If you want a regular table saw, you’re probably best off just buying one—it’s hard to beat the economies of scale that benefit the major manufacturers. If you want a teeny one, though, you might like to build it yourself. [Maciej Nowak] has done just that.

The concept is simple enough; a small motor and a small blade make a small table saw. [Maciej] sourced a remarkably powerful 800-watt brushless motor for the build. From there, the project involved fabricating a suitable blade mount, belt drive, and frame for the tool. Some time was well-spent on the lathe producing the requisite components out of steel and aluminum, as well as a stout housing out of plywood. The motor was then fitted with a speed controller, with the slight inconvenience that it’s a hobby unit designed to run off DC batteries rather than a wall supply. Ultimately, though, this makes the saw nicely portable. All that was left to do was to fit the metal top plate, guides, and a suitably small 3″ saw blade to complete the build.

We’ve seen mini machine tools like these before, too. They can actually be pretty useful if you find yourself regularly working on tiny little projects. Video after the break.

Solder fumes are not nice on the lungs; nor are fumes from superglue, epoxy, or a whole mess of other things we often find ourselves using on the bench. Some people might be able to go the fume hood route to toss that all outside, but for the rest of us, there’s fume extractors. [Raph] has produced an extra-large, carbon-filtering, two-stage fume extractor that by all accounts really sucks — it is effective at hoovering up solder fumes up to 10″ from its inlet.

Even better, [Raph] built a battery box for an 18 V cordless tool battery, and broke out banana plugs so this doubles as a variable power supply via a cheap LM2596 based DC-DC converter. It also serves as a speed controller for the fans, which makes us wonder if you can adjust the PSU output and the fan speed independently…

Maximum suckage is achieved through careful baffle design. Check out the blog to see the trial-and-error process at work. Of course, having a 200 mm axial fan and 140 mm blower fan front and rear is going to move some air no matter what. Which is required to get air flow through the 38 mm thick activated carbon filter that should scrub all nasties quite nicely. We aren’t filtration experts but we can agree with [Raph]’s estimate that it will last “a while”.

If you want to roll your own, all of the STEP files are on GitHub, and [Raph]’s blog has an excellent step-by-step build guide. We’ve seen other hacks from [Raph] before, from his dovetailed modular breadboard to the machine that shaped his bed and automation for his camper van.

When you start building lots of something, you’ll know the value of accurate fixturing. [Chris Borge] learned this the hard way on a recent mass-production project, and decided to solve the problem. How? With a custom fixturing tool! A 3D printed one, of course.

Chris’s build is simple enough. He created 3D-printed workplates covered in a grid of specially-shaped apertures, each of which can hold a single bolt. Plastic fixtures can then be slotted into the grid, and fastened in place with nuts that thread onto the bolts inserted in the base. [Chris] can 3D print all kinds of different plastic fixtures to mount on to the grid, so it’s an incredibly flexible system.

3D printing fixtures might not sound the stoutest way to go, but it’s perfectly cromulent for some tasks. Indeed, for [Chris]’s use case of laser cutting, the 3D printed fixtures are more than strong enough, since the forces involved are minimal. Furthermore, [Chris] aided the stability of the 3D-printed workplate by mounting it on a laser-cut wooden frame filled with concrete. How’s that for completeness?

We’ve seen some other great fixturing tools before, too. Video after the break.

Entry-level oscilloscopes are a great way to get some low-cost instrumentation on a test bench, whether it’s for a garage lab or a schoolroom. But the cheapest ones are often cheap for a reason, and even though they work well for the price they won’t stand up to more advanced equipment. But missing features don’t have to stay missing forever, as it’s possible to augment them to get some of these features. [Tommy’s] project shows you one way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, at least as it relates to oscilloscopes.

