Hackaday Prize Entry: The Arduino Powered LED Persistence Of Vision Rechargeable 3D Printed Fidget Spinner

July 27, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

It had to come to this. For his entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize, [Sean Hodgins] created a persistence of vision fidget spinner. This isn’t just any PoV fidget spinner — this is the ultimate in fidget spinner technology. It’s rechargeable, and there’s an Arduino inside. The enclosure is 3D printed. It improves morale. It is everything you ever wanted in a fidget spinner, and it’s the last fidget spinner project [Sean] will ever make.

We’ve seen electronic fidget spinners before, but never to this degree of polish. The fidget spinner that teaches coding is fantastic, but it’s not quite as refined as connoisseurs of fine fidgets would like. The Internet of Fidget Spinners is likewise a worthy effort and even includes RGB LEDs and WiFi, but [Sean]’s POV fidget spinner is on another plane of reality. This spinner uses batteries that can be recharged, and there’s even a 3D printed (sintered, even!) enclosure that fits everything into a small, compact package. It is, by far, the most elegant fidget spinner we’ve ever seen, and it measures its own rotation speed. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

You can grab all the sources for this amazing fidget spinner on [Sean]’s GitHub, or check out the under-monetized demo video he made below.

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Fidget Spinner Slash Drone Is Both

July 26, 2017 by John Baichtal 14 Comments

So Hackaday loves fidget spinners and we don’t care who knows it. Apparently so does [Jeremy S Cook], who decided to mash up a spinner and a cheap quadcopter. To what end? Is that even a question? Spinners are the bearing-studded equivalent to the Rubik’s Cube craze of the ’80s and all we can do is embrace it.

[Jeremy] designed a quadcopter shape with a hole in the center matching a VCB 22 mm ceramic bearing he had on hand. He CNCed out the design from a sheet of Lexan resin. Then he detached the electronics amd motors from a quad.

He used a rotary tool to cut off the housing, removed the motors, then inserted them in the new frame, using hot glue to secure them. He installed the control board 90 degrees off of the frame, before realizing it would mess with the accelerometer and re-installed it flat. Meanwhile, the center of the frame sports the all-important bearing.

If you’re looking for more quad projects check out these cool projects: a Power-Glove-controlled drone, this PVC-pipe quadcopter frame, and reverse engineering quadcopter controls.

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Customize Forstner Bits For Fidget Spinner Explosions

July 18, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

[Matthias Wandel] is a woodworker par excellence. He’s the guy behind all those wooden gear contraptions, he made cove molding on a table saw, and if the phrase, ‘don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing’ applies to anyone, it applies to [Matthias]. Now he’s getting into the fidget spinner craze, but there’s a problem in the workshop: [Matthias] couldn’t find the right sized drill bit, so he modified a Forstner bit to contain the heart of a spinner.

[Matthias] has a few roller skate bearings, which are 22mm in diameter. However, the closest drill to this size was 7/8″, or 22.23mm. A drill can be ground down, so the bit was chucked into a hand drill and taken over to the bench grinder. As with most things [Matthias] demonstrates, you shouldn’t do this unless you know what you’re doing. [Matthias] does.

With the bit ground down to 22mm, [Matthias] drilled a hole in a piece of wood, inserted the bearing, and completed an epic quest that was his destiny. There is no use for fidget spinners, so [Matthias] decided to make this one explode. After cutting several notches in this wooden spinner, [Matthias] applied shop air liberally and spun the spinner up until it fell apart.

You can check out the video of the fidget spinner carnage below, or check out [Matthias]’ write-up here.

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Bearing-in-Bearing Fidget Spinner Taken To The Max

July 13, 2017 by John Baichtal 34 Comments

People who know about bearings go through a phase of bemusement with regards to fidget spinners. We say something like, “man, I got a whole box of bearings in the basement.” Then we go through a “OK, I’ll make one” phase and print one out of PLA.

[fishpepper] took that sentiment a step further. After being forced to print spinners for his kids, he got jealous and decided to make his own—but his spinner would be a version for engineers. [fishpepper]’s ginormous spinner consists of five bearings superglued inside each other, with the grease cleaned out of the insides to make them spin faster. The inner two sets are doubled up bearings, 6 mm x 17 mm x 6 mm and 17 mm x 30 mm x 7 mm. The middle bearing measures 30 mm x 55 mm x 13 mm, and the fourth bearing 55 mm x 90 mm x 18 mm.

If you want to stop here, it’s a good size, around two inches across. However, [fishpepper] took it a step further, adding a fifth bearing, a 90 mm x 140 mm x 24 mm monster weighing in at 1 kg by itself. The total weight comes to 1.588 kg with the 3D-printed hub included. If you want to make one yourself, check out [fishpepper’s] bearing-in-bearing spinner tutorial which guides you through the various steps.

Hackaday likes fidget spinners so much you’d think we were in 6th grade: we’ve published posts on the three-magnet spinner hack, a fidget-spinning robot, and teaching STEAM with fidget spinners.

