3D Printed RC Servo To Linear Actuator Conversion

December 24, 2015 by Al Williams 23 Comments

RC servos are handy when you need to rotate something. You can even modify them to rotate continuously if that’s what you need. However, [Roger Rabbit] needed linear motion, but wanted the simple control afforded by an RC servo. The solution? A 3D printed housing that converts a servo’s rotation into linear motion.

The actuator uses five different parts, a few screws, and a common RC servo. The video shows the actuator pushing and pulling a 200g load with a 6V supply. There’s some room for adjustment, so different servos should work.

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Electrolytic Capacitor Repair

December 24, 2015 by Al Williams 18 Comments

If you’ve ever worked on old gear, you probably know that electrolytic capacitors are prone to failure. [Dexter] undertook a repair of some four-decade-old capacitors in a power supply. He didn’t replace them. He fixed the actual capacitors.

The reason these units are prone to fail is the flip side of what people like about electrolytics: high capacitance in a small package. In a classic parallel plate capacitor, the capacity goes up as the distance between the plates shrinks. In an electrolytic, one plate is a rolled up spiral. The other plate is conductive fluid. The insulator between (the dielectric) is a very thin layer of oxide that forms on the spiral. Over time, the oxide degrades, but this degradation repairs itself when using the capacitor. If the capacitor isn’t powered up for an extended period, the oxide will degrade beyond the point of self-repair.

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Baby Armaments Are Not To Be Messed With

December 23, 2015 by James Hobson 20 Comments

[theKylenator] spent about a month building this brilliant Halloween costume for his son. We realize its almost the holidays, but this is just too darn awesome not to share, despite being a bit late for our standard Halloween hacks.

Made completely out of cardboard, it just goes to show you really can make some awesome hacks that aren’t expensive — or overly complicated.

While the baby appears rather indifferent in possessing a suit capable of mass destruction, the wife filming the video sounds ever so impressed too: “It’s pretty cool babe.”

[Kyle] on the other hand is having the time of his life. Just listen to the mechwarrior sound effects he makes.

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Polarizing 3D Scanner Gives Amazing Results

December 23, 2015 by Al Williams 16 Comments

What if you could take a cheap 3D sensor like a Kinect and increase its effectiveness by three orders of magnitude? The Kinect is great, of course, but it does have a limited resolution. To augment this, MIT researchers are using polarized measurements to deduce 3D forms.

The Fresnel equations describe how the shape of an object changes reflected light polarization, and the researchers use the received polarization to infer the shape. The polarizing sensor is nothing more than a DSLR camera and a polarizing filter, and scanning resolution is down to 300 microns.

The problem with the Fresnel equations is that there is an ambiguity so that a single measurement of polarization doesn’t uniquely identify the shape, and the novel work here is to use information from depth sensors like Kinect to select from the alternatives.

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Camera Quadcopter Almost Hits Slalom Skiier

December 23, 2015 by Elliot Williams 107 Comments

During the World Cup slalom skiing championship on Wednesday, ski champion [Marcel Hirscher] was nearly hit by an out-of-control camera drone, that crashed just behind him while filming during a run. Watch the (scary) video embedded after the break.

According to this article in Heise.de (Google Translate link), the pilot was accredited and allowed to fly the quad, but only over a corridor where no spectators were present. After the first couple of runs, apparently the pilot went off course and quite obviously lost control of the copter.

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The Hackaday 2015 Omnibus: A Puzzle So Dense, Even We Don’t Know The Answer

December 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Print is dead, so we put a skull on it. That’s the philosophy behind the 2015 Hackaday Omnibus, the printed collection of the best Hackaday has to offer.

We have a few ideas of where we would like to take the print edition of Hackaday. Mad magazine-style fold-ins are on the list, specifically a fold-in style schematic that does two completely different things. Remember when records were included as a magazine insert? Those are called flexi-discs, and there’s exactly one company that still does it. All of these and more are plans for the future, and for the 2015 Hackaday Omnibus, we chose to include something we’re all very familiar with: a puzzle. This is no ordinary puzzle – even we don’t know what the solution is.

EOT ACK BS — The first clue on the front cover of the 2015 Omnibus

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Hackaday’s Editorial Vision

December 23, 2015 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

I had the honor of speaking at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference in November on the topic of Hackaday’s Editorial Vision. We are bringing to a close an amazing year in which our writing team has grown in every respect. We have more editors, writers, and community members than ever before (Hackaday.io passed 100,000 members). With this we have been able to produce a huge amount of high-quality original content that matters to anyone interested in engineering — the best of which is embodied in the expansive Omnibus Volume 2 print edition. 2015 also marked an unparalleled ground-game for us; we took the Hackaday Prize all over the world and were warmly greeted by you at every turn. And of course, the Hackaday SuperConference (where I presented the talk) is a major milestone: Hackaday’s first ever full-blown conference.

So this begs the question, what next? What is guiding Hackaday and where do we plan to go in the future? Enjoy this video which is a really a ‘State of the Union’ for Hackaday, then join me after the break for a few more details on why we do what we do.