Author: Dan Maloney

2974 Articles

Make Your Music Simpler With The User-Unfriendliest Cassette Deck Ever

April 12, 2024 by 17 Comments

Call us crazy, but music was a whole lot more fun when it was on physical media. Or perhaps just easier to use, especially in the car. Whether your particular vintage favored CDs, cassettes, or even 8-tracks, being able to fish out that favorite album and slam it in the player while never taking your eyes off the road was a whole lot easier than navigating a playlist on a locked phone, or trying to control an infotainment system through soft buttons on a touch screen.

It seems like [Jarek Lupinski] is as much a Spotify Luddite as we are, since his “tape-deck” project is aimed to be as user-unfriendly as possible. It’s just an auto-reversing cassette deck movement stripped bare of all useful appurtenances, like a way to fast forward or rewind. You just put a cassette in and it plays, start to finish, before auto-reversing to play the other side in its entirety. It doesn’t even have a volume control — his cheeky advice is to “listen to louder or quieter albums” to solve that problem. Pretty easy, really, and not a EULA or advertisement in sight. Build files are available if you hate yourself enough to build one of your own.

All kidding aside, this is kind of a nice reminder of how much things have changed, and how much complexity we’ve layered onto the simplest of pleasures. If you like the minimalist approach of this project but not the deconstructed aesthetics, we’ve got you covered.

Small, Quiet Air Compressor Puts 3D-Printed Parts To Best Use

April 11, 2024 by 14 Comments

When the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Similarly, while a 3D printer is a fantastic tool to have, it can make you think it’s possible to build all the things with printed parts. Knowing when to print ’em and when to machine ’em is important, a lesson that [Diffraction Limited] has taken to heart with this semi-printed silent air compressor.

The key to this compressor’s quiet operation is a combination of its small overall size. its relatively low output, and its strategic use of plastic components, which tend to dampen vibrations. The body of the compressor and the piston arms are the largest 3D-printed parts; the design calls for keeping printed parts in compression for longer life, while the parts of the load path in tension travel through fasteners and other non-printed parts. The piston design is interesting — rather than being attached to connecting rods via wrist pins, the machined Delrin pistons are solidly attached to the piston arms. This means they have to swivel within the cylinders, which are made from short pieces of metal tubing, with piston seals designed to move up and down in grooves on the pistons to allow air to move past them. The valve bodies atop each cylinder are salvaged from another compressor.

When powered by a NEMA23-frame BLDC motor via a belt drive, the compressor is remarkably quiet; not quite silent perhaps, but still impressively smooth, and capable of 150 PSI at low speeds. And as a bonus, the split crankcase makes it easy to open up and service, or just show off how it works. We’ve seen a variety of 3D-printed compressors, from screw-type to Wankel, but this one really takes the prize for fit and finish. Continue reading “Small, Quiet Air Compressor Puts 3D-Printed Parts To Best Use” →

Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2

April 11, 2024 by 20 Comments

Soldering is easy, as long as you have one hand to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and another to hold the workpiece. For those of us not so equipped, there’s the new and improved Solder Sustainer v2, which aims to free up one of however many hands you happen to have.

Eagle-eyed readers will probably recall an earlier version of Solder Sustainer, which made an appearance in last year’s Hackaday Prize in the “Gearing Up” round. At the time we wrote that it looked a bit like “the love child of a MIG welder and a tattoo machine.” This time around, [RoboticWorx] has rethought that concept and mounted the solder feeder on the back of a fingerless glove. The solder guide is a tube that clips to the user’s forefinger, which makes much finer control of where the solder meets the iron possible than with the previous version. The soldering iron itself is also no longer built into the tool, giving better control of the tip and letting you use your favorite iron, which itself is no small benefit.

Hats off to [RoboticWorx] for going back to the drawing board on this one. It isn’t easy to throw out most of your design and start over, but sometimes it just makes sense.

Continue reading “Let Your Finger Do The Soldering With Solder Sustainer V2” →

Get Today’s Forecast In Classic 90s Weather Channel Style

April 10, 2024 by 9 Comments

Remember when The Weather Channel actually had weather? It’s been a while, but we sure remember what a boon Local on the 8’s was when getting ready for the day. Not having to wait for the low-information national forecast on the morning shows or putting up with the antics of [Willard Scott] or [Al Roker] was just icing on the cake.

Recreating the retro look and feel of the Weather Channel experience is what this 1990s-style weather feed is all about, and we have to say that [Mitchell Scott] knocked it out of the park. Luckily, a lot of the heavy lifting was done already thanks to the WeatherStar 4000+ emulator project, which renders forecasts using online weather APIs in the distinctive retro graphics The Weather Channel used back in the day. He combined the graphics with the original smooth jazz soundtracks that TWC used back then; they’re online, because of course they are.

