Hackaday Links: Sunday, April 21st, 2013

hackaday-links-chain

Regular reader and master hacker [Bill Porter] got married. Congratulations [Bill] and [Mara]! The two of them just couldn’t leave their soldering irons at home. The actually swore their vows by soldering together a circuit during the ceremony (blinky wedding dress, el wire tuxedo, and all).

[Kevin] sent in a link to [Red Fathom’s] hacked Wacom tablet. It’s the screen from a Wacom-enabled laptop brought back to life with a Teensy and an LVDS interface module.

The Neato XV-11 is able to find its charging station when the batteries run low. [Derek] figured out that you can make a second station using some reflective tape.

If you use your drill a lot you’ll eventually break the rubber thing that holds the key to the chuck. Here’s a way to 3D print a replacement.

[Torxe] put eight floppy drives to use as a polyphonic Arduino-controlled MIDI player. And while we’re on the subject of Arduino controlled projects you should take a look at this web-interface to tell you if the foosball table is being used.

And finally [Th3 Bad Wolf] sent in this link to a milling machine built out of LEGO. It is able to mill floral foam and uses a lathe-like setup for one of the table axes.

10 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: Sunday, April 21st, 2013

  1. 3 times I have submitted the work done at forum.bongofish.co.uk dealing with the reverse engineering of tablet pc wacom panels. All of the instructions and software to do this yourself are provided; there is even a wiki. One forum member even used the info to put a wacom digitizer in an android tablet. I understand that you guys get a lot of tips, but to see an undocumented video on here when I’ve submitted so much source material is like seeing a video of someone’s xbox laptop on hackaday without any mention of the Ben Heck forums.

  2. Neato X-11, reflective tape could also be a fun way to screw up somebodies robot, just put up fake “charging stations” and it will keep running down before it finds one. As for the chuck holder, what’s the point, just tie it to the cord near the plug with some zip ties. And the lego milling machine, +++!

    1. i know it’s a joke but, from what i’ve read, neato keeps an internal list of likely charging stations, and will try each in succession until it finds one that works. the little buggers are pretty smart. :)

  3. First I got rid of that chunk of plastic on the end of my drill. I am referring to that drill-shank grinder that works on the same principle as “hand-tightened lugnuts”.
    After changing the “chuck” for a keyed Jacobs chuck, I made a chunk of wood with the key imbedded in it’s palm sized mass. A no pain in the fingertips way to tighten if necessary all three holes done to perfection. Hard to lose, gaudy colour.
    They don’t attach drill bits to the cord, why should the key be stuck there to get caught on things. Sometimes nice shiny things to scratch up.
    There is only one way to attach the key to the drill body, embedded secure safe and linked to power forcing safe operation. Imagine telling your industrial-consumer lawyer 30 years ago “we are going to require the user to grab onto the end of our power tool while plugged in and gun the trigger to effect operation” say what!

    1. As [Hirudinea] mentioned previously, I also zip tie my “chuckie” to the drill cord, but I DO like [EchoDelta]’s block of wood idea. And of course, for a drill press, just use a huge magnet to keep “chuckie” nearby.

  4. That Lego milling machine looks like an excellent tool for lost foam casting.

    It is quite nice that the LED driver boards in the wedding ceremony, lighting the letters “I DO” was the same ones as was used during the proposal. :-)

    1. I asked about this in the last Links post. Caleb and Mike responded. They dropped pictures for more links. While I agree with you, I’d rather have the pictures, I understand why they did it.

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