Adafruit industries is doing their part to help the hacker community with their latest addition, a job board. It just went live today so there aren’t many jobs posted, but we expect that to change in the immediate future. you can also post your services offered there, if you’re looking for work. We really appreciate when companies support the hacker community, so we tip our hats to you Adafruit.
Day: October 15, 2010
Cellphone Crowd-pleasers
When you start to think about the cellphone waste our society produces it can be quite daunting. How many cell phones have you had in recent years? Now multiply that by five billion cellphone subscribers. [Anthony Goh] and [Neil Mendoza] found something to do with a very minuscule portion of those left-overs; building interactive birds out of the old parts. You’ll have to check out their accomplishments in the video after the break as the image above doesn’t do them justice. Interactivity for the exhibit is provided by an Arduino, which communicates with one working phone via a serial connection. The phone can still make and receive calls, and controls parts from other, less functional cellphones. They can call each other, or receive calls from the audience.
Yes, there is art in garbage. But there’s also a lot of hacks waiting to happen. Take a look at the Nokia cellphone LCD feature and then start scavenging.
C Sharp Development 101 – Part 2: Toolbox Controls
Vapor Phase Reflow Soldering
Ditch that old toaster oven and move to the next level of surface mount soldering with this vapor phase reflow method. [Ing.Büro R.Tschaggelar] put together this apparatus to use vapor phase reflow at his bench instead of sending out his smaller projects for assembly. It uses the heating element from an electric tea kettle to boil Galden HT 230 inside of a Pyrex beaker. There’s a copper heat break part way up the beaker to condense the chemical and keep it from escaping. When a populated board is lowered into the heated chamber, the solder paste reflows without the need to stress the components with unnecessary heat. Better than traditional reflow? At this level it’s hard to say, but we do find his method quite interesting.
[Thanks Chris]
3D Printing With Visible Light
This 3D printer manages some pretty fantastic resolution, and these are just the early results of [Junior Veloso’s] build. He put together a machine that prints objects in resin that cures in visible light. To print, a thin layer of raw liquid resin self-levels across a printing surface and a DLP-based projector shines light from below, onto the portion to be hardened. The z-axis then pulls that layer up and the next to be printed will become the newest bottom layer. Horizontally the printer yields 1024×768 resolution with a layer thickness as small as 0.01 mm. No wonder he’s turning out this kind of quality.
The model above took 5 hours to print, with eight-second exposure for each layer, and 0.1mm layer thickness. There is lots of good information on his blog, from the early planning, to the finished hardware so take some time to learn about this fascinating project.
Update: Thanks to reader [Nave.notnilc] for pointing out that we’ve seen a chemical 3D printing technique before.
Self-balancing Unicycle 2.0
Focus Designs has a new version of their self-balancing unicycle for sale. This improves upon their original design in several ways. The battery pack has moved to LiFePO4, which is becoming more common in electric transportation. There’s also regenerative braking and fall protection which kills the motor when you fall off.
We’ve embedded their marketing video after the break. Our favorite part is the shot seen above: a guy on the unicycle cruising along next to a woman who is running. There’s nothing like sitting on your bum while some else exercises.
At any rate, from what we see in the video they’ve turned out a solid product.
Spherical Multitouch Rig
We all love a little bit of multitouch, but we’ve seen so many setups that it is getting a bit less exciting. This one will get your attention with its unique shape. It is a spherical multitouch using all open source software. Well, since the poles are unusable, it might just be toroidal, or cylindrical, but it is still impressive. They are using a convex mirror mounted to the upper most point of the frosted sphere to reflect a projector mounted at the bottom of the base. A web cam pointed at that same mirror picks up reflected IR light from a few emitters. You can catch a video of it after the break.