Hacklet 57 – CNC Hacks

July 24, 2015 by Adam Fabio 13 Comments

Everyone’s first microcontroller project is making an LED blink. It’s become the de-facto “Hello World” of hardware hacking. There’s something about seeing wires you connected and the code you wrote come together to make something happen in the real world. More than just pixels on a screen, the LED is tangible. It’s only a short jump from blinking LEDs to making things move. Making things move is like a those gateway drug – it leads to bigger things like robots, electric cars, and CNC machines. Computer Numerical Control (CNC) is the art of using a computer to control movement. The term is usually applied to machine tools, which cut, engrave, or perform other operations on wood, plastic, metal and other materials. In short, tools to make more things. It’s no surprise that hackers love CNCs. This week’s Hacklet is all about some of the best CNC projects on Hackaday.io!

We start with [Charliex] and Grizzly G0704 CNC Conversion. [Charliex] wanted a stout machine capable of milling metal. He started with a Grizzly G0704, which is small compared to a standard knee mill, but still plenty capable of milling steel. [Charliex] added a Flashcut CNC conversion kit to his mill. While they call them “conversion kits” there is still quite a bit of DIY ingenuity required to get a system like this going. [Charliex] found his spindle runout was way out of spec, even for a Chinese mill. New bearings and a belt conversion kit made things much smoother and quieter as well. The modded G0704 is now spending its days cutting parts in [Charliex’s] garage.

Next up is [brashtim] with Makesmith CNC. Makesmith was [brashtim’s] entry in the 2014 Hackaday prize. While it didn’t win the prize, Makesmith did go on to have a very successful Kickstarter, with all the machines shipping in December of 2014. The machine itself is unorthodox. It uses closed loop control like large CNC machines, rather than open loop stepper motors often found in desktop units. The drive motors are hobby type servos. We’re not talking standard servos either – [brashtim] picked microservos. By using servos, common hardware store parts, and laser cut acrylic, [brashtim] kept costs down. The machine performs quite well though, easily milling through wood, plastic, foam, and printed circuit boards.

Next we have [Kenji Larsen] with Reactron material processor: Wireless CNC mill. [Kenji] started with a Shapeoko 2, and gave it the Reactron treatment. The stock controller was replaced with a Protoneer shield, which is connected to the Reactron network via a HopeRF radio module. The knockoff rotary tool included with the kit was replaced with a DeWalt DW660 for heavy-duty jobs, or a quieter Black and Decker RTX-6. A tool mounted endoscope keeps an eye on the work. [Kenji] mounted the entire mill in a custom enclosure of foam and Roxul insulation. The enclosure deadens the sound, but it also keeps heat in. [Kenji] plans to add a heat exchanger to keep things cool while maintaining relative quiet in his shop.

Finally we have a [hebel23] with DIY Multiplex Plywood CNC Router. [hebel23] wanted to build a big machine within a budget – specifically a working area of 400 x 600 x 100 mm and a budget of 800 Euro. As the name implies, [hebel23] used birch plywood as the frame of his machine. He chose high quality plywood rather than the cheap stuff found in the big box stores. This gives the machine a stable frame. The moving components of the machine are also nice – ball screws, linear bearings, and good stepper controllers. The stepper motors themselves are NEMA-23 units, which should give the CNC plenty of power to cut through wood, plastic, and even light cuts on metal. [hebel23] spent a lot of time on the little details of his CNC, like adding an emergency stop switch, and a wire-chain to keep his gantry control wires from ending up tangled up in the work piece. The end result is a CNC which would look great in anyone’s workshop.

If you want more CNC goodness, check out our brand new CNC project list! Did I miss your project? Don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

Self Built Interferometer Measures Nanometer Displacement

July 24, 2015 by Nava Whiteford 56 Comments

[jrcgarry] hacked together this awesome interferometer which is able to measure displacements in the nanometer range. Commercial interferometers are used in research labs to measure tiny displacements on the nanometer scale, and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. [jrcgarry] used beam splitters from BluRay drives, mirrors from ebay and a 5mw laser diode.

We’ve covered the use of interferometers before. But never an instrument built from scratch like this. Interferometers exploit the wave-like nature of a beam of light. The beam is split and sent down two separate paths, where the beams bounce off mirrors to return to the beam splitter to be recombined. Because of its wave light nature the beams will interfere with each other. And as the beams have traveled different distances they may be in or out of phase. Resulting in either constructive (brighter) or destructive (darker) interference.

