Year: 2014

The Pioneering Lifestyle In Low Earth Orbit

January 17, 2014 by 91 Comments

The first element of the International Space Station (ISS) launched over fifteen years ago, on November 20, 1998. For more than thirteen years at least two human beings have been continually living off the surface of our planet. Assembly of the Space Station is now complete. It is being utilized by its crews and scientists from around the world to execute its primary mission – scientific investigations that can only be accomplished in the microgravity environment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). As with any structure, items age, wear out, or break and need to be repaired. What could be rather “simple” repairs on Earth can become much more complex in zero gravity. In some cases, “necessity becomes the mother of invention.”

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Nixie-ify Me Necklace

January 17, 2014 by 19 Comments

big-nixie

[Armilar] wanted to cheer up his friend who was going through a rough spot at the time — she really likes Dieselpunk, so he decided to improvise a Dieselpunk themed photo shoot for her. We’re assuming they had other costumes and props, but [Armilar] had this idea to make a nixie tube pendant for a while, he’d just have to expedite the build process to have it ready!

What he managed to whip up the day of the shoot looks amazing considering the time involved, if not just a little bit ill-advised. There may or may not be 200VAC running around his friend’s neck.

He’s using an electroluminescent driver rated for 5VDC to 100VAC, over-powered to 12VDC, resulting in about 200VAC, which is just enough to make the nixie glow a nice warm orange. In an effort to minimize the size of the pendant, he had to keep the battery and driver hanging off the back of the necklace.

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PIDDYBOT – A Self Balancing Teaching Tool

January 17, 2014 by 9 Comments

We’re sure that most Hackaday readers are already familiar with the inverted pendulum system, which basically consists of a pendulum having its center of mass above its pivot point. Most applications (like the one we are going to describe) limit the pendulum to 1 degree of freedom by affixing the pole (or circuit board here) to an axis of rotation. The overall system is therefore inherently unstable and must be actively balanced in order to remain upright.

[Sean] created the piddybot, a tiny balancing robot aimed to teach the basics of PID control by trying to get the robot to stand still. More interestingly, the Proportional / Integral / Derivative values can directly be adjusted using the three on-board potentiometers. This will allow users to get the feel of each parameter’s impact on the robot behavior. The piddybot is based around the Arduino nano, a custom PCB, 2x 26:1 geared motors, one 1A dual motor driver board, a six degrees of freedom Inertial Measurement Unit, 2 batteries and finally a 3D printed body. You can check out a video of the robot in action after the break.

This project stems from a non-PID self balancer which [Sean] hacked together in September.

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Here’s Pi In Your Eye – HUD Goggles

January 17, 2014 by 7 Comments

[John Ohno] has found what is perhaps the best possible use for steampunk goggles: framing a monocular display for a Raspberry Pi-based wearable computer. [John]’s eventual goal for the computer is a zzstructure-based personal organizer and general notifier. We covered [John]’s zzstructure emulator to our great delight in July 2011. Go ahead and check that out, because it’s awesome. We’ll wait here.

[John] has been interested in wearable computing for some time, but is unimpressed with Google Glass. He had read up on turning head-mounted displays into monocular devices and recognized a great opportunity when his friend gave him most of an Adafruit display. With some steampunk goggles he’d bought at an anime convention, he started on the path to becoming a Gargoyle. He encountered a few problems along the way, namely SD card fail, display output issues, and general keep-the-parts-together stuff, but came out smelling like a rose. [John] has ideas for future input additions such as simple infrared eye tracking, the addition of a chording keyboard, and implementing a motorized glove for haptic learning. 

Want to make your own wearable display but have an aversion to steampunk? Check out this homebrew solution with (mostly) 3-D printed frames. And it has servos!

[Thanks John]

Built-in Coffee Table Lightbox

January 16, 2014 by 9 Comments

diydollarstorelightbox

[Flyingpuppy] sent us this tip about her cleverly-concealed pull-out lightbox drawer. Her resolution for the new year was to make more art, so she filled this coffee table with art supplies and decided she’d draw while relaxing in front of the television. She also wanted a lightbox nearby, which originally involved hacking the entire tabletop with some acrylic, but she eventually opted for a simpler build: and it’s portable, too! The drawer’s lights are battery-powered, so you can pull the entire thing out of the table and drag it onto your lap, if that makes drawing more comfortable.

[Flyingpuppy] sourced seven inexpensive LED units from her local dollar store, which she mounted to the back of the drawer with some screws. The rest of the drawer was lined with white foam board, the bottom section angled to bounce light up onto the acrylic drawing surface. Because she needs to open the case to manually flip on the lights, she secured the acrylic top magnetically, gluing a magnet to the underside of the foam board and affixing a small piece of steel to the acrylic. A simple tug on the steel bit frees the surface, providing access underneath. Stick around for a video below.

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AxCut: An Open Source Laser Cutter

January 16, 2014 by 47 Comments

If you’ve always wanted a laser cutter and you have £1500 lying around (approx. $2500 as of today) — and you have access to a 3D printer — then you’ll want to take a look at [Damian’s] open source laser cutter: axCut. The project has evolved over the last few months from some mockups in OpenSCAD to a working prototype.

You’ll want to dig through his blog posts as well as his YouTube channel for all the juicy details, but from what we can gather, [Damian] is on the home stretch. The current implementation includes a 40W CO2 laser with functioning laser control and an impressively quiet watercooling system. Although the build’s wiring remains a bit of a tangle, the prototype cuts (almost) as expected. His next hurdle is ironing out the air assist, which should prevent some fire hazard issues and keep the lens free of debris.

Check out a couple of videos after the break, and if you’re interested in getting into laser cutting but want to start smaller, have a look at the MicroSlice from a few months ago.

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Retro Modern Nixie Clock

January 16, 2014 by 20 Comments

[Reboots] is a humble hacker who enjoys nixie tubes. So when he saw an old General Electric battery charger for sale at a hamfest, he thought: “that case would make a nice clock…”

He was first exposed to nixie tube clocks a few years ago when his brother gave him a DIY nixie clock kit from [Peter Jensen’s] website TubeClock.com — it was an easy build, and worked very well. It also introduced him to a unique driver for nixie tubes, an HV5622 high-voltage shift register made by Supertex inc. Compared to the traditional (and rare) 74141 nixie driver chips or discrete transistor drivers, the HV5622 is much smaller, requires less microcontroller I/O’s, and is not as picky when it comes to powering it.

The nixie tubes he chose for the project came from a lot sale on eBay, Russian surplus IN-12 tubes. He even managed to find an english datasheet for them!

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