Extruded rail and 3D printed connectors form a proper laser engraver

September 7, 2013 by 30 Comments

3d-printed-laser-engraver

Fast and accurate is a good description of this laser engraver built by [Ragnar] and [Gunnar]. The’re planning to show it off at the Trondheim Maker Faire after the new year but they took it out in the wild for the PSTEREO Mini Maker Faire (also in Trondheim) this past August. The video below gives an overview of the build process and the engraver at work. But we also enjoyed reading the post about a few missteps in the early prototyping process. We call this one a proper laser engraver because it was purpose built from the ground-up. We still like seeing the engravers hacked from optical drives, but this really is a horse of a different color in comparison.

From the start they’re using familiar parts when it comes to CNC builds. The outer frame is made of extruded aluminum rail, with precision rod for the gantry to slide upon. Movement is facilitated with stepper motors and toothed belts, with all of the connecting and mounting parts fabricated on a 3D printer. The mistake made with an early (and unfortunately mostly assembled) prototype was that the Y axis was only driven on one side when it really needed to be driven on both. But filament is relatively cheap so a few tweaks to the design were able to fix this and get the production back on track.

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Potassium Chlorate from household products

September 7, 2013 by 36 Comments

To the upper right we have very pure potassium chlorate, so much so that it bursts into flames when mixed with sugar and catalyzed with some sulfuric acid. [Mr. Home Scientist] produced the KClO3 using household chemicals and some rudimentary equipment sourced on eBay.

The experiment started off with concentrated bleach containing 8.25% sodium hypochlorite. He needed sodium chlorate so a hot plate was used to boil the bleach until crystals started to form. A more efficient way to achieve this reaction would be using electrolysis (check out the HHO generator we saw recently for a homemade rig). The next step is to add potassium chloride, which is sourced from the grocery store as a sodium-free salt alternative. After mixing with the filtered remains of the bleach reaction the two are combined. There is no precipitate from this — an indication that not everything is as it should be. But an overnight stay in the refrigerator results in the potassium chlorate crystals seen above.

Fiery testing (seen below) lets him know the experiment worked. From here the product can be used for things like making solid rocket engines.

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Pair of MIDI dongles to inspire some weekend music hacking

September 7, 2013 by 9 Comments

pair-of-midi-dongles

This pair of dongles is a fun way to get your feet wet working with MIDI hardware. They’re called MIDIvampire-I and MIDIvampire-II. Just plug one end into your MIDI-ready instrument and the other into a pair of speakers and you’re off and running. Mark I is a polyphonic synth, and Mark II is a drum machine, but both use basically the same hardware which you may already have on hand.

The single chip on each board is an ATmega328 often found anchoring Arduino boards. The other silicon component is an S1112B30MC voltage regulator. The rest of the components are passives, with MIDI and headphone jacks for connectivity. They’re selling these if you want the easy way out, but we thought we’d bring them to your attention in case you needed a breadboarding project this weekend. The firmware, BOM, schematic, and board artwork are all available on the Wiki pages linked in the articles above. After the break you can see a couple of demo videos which walk through all of the features.

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Putting every game console in the palm of your hand

September 6, 2013 by 22 Comments

SNES

Casemodders extraordinaire [Downing] and [Hailrazer] are known for their fabulous builds that put just about every gaming console into a portable hand-held format. Everything from a Game Cube to N64s and a Sega Genesis have been conquered by the two, and for the last year they’ve been putting their heads together to make the best solution to portabalizing console gaming forever. It’s called the Cross Plane, and puts just about everything with an HDMI connection in the palm of your hand.

The build began as one of [Downing]’s more ambitious projects. He imagined a system that could play nearly every retro game on a small handheld device. After finishing this build, he set up a Kickstarter and called up his friend [Hailrazer] to get some feedback. Just hours before the Kickstarter launched, [Hailrazer] suggested making a device for modern consoles. [Downing]’s pride and joy was scrapped, but out of its ashes arose the Cross Plane.

Inside the Cross Plane is a wireless HDMI receiver and a 7″ 720p display. This, along with a few buttons and analog controls, allow the Cross Plane to serve as a remote display and controller for an XBox 360, Playstation 3, and even a PC, for all that retro emulator goodness.

It’s a really, really cool project, and since the dream of an open Wii U controller seem to have died, we’re thinking this could be a great controller for an FPV quadcopter or other remotely operated vehicle.

3D Printering: Electronics Boards

September 6, 2013 by 32 Comments

If you’re gearing up to build a 3D printer, one of the first things you’ll need to look at is your options for electronics boards. Whether you decide to optimize for cost or capability, the choices you make during the planning stages of your build will drastically affect what the final project will look like and how it will behave.

There are a ton of electronics boards out there, so for this installation of 3D Printering, we’re going to take a look at what’s available. Hit the link below to give Hackaday more pageviews read the rest.

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A PC rig that belongs on the wall of an art museum

September 6, 2013 by 63 Comments

When Overclock.net user [Show4Pro] decided to upgrade his “old dusty rig”, he eschewed the conventional PC form factor and instead built an incredibly sexy custom wall-mounted case.

The six sticks of RAM, quad HDD/SSDs, and dual Radeon HD7970s are enough to make all but the most hard core gamer blush, but that was only the beginning here.  Using a Dremel tool, Show4Pro cut the frame from a piece of hardboard and coated it with a mock-carbon fiber vinyl sheet.  This backdrop acts to both hide the (many) cables and provide structural support to the components.  Custom light guides cut from an acrylic sheet are back lit with LEDs and serve as a border for each of the components.

Laying all of the boards flat on the frame required the use of PCIe risers to move the video cards away from the mother board.  Long PCIe connectors are very susceptible to EMI though, and Show4Pro ran into a few stability problems that he eventually had to resolve with some high-end shielded risers.

Besides that one minor hiccough, the project went off without a hitch and it looks like his 100+ hours of work have really paid off.

Via Reddit.

My First Brainf*ck

September 6, 2013 by 36 Comments

fuck

There was a time – not too long ago – that a ‘my first computer’ required the use of machine code and an understanding of binary. While an introduction to computers is now just how to put a Raspberry Pi image on an SD card, a few people are keeping the dream of memorizing opcodes alive. One such person is [Johan von Konow], creator of My First Brainfuck, an ultra small, low-cost programmable computer.

My First Brainfuck is an Arduino shield designed to have all the features of a normal computer, but without all those messy mnemonics that make assembly programming so easy. This computer is programmed in Brainfuck, a purposely obtuse programming language that, while being incredibly esoteric and difficult to program in, can be very, very rewarding.

[Johan] has a short tutorial showing how his computer works and how the Brainfuck language operates. There are only eight commands in Brainfuck, perfect for such a minimal user interface, but with enough patience, nearly anything can be written in this difficult language.

Right now there are a few examples showing how to play a scale on the on-board buzzer, displaying a Larson scanner on the LEDs, and a few more programs will be published in the future.