Because the wavelength of light is on the order of 100s of nanometers, by observing the interference patterns you can monitor the displacement of the mirrors with respect to each other at nanometer resolution. [jrcgarry] doesn’t use the interferometer for any particular application in this tutorial but it’s a great demonstration of the technique!

Quantum Mechanics In Your Processor: Complementarity

July 24, 2015 by Will Sweatman 42 Comments

Monday | 24 October 1927 | Brussels

While the official title of the 5th Solvay conference was “on Electrons and Photons”, it was abundantly clear amongst the guests that the presentations would center on the new theory of quantum mechanics. [Planck], [Einstein], [Bohr], [de Broglie], [Schrodinger], [Heisenberg] and many other giants of the time would be in attendance. Just a month earlier, [Niels Bohr] had revealed his idea of complementarity to fellow physicists at the Instituto Carducci, which lay just off the shores of Lake Como in Italy.

The theory suggested that subatomic particles and waves are actually two sides of a single ‘quantum’ coin. Whichever properties it would take on, be it wave or particle, would be dependent upon what the curious scientist was looking for. And asking what that “wave/particle” object is while not looking for it is meaningless. Not surprisingly, the theory was greeted with mixed reception by those who were there, but most were distracted by the bigwig who was not there – [Albert Einstein]. He couldn’t make it due to illness, but all were eager to hear his thoughts on [Bohr’s] somewhat radical theory. After all, it was he who introduced the particle nature of light in his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, revealing light could be thought of as particles called photons. [Bohr’s] theory reconciled [Einstein’s] photoelectric effect theory with the classical understanding of the wave nature of light. One would think he would be thrilled with it. [Einstein], however, would have no part of [Bohr’s] theory, and would spend the rest of his life trying to disprove it.

Complementarity – Wave , Particle or both?

einstein and bohr — [Niels Bohr] contemplates one of [Einstein’s] many challenges to quantum theory.

For more than a century it was thought that light was a wave. In 1801, [Thomas Young] had discovered interference patterns when shining a light through two very close slits. Interference is a well known property of waves. This combined with [Maxwell’s] equations, which predicted the existence of electromagnetic radiation put little doubt into anyone’s mind that light was nothing more, or less, than a wave. There was a very odd issue, however, that puzzled physicists during the 18th century. When shining light upon a metallic surface, electrons would be ejected from that surface. Increasing the intensity of the light did not translate to an increase in speed of the expelled electrons, like classical mechanics says it should. Increasing the frequency of the light did increase the speed. The explanation of this phenomenon could not be had until 1900, when [Max Planck] realized that physical action could not be continuous, but must be a multiple of some small quantity. This quantity would lead to the “quantum of action”, which is now called [Planck’s] constant and birthed quantum physics. It would have been impossible for him to know that this simple idea, in less than two decades, would lead to a change in understanding of the nature of reality. It only took Einstein, however, a few years to use [Planck’s] quantum of action to explain that mind-boggling issue of electrons releasing from metal via light and not following classical law with the incredibly complex equation:

E = hv

Where E is the energy of the light quanta, h is Planck’s constant and v is the frequency of the light. The most important item to consider here is this light quanta, later to be called a photon. It is treated as a particle. Now, if you’re not scratching your head in confusion right about now, you haven’t been paying attention. How can light be a wave and a particle? Join me after the jump and we’ll travel further down this physics rabbit hole.

Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics In Your Processor: Complementarity” →

Arduino (PCI) Express

July 24, 2015 by Al Williams 78 Comments

It is almost impossible these days to find a PC with old ISA card slots. Full size PCI card slots are in danger of going the same way. Many PCs today feature PCI Express connectors. PCI Express offers a lot of advantages including a small size, lower pin count, and a point-to-point serial bus topology that allows multiple simultaneous transfers between different pairs of end points. You’ll find PC Express connectors in things other than PCs too, including a lot of larger embedded systems.

If you ever wanted to prototype something on PCI Express, you’d usually turn to an FPGA. However, [moonpunchorg] posted a workable design for an Arduino on a mini PCI Express board. (As [imroy264] points out in the comments, the board is using the USB port present on the PCI-E connector.) The design files use KiCAD so it should be fairly easy to replicate or change. Naturally, there are pins on the edges to access I/O ports and power. You do need to use ISP to program the Arduino bootloader on the chip.

The board appears to a host computer as a SparkFun as a Pro Micro 3.3V board, and from there you could easily add function to a computer with a PCI Express slot using nothing more than the Arduino IDE. The board is known to work with the VIA VAB-600 Springboard and VIA VAB-820 boards, although it is likely to work with other PCI Express hosts, too.

