✍️🎄Buon Natale a te, a me, a noi che abbiamo le mani stanche di cucinare, di scrivere e la mente di pensare, organizzare
e il cuore pieno di voci attorno che ci danno forza, coraggio e amore!

Buon Natale a chi a mezzanotte, oggi, più tardi , domani lavora in corsia, per assistere, curare e regalare Speranza e vita..

Buon Natale a chi è solo, abbandonato o dimenticato, a chi ha imparato a farsi forza e compagnia
senza rumore,
senza scuse, ma semplicemente con la propria forza, con il proprio coraggio!
E il ricordo va sempre in questi giorni a chi non c'è più, a quella sedia che rimane vuota a tavola, ma ne senti sempre la presenza,
perché l’amore non muore, si trasforma e magari
cambia solo posto, forma e luogo!

Buon Natale a chi fa i conti con poco, con dignità
ma non rinuncia a regalare un po' di sé, del proprio pane o del proprio tempo a chi ne ha bisogno..

Buon Natale a tutti noi , ai bambini soprattutto che non devono smettere di sognare e aspettare Babbo Natale, a chi non festeggia, a chi vive le feste nel dolore, o nel ricordo, a chi soffre, combatte , resiste e affronta una malattia oggi, come tutti i giorni!
Il mio pensiero va a noi,
inermi e splendidi,
fragili e ostinati, stanchi, deboli e silenziosi,
che continuiamo ad amarci, a credere, a ringraziare per ogni nuovo giorno, indipendentemente che sia Natale, ma semplicemente un giorno in più da vivere e colorare e condividere,
nonostante tutto.
(Martina)✨

Printing With Metal on the Ender 3 Using Only a Friction Wheel

Printing metal as easily as it is to printed with thermoplastics has been a dream for a very long time, with options for hobbyists being very scarce. This is something which [Rotoforge] seeks to change, using little more than an old Ender 3 FDM printer and some ingenuity. Best of all is that the approach on which they have been working for the past year does not require high temperature, molten metals and no fussing about with powdered metal.
Additive manufacturing using friction welding. (Credit: Ruishan Xie, et al., j.mtcomm, 2021)
Rather than an extruder that melts a thermoplastic filament, their setup uses metal wire that is fed into a friction welding tool head, the details of which are covered in the video as well as on the GitHub project page. Unlike their previous setup which we reported on last year, this new setup is both safer and much riskier. While there’s no more molten metal, instead a very loud and very fast spinning disk is used to provide the friction required for friction welding, specifically friction and rolling-based additive manufacturing (FRAM) as in the cited 2021 paper by [Ruishan Xie] et al. in Materials Today Communications. By the same lead author there’s also a 2025 paper that explores more complex implementations of FRAM.

With this method the feed wire (e.g. aluminium) will experience plastic shear, causing it to become somewhat fluid and capable of adhering to other surfaces. This same method can be used for other materials, including plastics and glass. As can be seen in the video, FRAM certainly seems viable, though it is a veritable rabbit hole of complications since you’re dealing with a high-velocity engineering challenge.

Here’s where [Rotoforge] found that slitting saws are a good, off-the-shelf option as they have basically the same high-speed-but-safely requirements. This left the motor part, which has to keep the friction wheel going. After a lot of trial and mostly error, it was found that the motor in a Dremel tool provided the solution in the form of a universal AC motor. Unlike brush-less DC motors, these AC motors are far more simpler, cheaper and can keep up a constant speed much better, which is probably why they’re still used in power tools everywhere. Ergo some cheap Vevor flex-shaft grinders were bought and adapted for some FRAM purposes.
The Rotoforge FRAM printing in action. (Credit: Rotoforge, YouTube)
Initial experiments with Al1100 aluminium alloy showed very good layer adhesion, to the point that they were very similar to a solid bar of aluminium. Due to the layered nature of the prints, they perform better than solid Al1100 parts in some tests. Thus the next challenge was to try more advanced printing techniques than a single straight line, which posed the bigger challenge and is where the basic Ender 3-based prototype met its match.

Next a fourth axis will be added to hopefully resolve some of the issues encountered with the current prototype, along with a host of other improvements to make printing more reliable and versatile. Although it’s clearly still early days for FRAM, it is rather exciting that even in a hobby setting without massive monetary investment it’s already possible to do this much.

Of course, it should definitely be said that eye- and hearing protection are absolute requirements if you intend to do some FRAM printing yourself. The video gives some idea of how loud the process is, and high-speed discs and wheels together with metalworking always introduce the exciting possibility of high-velocity shrapnel.

youtube.com/embed/tRrVOfOU9qE?…

hackaday.com/2025/12/24/printi…

Mesh “Lens” Lets Your Camera Make Weird Pixel Art

We seldom talk about 3D printing lenses because most techniques can’t possibly produce transparent parts of optical quality. However, you can 3D print something like a lens, as [Luke Edwin] demonstrates, and get all kinds of crazy pictures out of it.

[Luke’s] lens isn’t really a lens, per se. There’s no transparent optical medium being used to bend light, here. Instead, he’s printed a very fine grid in a cylindrical form factor, stuck it on a lens mount, and put that on the front of a camera.

The result is effectively a set of parallel tubes that guide light on to the camera’s image sensor. With the lack of any sort of focus mechanism, you can’t use this “lens” to photograph anything more than a few centimeters away. Get something up close, though, and you can take very simple, very grainy images that are reminiscent of classic pixel art. [Luke] demonstrates this in some fun ways, using it to take photographs of money, a plant, and his own eye. The images look almost like art assets straight out of a 16-bit game. He’s got the STL file up for sale if you want to print your own at home.

We’d love to see this concept explored further, maybe with some supporting optics for more versatile use. In the meantime, you might explore other ways of using 3D printers for photographic gain.

youtube.com/embed/8ln2zjmyITk?…

hackaday.com/2025/12/24/mesh-l…

Abusing x86 SIMD Instructions to Optimize PlayStation 3 Emulation

Key to efficient hardware emulation is an efficient mapping to the underlying CPU’s opcodes. Here one is free to target opcodes that may or may not have been imagined for that particular use. For emulators like the RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator this has led to some interesting mappings, as detailed in a video by [Whatcookie].

It’s important to remember here that the Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 is a bit of an odd duck, using a single regular PowerPC core (PPE) along with multiple much more simple co-processors called synergistic processing elements (SPEs) all connected with a high-speed bus. A lot of the focus with Cell was on floating point vector – i.e. SIMD – processing, which is part of why for a while the PlayStation 3 was not going to have a dedicated GPU.

As a result, it makes perfect sense to do creative mapping between the Cell’s SIMD instructions and those of e.g. SSE and AVX, even if Intel removing AVX-512 for a while caused major headaches. Fortunately some of those reappeared in AVX2.

The video goes through a whole range of Cell-specific instructions, how they work, and what x86 SIMD instructions they were mapped to and why. The SUBD instruction for example is mapped to VPDPBUSD as well as VDBPSADBW in AVX-512, the latter of which mostly targets things like video encoding. In the end it’s the result that matters, even if it also shows why the Cell processor was so interesting for high-performance compute clusters back in the day.

youtube.com/embed/40tyEVx_umY?…

hackaday.com/2025/12/24/abusin…