To really sell the look, [Mitchell] tracked down a period-correct Zenith TV with a 9″ CRT to display the feed from a Raspberry Pi 4’s composite video output. Why such a small screen? Easy. [Mitchell] wanted it on a shelf behind him to be visible during videoconferences. It’s a bit of a weird flex, but we respect it. Getting the composite video output working was a bit of a chore, as was tricking the TV into starting up on channel 14 so the feed is instantly visible.

The nostalgia is strong with this one, especially for weather geeks. For a more in-depth look at how The Weather Channel brought those local forecasts to cable, make sure you check out how the WeatherStar box was reverse-engineered.

Thanks to [USA-RedDragon] for the tip.

Adjustable Lights Help Peer Inside Chips With IR

April 9, 2024 by 3 Comments

If you’re used to working through a microscope, you’ve probably noticed that the angle of the light greatly affects how your workpiece looks. Most of us prefer the relatively flat lighting provided by a ring light, but variable angle side lighting can be useful too, especially when you’re peering inside ICs to make sure the silicon is what it’s supposed to be.

That’s what [Bunnie] is working on these days with his Project IRIS, short for “Infrared in situ,” a non-destructive method for looking inside chip packages. The technique relies on the fact that silicon is transparent to certain wavelengths of light, and that some modern IC packages expose the underside of the silicon die directly to the outside world. Initial tests indicated that the angle of the incident IR light was important to visualizing features on the metal interconnects layered onto the silicon, so [Bunnie] designed a two-axis light source for his microscope. The rig uses curved metal tracks to guide a pair of IR light sources through an arc centered on the focal point of the microscope stage. The angle of each light source relative to the stage can be controlled independently, while the whole thing can swivel around the optical axis of the microscope to control the radial angle of the lighting.

The mechanism [Bunnie] designed to accomplish all this is pretty complex. Zenith angle is controlled by a lead screw driving a connecting rod to the lights on their guide tracks, while the azimuth of the lights is controlled by a separate motor and pulley driving a custom-built coaxial bearing. The whole optical assembly is mounted on a Jubilee motion platform for XYZ control. The brief videos below show the lights being put through their paces, along with how changing the angle of the light affects the view inside a chip.

Continue reading “Adjustable Lights Help Peer Inside Chips With IR” →

Multiply Your Multimeter With Relays And USB

April 2, 2024 by 10 Comments

Multimeters are a bit like potato chips: you can’t have just one. But they’re a lot more expensive than potato chips, especially the good ones, and while it’s tempting to just go get another one when you need to make multiple measurements, sometimes it’s not practical. That’s why something like this 2×4 relay-based multiplexer might be a handy addition to your bench

In this age of electronics plenty, you’d think that a simple USB relay board would be easy enough to lay hands on. But [Petteri Aimonen] had enough trouble finding a decent one that it became easier to just roll one up from scratch. His goal was to switch both the positive and negative test leads from up to four instruments to a common set of outputs, and to have two independent switching banks, for those times when four-lead measurements are needed. The choice of relay was important; [Petteri] settled on a Panasonic DPDT signal relay with low wetting current contacts and a low-current coil. The coils are driven by a TBD62783A 8-channel driver chip, while an STM32 takes care of USB duties.

The mechanical design of this multiplexer is just as slick as the electrical. [Petteri] designed the PCB to act as the cover for a standard Hammond project box, so all the traces and SMD components are mounted on the back. That just leaves the forest of banana-plug binding posts on the front, along with a couple of pushbuttons for manual input switching and nicely silkscreened labels. The multiplexer is controlled over USB using the SCPI protocol, which happily includes an instrument class for signal switchers.

We think the fit and finish on this one is fantastic, as is usual with one of [Petteri]’s builds. You’ll probably recall his calibrated current reference or his snazzy differential probe.

Mining And Refining: Tungsten

April 2, 2024 by 16 Comments

Our metallurgical history is a little bit like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, only without the paper; we’re always looking for something hard enough to cut whatever the current hardest metal is. We started with copper, the first metal to be mined and refined. But then we needed something to cut copper, so we ended up with alloys like bronze, which demanded harder metals like iron, and eventually this arms race of cutting led us to steel, the king of metals.

But even a king needs someone to keep him in check, and while steel can be used to make tools hard enough to cut itself, there’s something even better for the job: tungsten, or more specifically tungsten carbide. We produced almost 120,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2022, much of which was directed to the manufacture of tungsten carbide tooling. Tungsten has the highest melting point known, 3,422 °C, and is an extremely dense, hard, and tough metal. Its properties make it an indispensible industrial metal, and it’s next up in our “Mining and Refining” series.

Continue reading “Mining And Refining: Tungsten” →