Most of the problem with these lower-cost tools is their low precision due to fewer bits of analog-digital conversion. They also tend to be quite noisy, further lowering the quality of the oscilloscope. [Tommy] is focusing his efforts on the DSO138-mini, an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of 100 kHz and an effective resolution of 10 bits. The first step is to add an anti-aliasing filter to the input, which is essentially a low-pass filter that removes high frequency components of the signal, which could cause a problem due to the lower resolution of the device. After that, digital post-processing is done on the output, which removes noise caused by the system’s power supply, among other things, and essentially acts as a second low-pass filter.

In part 2 of the project, [Tommy] demonstrates the effectiveness of these two methods with experimental data, showing that a good percentage of the noise on a test signal has been removed from the output. All the more impressive here is that the only additional cost besides the inexpensive oscilloscope itself is for a ceramic capacitor that costs around a dollar. We were also impressed: [Tommy] is a junior in high school!

Presumably, you could apply these techniques to other inexpensive equipment, like this even cheaper oscilloscope based on the ESP32.

Discover the top web design tools and resources of 2025, tailored for creating innovative, secure, and visually stunning websites with ease.

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AudioShake is a powerful AI-powered audio tool that can separate sound recordings into their component parts and stems. It offers a free trial where you can upload a single track to get the stem files and test out the accuracy. The tool supports MP3, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, MP4A, and M4A audio files. Key Features

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SocialBu uses AI to help you manage and boost your social media platforms. It offers a range of features to help you improve your social media presence and save time, such as publishing, responding, analyzing, and generating ideas. SocialBu lets you schedule and publish your content across all social networks in one place, which can […]

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Human Generator is a free tool offered by Generated Photos which allows you to easily create realistic fake people with just a few clicks. It uses advanced AI to generate incredibly lifelike full-body photos of people that don’t exist. You can customize traits like ethnicity, age, clothing, and body type to get the perfect fake […]

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Cleanvoice is an AI voice tool that improves the quality of your audio recordings by removing filler sounds, stuttering, and mouth noises. It is capable of detecting and removing these issues in multiple languages, including those with heavy accents. Cleanvoice can also identify and remove long periods of silence (dead air) in order to keep […]

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MemeMorph is an AI-powered face-morphing app that allows you to turn yourself into your favorite memes. With just a few uploaded selfies, you can turn yourself into over 170 memes! The tool is simple to use: upload at least 20 photos, wait for the AI to train on your photos, then let it generate your […]

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Kits AI is an AI voice platform designed for musicians to enhance their music production. It offers the ability to modify voices using a wide range of pre-trained AI voices, featuring both licensed artist voices and royalty-free options. You can also use this tool to train, create, and share your own custom AI voices. Training […]

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Drayk.it is a revolutionary AI tool which lets you… generate a new Drake track. Seriously, you just type in your song idea with or without lyrics, and hit generate! It will even show you a deepfake video of Drake rapping the song. There is a big disclaimer on the website that this tool is only […]

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Portrait AI is a free tool which lets you upload a picture or selfie and turn it into a beautiful 18th century style portrait. They also have a mobile app available to download with even more filters and styles.

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Findem is a talent acquisition AI platform that streamlines the hiring process from sourcing to hiring. The tools developers state it can reduce hiring costs by 90% and improves pipeline quality with its Talent CRM. The platform provides a people search and deep data insights for the recruiter, making potential hires a much faster process. […]

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GetGenie is an AI assistant for managing content & SEO on your website. It simplifies and optimizes your online presence by providing AI-powered keyword analysis, SERP competitor analysis, and assistance with blog posts and sales copies. It replaces multiple apps and is available as a simple WordPress plugin. The built-in content score powered by predictive […]

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Anyword is an AI tool for creating effective marketing articles, trained on tens of millions of successful ads and social media posts. It uses data-driven algorithms to generate and evaluate text for ads, social media posts, email subject lines, landing pages, and more. With a focus on the power of data-driven copywriting, Anyword can help […]

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Amazon CodeWhisperer is an ML-powered AI coding assistant that helps developers build applications faster by providing real-time code recommendations in their integrated development environment (IDE). It can generate entire functions and logical code blocks, and offers recommendations for AWS APIs across popular services like EC2, Lambda, and S3. CodeWhisperer can also assist with unit test […]

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