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Fidget Spinner Gigantor

July 3, 2017 by Michael Uttmark 59 Comments

Had enough of fidget spinners yet? If you haven’t heard, a toy that consists of a bearing in the center of a multi-lobed flat structure that’s designed to spin around the bearing’s axis with little force has taken the world by storm. Usually, these devices are about 10cm in diameter or less. But, everything is bigger in Texas. So, naturally, students from the University of Texas at Dallas got to work making the largest fidget spinner in the world.

Clocking in at 150 pounds and 45 inches in diameter, this thing is undeniably huge. The structure is made out of what looks to be veneered plywood glued together to make a ~2.5in thick structure to put their bearings in. And, after washing their bearings with soapy water, the students get to work press fitting their 2.2in by 10.5in ball bearings into their painted wooden structure. Their video embedded below is an entertaining watch, it starts with a gag, but moves on the project afterwards.

Haven’t gotten enough fidget spinner news? Fear not, we’ve got you. [MakerStorage] has a fidget spinner designed to teach STEAM. Just in case manually spinning a fidget spinner is above you, we’ve got robots on the job. Want to see something more vibrant? How about POV on a fidget spinner?And if you’ll never get tired of fidget spinners, we’ve got a fidget spinner for that too.

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Hackaday Links: July 2, 2017

July 2, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 55 Comments

A few months ago, we had a Hack Chat with Chip Gracey, the guy behind Parallax, the Basic Stamp, the Propeller, and the upcoming Propeller II. Now we’ve finally got around to editing that transcript. There’s a lot of awesome stuff in here, from learning a Hardware Design Language to the actual costs of fabbing silicon.

Rigol, the manufacturers of every hackerspace’s favorite oscilloscope, announced a new chipset. The current lineup of Rigol scopes top out at around 1GHz. In a prototype scope based on this chipset, Rigol demonstrated 4GHz bandwidth and 20GS/s with one Billion point memory depth. What this means: Rigol will be making very powerful scopes in the near future.

Hackaday had a meetup this week in New York City. The June workshop at Fat Cat Fab Lab featured speakers involved with twitter bots, 8-bit art, one of the guys behind Beautiful Soup, and a talk on a completely self-sustainable record label. Want to attend one of these meetups? Check out the calendar.

Repairs of retrocomputers are always interesting, but usually the same. Wipe off some dust, possibly replace a cap or two, retrobrite the case, and you’re done. This is not the usual retrocomputer repair. [Drygol] found a C64 that was apparently stored in a swamp for several years. The power switch fell off when he touched it. Somehow, miraculously, the circuit worked and [Drygol] rewarded the board with a new enclosure, dyed keycaps, an SD2IEC mod, and a kernel switch mod.

Guess what’s back? A pen computer with a color sensor on one end, and an ink mixer in the other. The Scribble Pen is the Internet’s infamous crowdfunded color-sensing pen, and the scammer behind it is looking for another funding round. Has anything changed since we tore this thing apart three years ago? No, it’s still a scam. I’ve been keeping tabs on the guy behind it, he’s still not in prison, and there are still idiots on this planet.

The ‘A’ stands for ‘Arts’.

The Benchy is everyone’s favorite tugboat and 3D printer benchmarking tool. They usually float, sideways. However, [MakeShift] somehow figured out how to add weight to the keel and turn the cutest little tugboat into a real, remote controlled boat. You could probably model a proper hull for the bottom of this boat, and it would be one of the few 3D prints where the actual design would be subject to US Copyright.

Is the fidget spinner fad dying? Square, the startup built around turning old AUX to cassette adapters into POS terminals seems to think so. They’ve been graphing their sales figures for fidget spinners, and there has been a marked decline since school let out for the summer. Will the trend pick back up in September? Who cares.

Three Magnets Make Fidget Spinners Amazing And Only Engineers Will Appreciate This Hack!

June 29, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 135 Comments

The fidget spinner posts will continue until morale improves. This time, we’re looking at [TannerTech]’s electromagnetic accelerator for a fidget spinner. [Tanner] can spin his fidget spinner electronically using parts he had sitting around and a clever application of magnets and relays! Engineers hate him!

[Tanner]’s build consists of three magnets mounted on the tip of a fidget spinner’s arms, with the North pole facing outwards. The ‘drive circuit’ consists of an electromagnet — an inductor [Tanner] found in an old TV set — a reed switch, and a MOSFET. When the circuit is placed next to the fidget spinner, the reed switch closes, powering the electromagnet, pushing the tip of the fidget spinner forward, and starting the cycle anew. Think of it as the same technology that goes into a particle accelerator or a maglev train. Or a brushless DC motor.

Haven’t gotten your daily fill of fidget spinner hacks and fidget spinner news? Don’t worry, because we got your back, fam. Check out this amazing way to teach STEAM education — the ‘A’ stands for ‘arts’ — with the help of fidget spinner shaped PCBs and a flanged bearing. Is your oscilloscope too boring? Spice it up with some fidget spinner awesomeness. Useless machines are cool, and even [Marvin Minsky], the father of Artificial Intelligence, would say this fidget spinner hack is amazing. Like, share, and subscribe for the latest in fidget spinner news.

It’s great, if slightly ironic, to see people doing something other than fidgeting with their fidget spinners. Who would have thought a fad that began as a few extra skateboard bearings and a 3D-printed blob of plastic would beget so many truly interesting hacks? You can check out [Tanner]’s build video of this amazing hack below.

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