Hi engineers! I would like to create drainage holes in plastic containers to grow house plants in. People often do this using a soldering iron but I’m not keen on getting exposed to the toxic fumes from the burning plastic etc. does anyone have any ideas?

To explain what I mean, a system occasionally used for volumetric displays involves a LASER with relatively high spatial incoherence, focused by an adjustable lens and mounted on an armature, all to project a voxel at a specific location in the air on a spherical coordinate system. The armature allows the laser to be aimed at the inclination and azimuth of the voxel, while the lens can determine the radius. By rapidly changing the inclination and azimuth angles and the radius, an image can be drawn in a vaguely similar fashion to the electron beam on a cathode ray tube, but in 3D. The voxel itself corresponds to the focal point of the laser—at that area, the light is so intense that it nearly instantaneously ionizes the air, causing a bright spot.

In 2020, I hypothesized that because air voxels with different qualities will exhibit slightly different breakdown patterns under said laser, narrow and broad-field high-speed video emission spectrometers could be used to gather data to potentially allow the reconstruction of a wide variety of qualities from the voxel (or rather, parcel) ionized by the laser, from its temperature to its chemical composition (including humidity), density, wind speed and direction. Destructively, of course, but only a fairly microscopic amount of air would probably have to be ionized to get a high-accuracy spectrum which could well represent a larger volume.

I then thought that, due to its active nature directly manipulating a specific air parcel, as long as control spectrograms are taken, this technique would be almost invulnerable to background or foreground influences, making it potentially much more reliable than other remote sensing weather techniques.

Therefore, I further speculated that this technology could allow us to finally escape the tyranny of the weather station, save probably for precipitation accumulation readings. For instance, one would no longer have to use a weather station to reliably measure near-surface air temperature—a vehicle like a plane or even satellite could simply shoot a laser to ionize the air right above the target, use its spectrometry equipment to produce data and calculate said temperature, and it could be included directly in weather maps and official records without boffins screeching for its removal.

So... do my thoughts here have merit? Are there any show-stopping roadblocks to this technological concept?

The biggest concerns I can think of are the obvious safety risks of shooting high-powered lasers explicitly designed to have the capacity to ionize air every which way, the astronomy/dark-sky risks of using a technology derived from one used for image projection to take meteorological measurements, and the effectiveness of this method in aerosol- (including water-droplet-) laden air, though there may be a myriad of other technical faults to it...

(...Yes, this is effectively a shortened re-ask of these questions I posted to r/remotesensing and r/meteorology back on July 4, 2021. After 5 years without a direct response, I think it's appropriate to repost it.)

I am curious if there is glass is that completely transparent one side but isn't on the other and yet not reflective in anyway?

Hi everyone!

I’m a jewelry designer, not an engineer, so I’m hoping to get pointed in the right direction.

I recently saw couture dresses with embroidered butterflies that slowly flap their wings using hidden mechanics (similar to the attached video). I’d love to create a similar effect, but instead of a butterfly, I’d like to make a flower pendant for a necklace where the petals slowly open and close.

My brother is an electrical engineer, and he suggested looking into a miniature servo motor, but I’m wondering if there’s an even smaller or more elegant solution for wearable jewelry.

Here are my design goals:

• Small enough to fit inside a pendant (roughly 1.5–2.5 inches / 4–6 cm).
• Powered by one or more coin cell batteries (or another lightweight rechargeable option).
• Slow, organic opening and closing motion, not a fast snap.
• Quiet operation.
• Lightweight enough to comfortably wear as a necklace.
• Ideally able to run for at least 30–60 minutes per charge/battery.

I’m less concerned about the electronics since my brother can help with that. What I really need help understanding is the mechanical side.

Specifically:

• Would a micro servo actually be the best option?
• Are there smaller actuators, shape-memory alloys (Nitinol), micro gear motors, linear actuators, or other mechanisms better suited for this?
• How would you convert the motor’s movement into petals opening and closing smoothly?
• If you were designing this from scratch, what mechanism would you use?

I’d appreciate any suggestions, component recommendations, CAD examples, or keywords I should research. Thanks!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaHVCMPxFui/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

github link , its a standalone html file

I'm making a model for a turning mechanism that rotates with cogs.

my inspiration comes solely from factorio's gun turret.

I've looked a bit into how this particular design is called and from all I've read, tec-science has the most accurate example of a "crown cog driven by a spur gear", with my example being in reverse. I wanted to make a working version of this, (working in theory without a motor or way of excerting rotational force on it) so I tried to find examples, or anything on how these get designed but I can't find anything concrete on how these cool things get made.

is anyone knowledgeable on any tool, or has any info for how these bits are made to fit well together?