PCB Drill From R/C Car Parts

September 12, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

[Sid] makes a few PCBs a month and the hardest part of his fabrication process is always drilling the through-holes. He has a PCB hand drill that usually results in a sore index finger. After a few unsuccessful attempts of using a full-size electric drill and not wanting to invest in a commercial solution, [Sid] made a PCB drill from a broken R/C car.

The toy car was donated by [Sid]’s 4-year-old after a terrible crash. [Sid] took the gearbox from the car and added a small circuit to control the direction of the drill. After attaching the drill chuck to the former R/C car axle and adding the power leads to a 5 Volt adapter, a PCB drill press was born.

Most of the parts for this build were salvaged from the toy car’s radio control circuit. Except for the chuck from [Sid]’s hand drill and a few switches, everything on this build was pulled from a broken remote control car. While the build is a lot simpler than this semi-automatic PCB drill, [Sid]’s drill seems to work well. Check out the demo video after the break.

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A Simple Fix To Resurrect Your Broken Iclicker

September 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 34 Comments

simple_iclicker_battery_fix

If you are currently attending college, the odds are that you are familiar with iclicker classroom remotes. If you have one of these, you might also be aware that they tend to be flaky at times, particularly when it comes to powering on. [Todd] received a few “broken” iclickers lately and has found an easy to fix design issue that might possibly save yours (and others) from the trash heap.

When he started pulling the units apart to diagnose them, he noticed that something with the battery contacts was not quite right. They are held in place by the device’s plastic shell which is pretty common, however in the iclicker, the portion of the plastic case that holds the positive battery contact is too big, preventing some batteries from making a complete circuit.

Now you might be thinking to yourself that AA batteries are all the same, but they are not necessarily created equal. Through a small bit of testing, [Todd] found that many different batteries experienced intermittent connectivity issues depending on the height of the positive terminal, and that due to their design, Duracell batteries flat out didn’t work. With the careful removal of a portion of the plastic surrounding the positive contact, [Todd] was able to fix each of his “broken” remotes.

He hopes that this information helps some people resurrect their non-functioning units, because a few minutes work sure beats buying another $30 iclicker.

World Clock Simulates Night And Day

September 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

[Justin] always wanted a GeoChron clock, but since they run in the range of several thousand dollars apiece, he was pretty certain he would never have the chance to own one. Undaunted, he figured out a way to build a small version of the clock for himself, and he wrote in to share how it was done.

He first purchased a Wise Clock 3 from FlorinC, but he definitely wasn’t going to use the clock as it was originally intended. Rather than display the time in numbers, he pulled the Wise Clock apart and sandwiched a vellum printout of a world map in between the front face plates. A tweaked firmware image allows him to simulate day and night using the Wise Clock’s LED array. He also programmed the clock to take into account seasonal light patterns, as you can see in the video embedded below.

We think this is a great idea, and though we would probably use plain white LEDs if we built one, the RGB LEDs in the Wise Clock certainly provide a neat effect.

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Announcing Our Next Theme: ATtiny Hacks

September 12, 2011 by Jack Buffington 34 Comments

ATtiny Hacks Theme Banner

It is time once again to announce a new theme. This time around, we have chosen to highlight projects built around the ATtiny series of processors. These are 6 to 32 pin AVR processors that run up to 16 MHz and have anywhere from 512 Bytes of flash with 32 Bytes of RAM to 16K of Flash with 512 bytes of RAM. We’re guessing that this will be a pretty popular theme since so many people are using Atmel processors these days. If you have a project that you would like to see on Hackaday that is using an ATtiny processor, please hit us up on our tip line. If we like it, we may we choose to feature it in one of our daily themed hacks.

To kick off this theme, here is a nice write up about a stepper motor driver based around the ATtiny13. This project reads the analog value on pin B4 and adjusts the speed of the stepper motor. It is well documented and includes source code.

Glass PCBs

September 12, 2011 by Kevin Dady 78 Comments

Our friend [Jeri] tipped us off about this cool video on youtube where the author makes his own “transparent” PCB’s using some nontraditional materials. One ounce copper foil is found online along with some clear glass microscope slides, from there it is just a matter of cementing the foil onto the glass slides with some thin UV curing glue. Once the 2 parts are mated the entire thing is popped into an eeprom eraser for its intense UV light, then excess is trimmed.

The normal routine of toner transfer is used to copy a circuit pattern onto the copper clad glass and it’s etched in standard ferric chloride. The copper is removed but the UV glue that was holding it is still left, some special care needs be followed as this stuff is pretty weak against even mild solvents, and you do not want your traces peeling up. Next no clean solder paste is applied and parts are soldered down with a heat gun, keeping the glass evenly heated to prevent it from cracking.
This leaves you with a board that looks like frosted glass, and in order to protect the glue while clearing up the frosted effect, some polyurethane is applied which fills in all the little bumps and smoothes the surface bout out to almost 100% clear.
The end application in this video is a touch sensitive board which works fine though the back side of the glass and presents a nice smooth interface for the user. Join us after the break for the video.

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Update: Bluetooth Super Nintendo Controller For Android

September 11, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Rich’s] newest version of a Bluetooth connected Super Nintendo controller takes what was already good and makes it better. We looked at the original version back in May, which is built into a knockoff controller — [Rich] mentions that he got a lot of flack for defacing retro equipment and wants to set the record straight. The most notable difference between the two controllers is that the batteries are now housed inside the case. He switched over to an 850 mAh Lithium Ion battery, which takes much less room than the four AA batteries did. There is an integrated charger which connects via a mini USB jack as seen in the image above. Bother versions of the controller can be used to play emulators without rooting your Android device.

Unfortunately you won’t get to look inside the case. What we can tell you is that the build no longer uses a BlueSMiRF board , opting for a less expensive Bluetooth solution. We also know that the build is still Arduino compatible, sporting an ATmega328 chip running the bootloader. The lack of detail is because [Rich] is working to market the controller with a limited-quantity preorder. Check out his video presentation of the new version after the break.

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Dippy Bird Binary Clock

September 11, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

This Dippy Bird clock display is simple to build and it’s just waiting to be scaled up for use as a full clock. As shown there are only enough birds in this rendition to read out the hours. More tiers can be added for minutes and you could even add your own temperature readout function using a separate bird as the thermometer.

Other than the fact that there are only four bits of resolution, the first thing you should notice is that these birds have nothing to drink. They’re intended to dip their beaks into a glass of water, leading to evaporation that changes the temperature of the dichloromethane inside to start their teeter-tottering. Water isn’t used because the birds would be in constant motion. Instead a resistor has been placed in the base of each, which heats up when current is passed through it. A bird in motion is a digital 1, and bird at rest is a digital 0. A set of transistors protects the microcontroller from sourcing too much current. In this case an mbed is keeping time but any microcontroller will do. We’ve embedded a quick clip of the dippy bird clock after the break.

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