Hackaday Links: January 25, 2015

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Misumi is doing something pretty interesting with their huge catalog of aluminum extrusions, rods, bolts, and nuts. They’re putting up BOMs for 3D printers. If you’ve ever built a printer with instructions you’ve somehow found on the RepRap wiki, you know how much of a pain it is to go through McMaster or Misumi to find the right parts. Right now they have three builds, one with linear guides, one with a linear shaft, and one with V-wheels.

So you’re finally looking at those fancy SLA or powder printers. If you’re printing an objet d’arte like the Stanford bunny or the Utah teapot and don’t want to waste material, you’re obviously going to print a thin shell of material. That thin shell isn’t very strong, so how do you infill it? Spheres, of course. By importing an object into Meshmixer, you can build a 3D honeycomb inside a printed object. Just be sure to put a hole in the bottom to let the extra resin or powder out.

Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer invented an automatic hammer? It’s been reinvented using a custom aluminum linkage, a freaking huge battery, and a solenoid. Next up is the makeup shotgun, and a reclining toilet.

[Jan] built a digitally controlled analog synth. We’ve seen a few of his FM synths VA synths built from an LPC-810 ARM chip before, but this is the first one that could reasonably be called an analog synth. He’s using a digital filter based on the Cypress PSoC-4.

The hip thing to do with 3D printers is low-poly Pokemon. I don’t know how it started, it’s just what the kids are doing these days. Those of us who were around for Gen 1 the first time it was released should notice a huge oversight by the entire 3D printing and Pokemon communities when it comes to low-poly Pokemon. I have corrected this oversight. I’ll work on a pure OpenSCAD model (thus ‘made completely out of programming code’) when I’m sufficiently bored.

*cough**bullshit* A camera that can see through walls *cough**bullshit* Seriously, what do you make of this?

24 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: January 25, 2015

    1. I agree that this is not real, just like the average movie is not real. This is obviously an artist. Art is mindf*ck.

      Anyway, I do not rule out that such a device could be built, by means of time of flight imaging sensors, and scanning the visible part of the wall with a laser. Multiple diffuse reflections in the room will cause different flight times, and *perhaps* with enough statistics and patience and some more statistics and some more patience, features could be brought above the noise floor…

      I.e. if the flat wall’s distance varied at most a few cm as seen from the window area then light that is scattered within a few meters distance (according to its time of flight) of that range and returns from the window area by direction, obviously scattered within the room. So as a function of laser 2 laser angles and 2 image angles we get a time distribution of reflections…
      so thats a 5dimensional intensity profile… so dispose at measure time all the events that do not originate from within the window area, and those that correspond from the visible wall, and you have a dataset of multiple reflection timings.

      This is obviously not what was done in the video… But of course particles have “memory”, namely the variables that describe the light: wavelength, phase, direction/momentum, polarization, coherence, … If particles had no form of memory of what they underwent, eyes and cameras wouldn’t really be useful would they?

      A photon that succeeded in passing a vertical polarizer (irrespective of its original polarization) now “remembers” this vertical polarization…

    1. Sometimes it’s fun to look at things that are so obviously fraudulent that no intelligent person could possibly mistake it for a genuine piece of functional technology.
      It’s also fun to watch for trolls that are so quick to judge that they don’t even bother to read the comments surrounding the link.

  1. The “automatic” hammer is more like semi-auto. IIRC, when Homer’s hammer was turned on, it began to rapidly hammer by itself. This version needs either a motor and reciprocating linkage (e.g. a cam), or some kind of commutation to repeatedly trigger the solenoid.

    1. +1 repeatedly triggering the solenoid. Plus a big spring or two so energy can build up on each stroke. It’s not a Homer Hammer(tm) unless it’s at least a little uncontrollable.

  2. That 3d printer BOM interested me, but the pricing is crazy.

    “This printer would be able to print objects roughly the size of a coffee mug…….The cost for this MISUMI BOM is approximately $1,875”

    That’s insane. You can buy a pre-built mendel max and have it delivered for around 1k.

    You can buy a Prusa i3 complete kit for about $350 and it has a bigger build area than a coffee cup.

    1. I view that “camera” as a tongue-in-cheek performance art. The camera is a little sculpture as well. I don’t know any place but YouTube you could view this art though (and Vimeo). Art keeps pushing it’s own boundaries.

  3. Correction, Brian, my dsp-G1, based on the LPC-810 are not FM but VA-synths.

    And these Jano synths have the DCO’s as hardware built with the FPGA block of the Cypress chip.
    Only the filter is digital or VA.

  4. In these times, with pocket operators and minitrons, you need to be small.

    So I made a pocket version.
    Same synth, pocket size.

    Added a jam sequencer for running on the train and in your bed.

    Headphone output and CV/Gate/Midi input.
    Runs on a 3v button battery.

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