More Counterfeit Apple Chargers Than You Can Shake An IPod At

May 10, 2014 by Rich Bremer 68 Comments

Phones, MP3 players, designer bags, artwork, money…. anything with value will bring out the counterfeiters looking to make a quick buck. Sometimes the product being counterfeited isn’t even necessarily expensive. For example, an Apple iPad Charger. [Ken Shirriff] got a hold of a counterfeit iPad Charger, took it apart, and did some testing.

So why would someone buy a counterfeit product? To save some money! The counterfeits are usually cheaper to reel the potential buyer in thinking they are getting a deal. In this case, the Apple product costs $19 and the knock-off is $3, that’s a huge difference.

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Blobless Printing With Velocity Extrusion

May 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

velocity

The current crop of 3D printers are technically four-axis machines, with three axes of movement and a fourth for the position of the filament. [Bas] had an entirely different idea – why not link the speed of the extruder to the speed of the nozzle? It turns out this technique gives you more ‘plasticy-looking’ prints and a vast reduction in blobbiness.

[Baz] has been working with LinuxCNC, a BeagleBone Black and the BeBoPr-Bridge cape, and there’s been a lot of development with that system in turning many straight lines into one smooth arc. This led him to adjusting the flow rate of a nozzle while the printer is running, but this is difficult if the extrusion is controlled by position as in a traditional printer setup. A new configuration was in order.

What [Baz] ended up with is a config that calculated the speed of the extruder based on the speed the nozzle is moving over the print surface. This gave him the ability to add live nozzle pressure adjustment, and as a result, a near complete disappearance of the little blobs that appear at the start of each layer.

For a well calibrated machine, it’s only a small difference between the ‘normal’ and ‘velocity’ methods of controlling an extrusion rate. It’s a noticeable difference, though, and one that vastly improves the visual quality of a print.

Reading 2.4GHz Transmitters With An Arduino

May 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Quad There are a lot of cheap quadcopter kits out there, sold ready to fly with a transmitter and battery for right around $50 USD. One of the more popular of these micro quads is the V2X2 series. They are, unfortunately not compatible with any other radio protocol out there, but [Alexandre] has managed to use the transmitter included with his V202 quad to send data to an Arduino.

Like most quads, the transmitter that came with [Alexandre]’s V202 operates on 2.4GHz. Listening in on that band required a little bit of hardware, in this case a nordic Semiconductors nRF24L01p. Attached to this chip is a regular ‘ol Arduino running a bit of code that includes [Alexandre]’s V202 library.

Right now, the build can detect if the quad is bound or not, and read the current position of the throttle, yaw, pitch, and roll, as well as all the associated trims. It’s just the beginnings of [Alexandre]’s project, but his eventual goal is to build an Arduino bot based on the code, complete with RC servos. Not bad for a transmitter that will be utterly useless when the microquad eventually breaks.

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Koenigsegg 3D-Printing For Production Vehicles

May 10, 2014 by Marsh 23 Comments

Koenigsegg with Printed Parts

We’re not surprised to see a car manufacturer using 3D-printing technology, but we think this may be the first time we’ve heard of 3D-prints going into production vehicles. You’ve likely heard of Christian von Koenigsegg’s cars if you’re a fan of BBC’s Top Gear, where the hypercar screams its way into the leading lap times.

Now it seems the Swedish car manufacturer has integrated 3D printing and scanning into the design process. Christian himself explains the benefits of both for iterative design: they roughed out a chair, adjusting it as they went until it was about the right shape and was comfortable. They then used a laser scanner to bring it into a CAD file, which significantly accelerated the production process. He’s also got some examples of brake pedals printed from ABS—they normally machine them out of aluminum—to test the fits and the feeling. They make adjustments as necessary to the prints, sometimes carving them up by hand, then break out the laser scanner again to capture any modifications, bring it back to CAD, and reprint the model.

Interestingly, they’ve been printing some bits and pieces for production cars out of ABS for a few years. Considering the low volume they are working with, it makes sense. Videos and more info after the jump.

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Robot Runs On 6 Legs But Never More Than 2 At A Time

May 10, 2014 by Mike Szczys 48 Comments

Looking at this legged robot gives us the same feeling we had the first time we saw a two-wheeled balancer. At first glance it just shouldn’t work, but after a little thought it makes a lot of sense. The six-legged bot called OutRunner uses two sets of three legs to propel itself. The footfalls are staggered to mimic how a biped runs, but mechanically it’s just spinning wheels to which the legs attach. If you have a smart enough algorithm it will not only remain upright but be steerable too.

This is a Kickstarter offering to let you can get your hands on an unassembled kit for $200. That version comes with a universal camera mount but no camera. This may not sound like a problem, but look closer and you may notice what we have: The thing is remote-controlled and can run up to 20 MPH, but there’s not footage of it running slowly. We’d wager the need to keep itself balanced equates to the need to run rather than walk. Since it’s going to get away from you very quickly you probably need a camera and a wearable display (or a chase car like in the video) to make the most out of the OutRunner. But hey, who’s complaining about that? Sounds like a ton of fun to us!

Why is it that this thing looks delightful but all of the Boston Dynamics running bots scare the crap out of us?

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Have An Unused DIY Instrument? Send It On Tour With [Imogen Heap]

May 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

goofys a dog and plutos a dog but goofy can talk whaaa

[Imogen Heap] is well-known for performing with DIY and cobbled-together instruments, and now she’s teaming up with another famous DIY instrument musician for a world tour. That’s the cool part, now here’s the awesome part: they want to take your DIY musical instrument on tour for a scrapyard symphony.

Both [Imogen] and [Leafcutter] are semi-regular Hackaday features, with [Leafcutter] building hydrophones and [Imogen] doing some crazy stuff turning gestures into music. They’re both known for their strange and esoteric sounds that sends Rolling Stone writers scrambling for a thesaurus, and now they want your disused or discarded music machines to use live on their world tour.

The team is looking for video submissions of any musical creatures you’d like to send around the world. The only real guideline on what they’re looking for is, ‘the weirder the better’, with an apparent slight emphasis on physical machines over the purely electronic.

Video of the duo below.

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BrickPi Bookreader 1 And 2 Read Tablets Or Books Aloud, You Choose

May 10, 2014 by Rich Bremer 10 Comments

BrickPi Bookreader 2

Have you ever wanted to relax with a good book but couldn’t due to the hassle of having to actually read and turn pages? Well, now BrickPi offers 2 solutions to that problem. They have you covered regardless if your document is on a tablet or resides in a physical book.

The original Bookreader will read out loud the displayed text on a tablet. brickpi bookreader This is not an application that runs on the tablet, it is a completely separate device that ‘reads’ the tablet screen. As you could guess from the BrickPi name, the brains behind the operation is a Raspberry Pi. A camera takes a photograph of the displayed text and the Raspberry Pi converts that image file to text using Optical Character Recognition. A Text-to-Speech engine then speaks the text in a robotic sounding voice. In order to change the page the Raspberry Pi controls a Lego Mindstorms arm that swipes across the tablet screen and the entire process is repeated.