Apollo 13 DJ controller Follow Up
[Adam] had a really impressive DJ controller build featured here recently. Many of you had more questions about the internals and such, so this post should clarify a few things. He’s still got a few more updates to make, but promises to reveal all if given enough time!
Noise Absorbing Headphones from Shooting Earmuffs
If the circuitry on your microphone-enabled shooting earmuffs has gone bad, the actual speakers may still be good. Why not convert them into some noise-blocking headphones? For that matter, if you’ve broken a pivot, there’s a simple solution for that too!
Help Choosing your CNC Router
If you’re in the market for a CNC router, but aren’t sure where to start, Ponoko has put together a handy pricing guide to several of the more popular DIY routers available.
DIY AC Unit
It’s very hot out, so what is one to do when your shop or garage is burning up? Why not build your own “AC unit?” Sure you have to supply your own ice, but at under $20 for this cooler-based unit, maybe it’s worth it. Here’s the Reddit thread explaining it as well as a picture of the finished product.
3D Topo Map on a CNC Router
Once you’ve purchased your CNC router using the above guide, why not make your own 3D top map? This tutorial features a map of Ross Island off of Antarctica. Why Ross Island? It was the first vector-format topo map found off of Wikimedia.
Not sure what happened to it, but the price for the ShapeOko mentioned in the CNC kit run-down hasn’t been $375 in a while. It’s now upwards of $600 for a working machine. Kinda sucks because I wanted to get one when they first cam out, but figured I’d wait a few iterations for any kinks to be worked out.
It seems like the cnc list is about a year old. I believe Lumenlab died several months ago, yet it is still listed.
I’ve been looking for a cheap CNC exclusively for milling PCBs, i.e. small Z movement, small area and high resolution/precision. Anyone knows of such a thing?
I just built the Mantis 9.1 but modified it to use a dremel for the spindle. It has very good precision for PCBs and cost around $150 (not including dremel).
Yeah the Mantis9.1 is great! If for some reason just like me you couldnt open the drawing files, try upload them to Google drive or Docs, worked for me. On the subject now, Im trying my own flavor of the mantis, 2x the milling area. Hope the X rods will stand the down force, but meh Go big or go home, thats what I say!
83 pounds of ice melting in 1 hour will provide 12,000 btu of cooling. A very ineffenient and expensive way to cool a room.
That Reddit thread is very amusing, worth a read.
for little machines those may be great, but for bigger machines the blacktoe/blackfoot sucks. I built my whole machine from Fine Line Automation, and CNC router parts. Its all 3030 and 3060 extrusion, no wood/mdf at all. very accurate, very fast, and a while more expensive it is worth it.
What didn’t you like about your blackfoot?
humidity, I had to leave enough slop in the gantry so that when the humidity drastically changed it would still run, but when it was dry it always too loose, yes i could have just adjusted it to run in the middle but I hated hearing my motors grunt because the gantry was changing shape. I painted them when it was dry to try to slow down the intrusion but it never really worked well. I have read many reports of people with the same problem, that they have to just deal with it. Any machine that has allot of MDF in its structure is going to run into this problem.
Ahh, they’ve fixed that. They don’t use mdf anymore. The plywood they use now is used for sign making and is waterproof.
I’ll second the CNCrouterparts.com. I used all 8020 alum extrusions and rack and pinon. Works great and fast!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-DFNyjoovo
I know I’ve seen an ice based air conditioner on here before.