DDR-ing A Simon Game With A Raspberry Pi

July 24, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

Since 1998 we’ve been privileged to partake in an arcade game known as Dance Dance Revolution, but before that, way back in the 70’s, was the Simon game. It’s essentially a memory game that asks the player to remember a series of lights and sounds. [Uberdam] decided to get the best of both worlds and mixed the two together creating this giant foot controlled Simon game. (English translation.)

The wood platform that serves as the base of the project was fitted with four capacitive sensors, each one representing a “color” on the Simon game. When a player stomps on a color, a capacitive sensor sends a signal to a relay which in turn notifies the Raspberry Pi brain of the input. The Pi also takes care of showing the player the sequence of colored squares that must be stepped on, and keeps track of a player’s progress on a projector.

This is a pretty good way of showing how a small, tiny computer like the Raspberry Pi can have applications in niche environments while also being a pretty fun game. We all remember Simon as being frustrating, and we can only imagine how jumping around on a wooden box would make it even more exciting. Now, who can build a robot that can beat this version of Simon?

Continue reading “DDR-ing A Simon Game With A Raspberry Pi” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Online Bone Marrow Cytometry Aid

July 23, 2015 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Simple blood tests can lead a doctor toward a diagnosis of blood cancers, like leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma, but to really see what’s going on, he or she needs to go to the source of the problem: the bone marrow. Examining maturing blood cells from the marrow with a microscope is an important step in staging the disease and developing a plan for treatment, but it’s a tedious and error-prone process that requires a doctor to classify and tally a dozen or so different cells based on their size, shape and features. Automated systems like flow cytometry and image analysis software can help, but in an austere environment, a doctor might not have access to these. Luckily, there’s now an on-line app to assist with bone marrow cytometry.

Thanks to [Eduardo Zola], a doctor can concentrate on classifying cells without looking up from the microscope, and without dictating to an assistant. Keys are assigned to the different cell morphologies, and a running total of each cell type is kept. With practice, the doctor should be able to master the keying for the various cells; we suspect the generation of physicians that grew up with the WASD keying common in PC-based gaming might have a significant advantage over the older docs when it comes to learning such an app.

[Eduardo]’s app seems like a simple way to improve on an important medical procedure, and an enabling technology where access to modern instrumentation is limited. To that end, one area for improvement might be a standalone app that can run on a laptop without internet access, or perhaps even a version that runs on a smart phone. But even as it is, it’s a great entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Puzzle Box Is Rigged To Blow

July 23, 2015 by Rick Osgood 23 Comments

[Sande24] needed a gift for his father’s birthday. He decided that rather than simply give his father the gifts, he would present his father with a unique challenge. The gifts are locked inside of a multi-stage puzzle box. This isn’t your average puzzle box though. This one is rigged to blow.

The puzzle box was designed to test his father’s reflexes, mind, and luck. The finished product looks sort of like a wooden crate made from particle board. The box contains three levels, each with its own gift and its own task to be completed.

With the lid opened, the first compartment and puzzle is revealed. Inside of the compartment were a new pair of gloves, meant to protect the father’s hands when working on the puzzles. The first puzzle is built into a sheet of wood with several custom-made levers. The levers must be moved into position in order to remove the wooden sheet and reveal the next level.

The first lever triggers a home-made detonator that eventually lights a series of fireworks placed around the box. You need to solve the puzzle box fast enough to prevent the fireworks from destroying the gifts that lay inside. [Sande24] was unable to legally purchase fuses where he lived, so he had to make his own.

The second level held a gas mask, also meant to protect the father from the booby traps of this mysterious box. This level, also made from a sheet of wood, has nine squares drawn on it. Each square is labeled with a different number which goes into solving a mathematical function (x^5-25x^4+233x^3-995x^2+1866x-1080 = 0). The solution to the function would reveal the safe path to be used to cut the wooden platform in half. Unfortunately [Sande24’s] father cut the wrong squares and released a huge amount of vinegar into the box. Oops.

The bottom level contained the final puzzle and the locked treasure compartment locked with an ordinary padlock. To find the key, another puzzle had to be solved based on a series of wooden levers labeled with different shapes. The shapes provided clues to the order in which the levers should be pulled. Once the levers were moved into position, two compartments were unlocked. One of them contained the key to the treasure box. The other contained another booby trap which would set off more fireworks, destroying the final gift of four cans of Kuld beer. That’s a lot of work to get a a few cans of frothy beverage!

[Thanks Ellery]