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New Guide! Apple IIe Fruit Jam Enclosure #3DThursday by Adafruit Learning System
Thursday January 8th, 2026 at 10:33 AM

Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!
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3D print an Apple IIe inspired enclosure for Fruit Jam

Retro Inspired

Build an Apple IIe inspired 3D printed enclosure for the Adafruit Fruit Jam. This project is designed to pair nicely with the Apple IIe Emulator on Fruit Jam.

This guide covers the 3D printable CAD files, case assembly and keyboard setup. There is no soldering required making this a great project for beginners!

– A step‑by‑step guide to 3D print and assemble an Apple IIe‑inspired enclosure for the Adafruit Fruit Jam, including CAD files, an easy‑open access cover, and modular internals requiring no soldering.
– The guide also walks through fitting a 43‑key RGB mechanical keyboard (KPRepublic BM43) with custom QMK firmware, housing an SD→microSD adapter for the Total Replay Apple II software, and using USB‑C power, HDMI video, and an extra USB‑A port for peripherals.

– Adafruit 512MB micro SD Memory Card — https://www.adafruit.com/product/5252.
– Adafruit Fruit Jam (project hardware target referenced in the guide) — https://www.adafruit.com/?q=Fruit+Jam.

Read more at Apple IIe Fruit Jam Enclosure

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Feather or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

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jepler
5 minutes ago
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oh my god it is cute
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Superstition
Wednesday January 7th, 2026 at 3:45 PM

xkcd.com
3 Comments and 4 Shares
It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!
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jepler
18 hours ago
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An Airplane joke? on XKCD? It's more likely than you think.
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2 public comments
fancycwabs
19 hours ago
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I *did* say rabbit rabbit on January 1, and behold!

What I'm trying to say is I'm very sorry.
Nashville, Tennessee
alt_text_bot
19 hours ago
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It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

Fruit Jam Code Practice Oscillator by sam blenny
Tuesday January 6th, 2026 at 10:48 AM

Adafruit Playgrounds - New Notes
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Closeup photo of mx straight key and Fruit Jam TRRS jack breakout board wiring details
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This is a Morse code practice oscillator for Fruit Jam with super clean sine wave tones and a 3d-printable straight key. The key uses a Kailh Cherry MX compatible keyswitch for reliable switching and flexures to make a precision hinge that works well when printed in PLA. Set screw adjustment lets you shorten the keyswitch travel. The audio output chain uses an audiofilter.Filter to bandpass filter the output of a  synthio.Synthesizer for smooth note attacks and releases without keyclick.

Overview

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jepler
1 day ago
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Neat project. I never have learned morse code, hmm.
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The Man Taking Over the Large Hadron Collider
Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 12:52 PM

Slashdot
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Mark Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, takes over as CERN's director general this week, and one of his first major decisions during his five-year tenure will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider for an extended upgrade. The shutdown starts in June to make way for the high-luminosity LHC -- a major overhaul involving powerful new superconducting magnets that will squeeze the collider's proton beams and increase their brightness. The upgrade will raise collisions tenfold and strengthen the detectors to better capture subtle signs of new physics. The machine won't restart until Thomson's term is nearly over.

Thomson is far from disconsolate about the downtime. "The machine is running brilliantly and we're recording huge amounts of data," he told The Guardian. "There's going to be plenty to analyse over the period." Beyond the upgrade, Thomson must shepherd CERN's plans for the Future Circular Collider, a proposed 91km machine more than three times the size of the current collider. Member states vote on the project in 2028; the first phase carries an estimated price tag of 15 billion Swiss francs (nearly $19 billion).
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jepler
6 days ago
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... the proposed supercollider costs about 1% of the current AI bullshit, and would do useful science with negligible environmental impact ...
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Tech Startups Are Handing Out Free Nicotine Pouches to Boost Productivity
Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 11:42 AM

Slashdot
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The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The pouches are free for employees and guests over the age of 21, a spokeswoman for Palantir said. Palantir pays to stock the nicotine products.

Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.

Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.
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jepler
6 days ago
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evil evil evil
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UK Company Sends Factory With 1,000C Furnace Into Space
Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 11:13 AM

Slashdot
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A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." The BBC reports: Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they're made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure. When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can't sneak in. The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.

[...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]

The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.
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jepler
6 days ago
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I'm really doubting the economics on this one. "10,000" chips is a meaningless figure. Or, more specifically, it's a figure designed to sound like a lot when it could be very little.

If you want to be extremely generous (and of course: AI!!), assume they are making a massive chip: the 762mm2 "GB202" nvidia blackwell chip. You'll need somewhat more than 100 "300mm" dies, or 12kg of finished silicon die using wikipedia's mass figure. A whole mission to earth orbit, just to make 12kg of chip-stuff!

But if they're engaging in sleight of hand, and you know they are, they could be talking about a much simpler chip. The RP2350 from Raspberry Pi is only about 49mm2, or less than 1/15 the area. At the most absurd, they could be talking about "chips" like SN74LVC1G97 which fits in a 1mm2 *package*, meaning the die is well under 1mm2 in area. You could put over 10k of those on a 200mm wafer with a mass of just 53 grams.

Honestly their whole website is a laugh. It's carbon negative! 15 tons of CO2 saved per 1kg "created" (their word). There is inadequate information given to even begin to assess this but based on further searching it's not passing a sniff test.

Huge number: the "Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" of coal [the worst choice listed on wikipedia's page "Greenhouse gas emissions] is 490g CO2/kWh, so we have 30612kWh per 1KG created. That's something like the total electricity my home uses in 5 years. I found https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666445323000041 detailing resources used in semiconductor manufacturing; assuming I'm interpreting it correctly, this is a key passage:

> In 2021, average water use, energy consumption, and GHG emissions were calculated to be 8.22 ​L/cm2, 1.15 ​kWh/cm2, and 0.84 ​kg CO2 equivalent/cm2, respectively, based on announced data

A 300mm die is 706cm2 and mass 125g, so in fact industry was emitting about 593kg CO2-equivalent per kg. So, unless this paper missed an addtional 14.5 *tons* of CO2 emissions it's simply not possible to save 15 tons per kg. But, y'all also added a whole fucking space launch to the math on your end and we haven't even tried to account for that...
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jepler
6 days ago
here's a whole CPU in about 0.25mm2 so they could even talk about "10,000 CPUs" even if they're producing under 50 grams of material. http://zeptobars.com/en/read/Nyquest-Technology-NY8A051H-8051-smallest-microcontroller
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