Day: July 5, 2012

3D DLP Printer Builds An Orange TARDIS

July 5, 2012 by 16 Comments

This micro-sized TARDIS is the latest print from [Ron Light]’s Sedgwick 3D DLP printer. Yes, it’s orange, but the print quality for such a small object is pretty astounding.

The Sedgwick 3D printer is currently available as a kit on Kickstarter. For five hundred bones, the Sedgwick provides all the parts – minus a DLP projector and resin – to make your own miniature Type 40 with a broken chameleon circuit. There’s a lot more this printer can do, from miniature cathedrals to hollow geodesic spheres.

This is the latest in what will be a long line of DLP projector / resin 3D printers, and the most affordable one to date. The last one we saw was an awesome $2400 machine that included a projector and resin. At $500 for a projector-less kit, the Sedgwick still handily beats even the cheapest option we’ve seen so far.

[Ron Light] is from Kansas City, and our boss man [Caleb] ran into him at the KC Maker Faire a few weeks ago. You can check out that little interview and a few videos of the Sedgwick doing its thing after the break.

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Anti-Sanecraft ARTillery Cannon Is Farm Boy Engineering At Its Finest

July 5, 2012 by 13 Comments

The term “just enough knowledge to be dangerous” comes immediately to mind with this one. The official description is “a large scale pan and tilt propane Flame Effect” but that hardly does this thing justice. The Anti-Sanecraft ARTillery Cannon is a three-barrel fire cannon that can move around like its namesake and launch massive propane bursts from two 1″ diameter barrels. The third barrel is somewhat special, it is constructed of stronger steel and can be pre-fed with oxygen to create one massive intense propane-O2 mixed fire burst.

The trick about the whole thing is that when oxygen and propane are mixed it is a highly volatile and dangerous thing, in a closed space they classify as an explosive. Instead oxygen is filled directly into the open ended barrel separately and is allowed to sit until propane fires it out. This mixes the two fuels in the open air where it is safer and far away from any bystanders. We would not suggest you try this at all ever, as the effect was so loud during the Transformus festival that neighbors, miles away from the large festival ground, were complaining  about rattling windows. This is the kind of place where several thousand watt sound systems are pushed near the red with no issue, just to give a bit of a comparison.

We can’t seem to find a video of this thing in action either [Beyond Joy] just posted a video of this crazy contraption in action (without the O2 effect), check it out after the jump! Don’t forget to check the facebook photo album for all the NPT pipe fitting action, (warning some images of the phallic controls are very mildly NSFW).

Photo Credit: [Bert Reed Photography]

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Reverse Engineering Silicon

July 5, 2012 by 16 Comments

[John McMaster] is doing some pretty amazing work with figuring out how the circuitry in an integrated circuit works. Right now he’s reverse engineering a serial EEPROM chip one section at a time. This is a 24c02 made by ST, and  he chose this particular portion of the die to examine because it looked like there were some analog components involved.

He removed the top metal using hydrofluoric acid in order to take this image. By continually removing layers this way he manages to work out the traces and even the components themselves. To help clarify the parts he uses the set of snapshots to generate a colored map using Inkscape. From there he begins labeling what he thinks the components might be, and like a puzzle the pieces start falling into place one by one. From the Inkscape drawing he lays out a schematic, then rearranges the components to make the design easier to understand. Apparently this is a Schmidt trigger.

[Thanks George]

The Cool Kids All File Their Resistors For Accuracy

July 5, 2012 by 43 Comments

Here’s a tip to keep in your back pocket, you can use a metal file to adjust your resistors. [Gareth] shows off this technique in the video after the break. A metal file is literally all that you need to do some fine tuning. Just make sure you’re starting off with a carbon film resistor as this will not work with the metal film variety.

His example shows a 10k resistor which is reading just 9.92k on his multimeter. But he needs precisely 10k. After getting through the protective layer he makes just a couple of passes with a small file, each time adding about 20 Ohms of resistance. Now he does mention that excessive deep cuts can hurt the power rating of the resistor. But this certainly isn’t damaging it if done correctly. It turns out this is how they are tuned at the factory.

One possible use he mentions is trimming the balance on a hacked servo motor.

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Facedancer Board Lets Your Python Programs Pretend To Be USB Hardware

July 5, 2012 by 9 Comments

This is the prototype board for [Travis Goodspeed’s] new USB development tool called the Facedancer. He took on the design with USB security exploits in mind, but we think it’s got a lot of potential for plain old development as well.

Kudos on the [Frank Herbert] reference when naming the project. Like the characters from the Dune mythology that can perfectly mimic any person they touch, this device let’s you mimic whatever you can imagine. One the USB ports connects to the victim (or host) the other connects to a development machine. Python can then be used to send USB commands in real time. Think of this as doing the same thing the Bus Pirate does for SPI and i2c, except that it’s doing it on the USB protocol itself. This way you can feel your way through all of the road-bumps of developing a new device (or testing an exploit) without the need to continually compile and flash your hardware.

Automatic Beverage Delivery System

July 5, 2012 by 19 Comments

Members of theTransistor, a Provo, Utah based Hackerspace, are showing off their entry in the Red Bull Creation contest. This is an all-in-one energy drink delivery system. It can take a warm can of Red Bull from a reserve rack and turn it into a chilled cup of goodness in no time. And it (kind of) cleans up after itself too!

The process starts when a can is opened by lancing it through the side walls. At the upper right corner of the rig you can see the apparatus that is responsible for this beverage extraction technique. The drink drains from the newly created openings into a funnel below. It then enters a heat exchanger the team built by surrounding an aluminum pipe with several copper pipes. The copper has ice water circulating through them from the orange bucket that serves as the reservoir. By the time the drink gets to the cup on the bottom left it is ready to drink. The empty can is crush, falling into a bin and making space for the next in the 16-can backup supply.

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F/stop Printer For Analog Printing Black And White Photos

July 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

This beautifully crafted device is a timer used for getting the perfect exposure when making film prints of photos. But in addition to keeping time, it also does logarithmic calculations that are based on the f-stop values used for each exposure. It does this in 1/100th of a stop increments. While he was at it, [William] also decided to pack in a bunch of other features like dry down correction, and support for making test strips. This is a little hard to understand when discussed in the abstract, but just take a look at his video after the break where [William] walks us through an example exposure and all will become clear.

You can see from the construction page that the device is basically an Arduino shield. It provides a relay for controlling the exposure lamp, a keypad, rotary encoder, and character LCD. Slap it in a fancy case, connect it to the equipment you’re using, and you’ll be creating perfect prints in no time flat!

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