Need some gears? Got a timing belt?
[filespace] sent in a neat build he stumbled upon: making gears with plywood and a timing belt. Just cut out a plywood disk and glue on a section of timing belt. There’s some math involved in getting all the teeth evenly placed around the perimeter, but nothing too bad. Also useful for wheels, we think.
We’re on a chess kick now.
Huge chess sets are cool, right up until you try to figure out where to store the pieces when they’re not being used. [Jayefuu] came up with a neat solution to this problem. His pieces are cut out of coroplast (that corrugated plastic stuff political campaign signs are made of), making it relatively inexpensive and just as fun as normal giant chess pieces on a tile floor.
<INSERT MARGINALLY RELEVANT PORTAL QUOTE HERE>
[Randy]’s son is in the cub scouts. Being the awesome father he is, [Randy] helped out with this year’s pinewood derby build. It’s a car shaped like a portal gun with the obligatory color-changing LED. The car won the ‘Can’t get more awesome’ award, but wheel misalignment kicked it out of the competition during qualifying rounds. Sad, that. Still awesome, though.
These people are giving you tools for free
Caltech professor [Yaser Abu-Mostafa] is teaching a Machine Learning class this semester. You can take this class as well, even if the second lecture started last Thursday.
Turning an Arduino into a speech synthesizer
[AlanFromJapan] sent in this product page for an Arduino-powered speech synthesizer. We’re probably looking at a relabeled ATmega328 with custom firmware here; to use it, you replace the micro in your Arduino Uno with this chip. The chip goes for about $10 USD here, so we’ll give it a week until someone has this proprietary firmware up on the Internet. There are English morphemes that aren’t in Japanese, so you can’t just ‘type in English’ and have it work. Here’s a video.
Six things in this links post. We’re feeling generous.
What would you build if you had a laser cutter? [Doug Miller] made a real, working fishing reel. No build log or files, but here’s a nice picture.
with 4 gears you could make a device for twist making ropes. i made one without gears but the geared ones would be a better job.
>> ‘type in English’ and have it work.
If you type in ingurishu you’ll get sort of Japanese sounding English ;).
Yamaha used/maybe still does make synth chips that contain all the samples to do Japanese speech.
there’s the speakjet available (programmed on some rebranded PIC) for english, unfortunetely it’s 20 GBP :-(
question is now ingurishu for free or speakjet for £$€. I’ll give it a try:-)
the synth sounds like miku
But he didn’t use only parts from the approved pinewood derby parts kit!
Here’s my tip for broken gear teeth that works mainly with plastic (optical drive or rc car) gears. Take the offending gear cog with the missing tooth or teeth and get a piece of silly putty or modeling clay-it won’t need to harden, just retain the shape of the gear in a reasonable manner. Push the gear into the clay until the teeth are just barely submerged (I keep hearing the Always Sunny gang-“Now you’re just mashing it”lol). You’ll notice the offending tooth is still missing. Carefully pull the gear back out, turn it a notch or few to the right and puch it into the clay so that the broken tooth is in a full notch and the give a dab of super glue or epoxy to fill that space and harden to make the new tooth. After you let it set, you can peel away the soft clay or putty and have your tiny, proprietary ratio gear back in action. You may want to shave/clean up the gear for good action and fit :) I have saved more than a handful of devices this way :)
Little Heads up to all readers from Germany:
On video.rwth-aachen.de are a bunch of lectures online for everyone.
Also Machine Learning is not the easiest thing to learn!
Simplicity is key. The gears are awesome! Its much better then buying them, even plastics are 10$ each and hard to get. (t5)