The Ripper: A Different Kind Of CNC Machine

March 13, 2014 by James Hobson 45 Comments

Here’s an awesome CNC build that crosses a standard CNC router… with a CNC machine capable of milling metal with ease. Introducing The Ripper. No, not Jack.

[Maximilan Mali] has been reading Hack a Day since he was a kid. A few years ago, he saw a guide on a DIY CNC build which inspired him to start designing The Ripper at the young age of 16. He’s 19 now (studying mechatronics in Austria), and raised enough money last summer to finally build his first prototype. It cost approximately 4000€ to build, which is pennies compared to a commercial machine of this caliber.

The machine has a bed size of just over a meter squared, with a Z height of 225mm. It’s also rigid enough to slice through aluminum at 850mm/s with ease! Take a look at the following video — we’re very impressed. Our favorite part is when he shows off its accuracy and repeatability by plunging a tool towards the screen of his very own iPhone.

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Billboard Advertises Engineering School, Manufactures Potable Water

March 13, 2014 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

It’s a remarkable thing when ad agencies manage to help people in the course of advertising. The University of Technology and Engineering Peru (UTEC) was looking for ways to increase enrollment. They went to the Peruvian offices of agency DraftFCB and came away with the idea to install a billboard that converts Lima’s water-saturated coastal desert air into potable water.

Perhaps the only downside is that it requires electricity, and not just for those cool neon water drops. There are five generators that capture the humidity and use reverse osmosis to purify the water. Each of these units has a tank that holds 20L. From there, the clean water is aggregated in a main tank and can be collected from a faucet at the base of the billboard. In just three months, the billboard produced over 9,000L (2500 gallons) of potable water for people who would otherwise draw polluted water from wells.

We love to see hacks that help. Use your powers for good, like re-purposing humid air and pollution. Make the jump to see a short video and an artist’s conception of the billboard’s innards.

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Hackaday 68k: Gluing Architecture Buffer Maps

March 13, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

It’s time for more blatant advertising for Hackaday Projects, the best project hosting site on the Internet. Did we tell you it’s collaborative? That you and your friends can work on projects together? Want more encouragement to join? How about a contest with prizes that include oscilloscopes, FPGA dev boards, soldering and rework stations, Beaglebones and Raspberries and Spark Cores? Oh my!

Oh. We’re also developing a retrocomputer to show off the features of Hackaday Projects. This is the latest update, showing off the architecture of the entire system, the memory map, and the logic glue and buffers. The plan for this project is to have it host another awesome Hackaday site, our retro version, a small off-shoot of the main Hackaday site that’s specifically designed to be loaded by computers built before 1993. There haven’t been many retro successes in the Hackaday tip line recently, so if you manage to get a vintage computer to pull the retro site up, snap a pic and send it in.

For those of you wanting to catch up on the Hackaday 68k project, here’s the Hackaday Projects page, and here’s all the front page updates. Click that ‘Read more…’ link for the update.

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Cleaning Up Smoke With An Electrostatic Precipitator

March 13, 2014 by James Hobson 56 Comments

[Steve Dufresne’s] got another great project for us — a device that effectively gets rid of smoke!

It’s called an electrostatic precipitator and it works similar to the way many cars are painted today using a process called electrostatic coating. Electrostatic coating works by giving the paint particles an electrostatic charge, opposite to the charge on the vehicle’s body panels — this makes the two attract and results in using around 95% of sprayed paint — barely any over-spray, and a better bond to boot!

[Steve’s] tried this experiment of creating a smoke precipitator with the eventual goal of using it on a car’s exhaust. He’s been through a few designs so far, and finally has one that works quite well. It’s not even that complicated, just take a look at the following diagram.

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Fail Of The Week: Unconnected Nets In KiCad

March 13, 2014 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

fotw-unconnected-net

From the title and the image above you surely have already grasped this Fail of the Week. We’ve all been there. Design a board, send it to fab or etch it yourself, and come to find out you’ve missed a connection. Automatic checks in your software should prevent this, but when making small changes it’s easy to overlook running the checks again. This is exactly what [Clint] did with this board; leaving a net unconnected in the schematic, which made its way through to the board layout and into the OSHPark boards.

Okay, so fix it with jumper wire which is clearly what he did (white wire in the lower left image above). But since this is rev3 of his PCB it’s pretty upsetting that it happened. The meat and potatoes of the fail is the missing software feature that led to it. KiCad doesn’t have a pin swap tool in the board layout. Really? We use KiCad frequently and didn’t realize that the feature was missing. Needing to simplify his board layout, [Clint] went back to the schematic to swap some resistor network pins by hand. He pushed the change through the netlist and into the board layout, not realizing he had left an input gate unconnected.

A bit of searching proves that pin swapping may be coming to KiCad soon. It’s on the CERN roadmap of features they plan to add to the open source PCB layout software. We remember hearing about CERN’s plans quite a while ago, and thought we featured it but the only reference we could find is [Chris Gammell’s] comment on a post from back in December. It’s worth looking at their plans, these are all features that would make KiCad a juggernaut.

EDITORIAL NOTE: We’ll soon be out of story leads for this series. If you have enjoyed reading weekly about fails please write up your own failure and send us the link. Of course any documented fails you find around the internet should also be sent our way. Thanks!

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Manual Pick And Place

March 13, 2014 by Nick Conn 13 Comments

picknplace Populating a large surface mount PCB can take forever. [craftycoder] from Freeside Atlanta has built a great looking manual pick and place machine, removing the need for tweezers. No more will passives stick to your tweezers while you are trying to place them on your PCB!

We have seen a lot of pick and place machines in the past few years. What makes this one stand out is its simplicity and the no-nonsense build. This pick and place is built on an MDF platform, uses bearings from Amazon, standard 12 mm rails, and has a small camera for a close-up look at your part placement. Sure it is a manual method, but it beats painstakingly placing each part with tweezers. It would be interesting to see how much this entire build cost; we expect that it was not too expensive. See this thing in action in the video after the break.

We hope this project has inspired you to go out and make something cool! If so, let us know what you have made!
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Automatically Accept Membership Fees Or Donations

March 13, 2014 by Nick Conn 29 Comments

MoneyMachine

Whether you run a club or a hackerspace, collecting membership fees and accepting donations can be a pain. [MRE] from TokyoHackerspace has the solution, an automated machine that can accept cash from anyone who is walking by.

Members can choose to either donate or pay their membership fee even when the hackerspace administrator is not around. The interface consists of two buttons, an LCD display, a place to put your cash, and a thermal printer that prints out two receipts (one for you, one which goes right back into the box). One of the coolest parts of this build is the banknote validator, which can work with over 100 currencies (in this case, it is programmed to accept Japanese bills). Despite the simple interface, a lot of thought went into this build. There are backup batteries for the real time clock, an EEPROM to keep track of all the accounting, and an Arduino as the brains of the operation. If you take a look at the project page, there is a lot of information on the Arduino code, the PCB layout, how to interface with the banknote validator, and more! Check out the machine in action after the break.

We would love to see the banknote validator used in other projects. Have you used one before or built something similar?

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