electronics hobbiests without getting into the 3D printing hobby. For those people, [mircemk] shares how he creates professonal-looking enclosures with handtools.

The name [mircemk] will seem familiar to longtime readers– we’ve featured many of his projects, and they’ve always stood out for the simple but elegant enclosures he uses. The secret, it turns out, is thin PVC sheeting from a sign shop. At thicknesses upto and including 5 mm, the material can be bent by hand and cut with hobby knives. It’s obviously also amenable to drilling and cutting with woodworking tools as well. Drilling is especially useful to make holes for indicator LEDs. [mircemk] recommends cyanoacrylate ‘crazy’ glue to hold pieces together. For holding down the PCB, the suggestion of double-sided tape will work for components that won’t get too hot.

Rather than paint, the bold contrasting colours we’ve become used to are applied using peel-and-stick wallpaper, which is a great idea. It’s quick, zero mess, and the colour is guaranteed to be evenly applied. It might even help hold the PVC enclosure together ever so slightly. You can watch him do it in the video embedded below.

We hate to say it, but for a one-off project, this technique probably does beat a 3D printed box for professional looks, assuming you have [mircemk]’s motorskills. If you don’t have said motor skills, check out this parametric project box generator. If you’d rather avoid PVC while making a square box to hold a PCB, have you considered using PCBs?

Thanks to [mircemk] for the tip! If you have a tip or technique you want to share, please box it up and send it to the tipsline

youtube.com/embed/t9KfsZ-eU5M?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/29/clean-…

Ionizing radiation damage from electrons, protons and gamma rays will over time damage a CMOS circuit, through e.g. degrading the oxide layer and damaging the lattice structure. For a space-based camera that’s inside a probe orbiting a planet like Jupiter it’s thus a bit of a bummer if this will massively shorted useful observation time before the sensor has been fully degraded. A potential workaround here is by using thermal energy to anneal the damaged part of a CMOS imager.

The first step is to detect damaged pixels by performing a read-out while the sensor is not exposed to light. If a pixel still carries significant current it’s marked as damaged and a high current is passed through it to significantly raise its temperature. For the digital logic part of the circuit a similar approach is used, where the detection of logic errors is cause for a high voltage pulse that should also result in annealing of any damage.

During testing the chip was exposed to the same level of radiation to what it would experience during thirty days in orbit around Jupiter, which rendered the sensor basically unusable with a massive increase in leakage current. After four rounds of annealing the image was almost restored to full health, showing that it is a viable approach.

Naturally, this self-healing method is only intended as another line of defense against ionizing radiation, with radiation shielding and radiation-resistant semiconductor technologies serving as the primary defenses.

hackaday.com/2026/03/29/self-h…

Usually, when we see non-planar 3D printers, they’re rather rudimentary prototypes, intended more as development frames than as workhorse machines. [multipoleguy]’s Archer five-axis printer, on the other hand, breaks this trend with automatic four-hotend toolchanging, a CoreXY motion system, and print results as good-looking as any Voron’s.

The print bed rests on three ball joints, two on one side and one in the center of the opposite side. Each joint can be raised and lowered on an independent rail, which allows the bed to be tilted on two axes. The dimensions of the extruders their motion system limit how much the bed can be angled when the extruder is close to the bed, but it can reach sharp angles further out.

The biggest difficulty with non-planar printing is developing a slicer; [multipoleguy] is working on a slicer (MaxiSlicer), but it’s still in development. It looks as though it’s already working rather well, to the point that [multipoleguy] has been optimizing purge settings for tool changes. It seems that when a toolhead is docked, the temperature inside the melt chamber rises above the normal temperature in use, which causes stringing. To compensate for this, the firmware runs a more extensive purge when a hotend’s been sitting for a longer time. The results for themselves: a full three-color double helix, involving 830 tool changes, could be printed with as little as six grams of purge waste.

As three-axis 3D printers become consumer products, hackers have kept looking for further improvements to make, which perhaps explains the number of non-planar printing projects appearing recently, including a few five-axis machines. Alternatively, some have experimented with non-planar print ironing.

youtube.com/embed/Y44QV1gQqq0?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/29/multic…

Until the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 you’d be forgiven as a proud Soviet citizen for thinking that the USSR’s technology was on par with the decadent West. After the Iron Curtain lifted it became however quite clear how outdated especially consumer electronics were in the USSR, with technologies like digital audio CDs and their players being one good point of comparison. In a recent video by a railways/retro tech YouTube channel we get a look at one of the earliest Soviet CD players.

A good overall summary of how CD technology slowly developed in the Soviet Union despite limitations can be found in this 2025 article by [Artur Netsvetaev]. Soviet technology was characterized mostly by glossy announcements and promises of ‘imminent’ serial production prior to a slow fading into obscurity. Soviet engineers had come up with the Luch-001 digital audio player in 1979, using glass discs. More prototypes followed, but with no means for mass-production and Soviet bureaucracy getting in the way, these efforts died during the 1980s.

During the 1980s CD players were produced in Soviet Estonia in small batches, using Philips internals to create the Estonia LP-010. Eventually sanctions on the USSR would strangle these efforts, however. Thus it wouldn’t be until 1991 that the Vega PKD-122 would become the first mass-produced CD player, with one example featured in this video.

The video helpfully includes a teardown of the player after a rundown of its controls and playback demonstration, so that we can ogle its internals. This system uses mostly localized components, with imported components like the VF display and processors gradually getting replaced over time. The DAC and optical-mechanical assembly would still be imported from Japan until 1995 when the factory went bankrupt.
Insides of the Vega 122S CD player. (Credit: Railways | Retro Tech | DIY, YouTube)
This difference between the imported and localized part is captured succinctly in the video with the comparison to Berlin in 1999, in that you can clearly see the difference between East and West. The CD mechanism is produced by Sanyo, with a Sanyo DAC IC on the mainboard. The power supply, display and logic board (using Soviet TTL ICs) are all Soviet-produced. A sticker inside the case identifies this unit as having been produced in 1994.

Amusingly, the front buttons are directly coupled into the mainboard without ESD protection, which means that in a Siberian winter with practically zero relative humidity inside you’d often fry the mainboard by merely using these buttons.

After this exploration the video goes on to explain how Soviet CD production began in the 1989, using imported technology and know-how. This factory was set up in Moscow, using outdated West-German CD pressing equipment and makes for a whole fascinating topic by itself.

Finally, the video explores the CD player’s manual and how to program the player, as well as how to obtain your own Soviet CD player. Interestingly, a former employee of the old factory has taken over the warehouse and set up a web shop selling new old stock as well as repaired units and replacement parts.

youtube.com/embed/utcfnmQtGxA?…

hackaday.com/2026/03/29/soviet…