Some of the entries we got into the Tiny Games Contest have been really mind-blowing. Just as you think you’ve seen it all, for instance, alnwlsn comes along and mills the DIP-package ATtiny84 and embeds a complete Simon game in the space normally wasted by all that plastic overmolding. It’s the tiniest, and most gonzo, circuit-sculpture Simon we’ve ever seen.

Now, our judges are hard at work ranking all 80 of the entries, and we have a fantastic range of entries all around, so I’m not calling any winners yet. But have you ever seen a project milled into a chip before? Nope, me neither.

What’s amazing is that this happens every time we run a contest. The second you put limitations on a project, there’s always someone out there who says “Hold my beer” and blows the limits out of the water. Indeed, the frequency with which we see someone pull off the impossible on Hackaday makes me wish I were buying more lottery tickets. You all really are stupendous.

We hope that feats like this are as inspirational to you as they are to us. No idea is too bonkers to not at least give it a try. Who knows, it might work! And when it does, please write it up and let us know. Keep the cycle of inspiration going!

[Joe Barnard] made a solid propellant rocket motor, and as one does in such situations, he put it through its paces on the test stand. The video below is not about the test, nor is it about the motor’s construction. Rather, it’s a deconstruction of the remains of the motor in order to better understand its design, and it’s pretty interesting stuff.

Somewhere along the way, [Joe], aka “BPS.Space” on YouTube, transitioned from enthusiastic model rocketeer to full-fledged missile-man, and in the process stepped up his motor game considerably. The motor that goes under the knife — or rather, the bandsaw — in this video is his “Simplex V2,” a completely DIY build of [Joe]’s design. For scale, the casing is made from a 6″ (15 cm) diameter piece of aluminum tubing over a meter in length, with a machined aluminum forward closure and a composite nozzle assembly. This is a pretty serious piece of engineering.

The closure and the nozzle are the focus of the video, which makes sense since that’s where most of the action takes place. To understand what happened during the test, [Joe] lopped them off and cut them roughly in half longitudinally. The nozzle throat, which was machined from a slug of graphite, fared remarkably well during the test, accumulating only a little slag from the propellant, a combination of powdered aluminum, ammonium perchlorate, and HTBP resin. The lower part of the nozzle, made from phenolic-impregnated linen, did pretty well too, building up a pyrolyzed layer that acted much like a space capsule’s ablative heat shield would. The forward closure, whose sole job is to contain the inferno and direct the exhaust anywhere but up, took more of a beating but stood up to the challenge. Especially interesting was the state of the O-rings and the way that the igniter interfaced with the closure.

Post mortems like these are valuable teaching tools, and while it must be heartbreaking to destroy something you put so much work into, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Hats off to [Joe] for the peek inside his world.