Turn Your $10 Dollar Mouse Into A Fancy $10 Dollar Mouse With CNC

February 19, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 20 Comments

We feel it’s healthy to cultivate a general desire for more neat tools. That’s just one of the reasons we like [doublecloverleaf]’s retro PC mouse. It certainly meets the requirement, the first computer mouse was wooden, and the mouse he used as the guts for this is so retro it belongs in the dollar bin at the thrift store.

To begin with, [doublecloverleaf] took a picture of the footprint of his aged, but trustworthy laser mouse. Using the photo in SolidWorks he built a model of the circuit board, and with that digitized, a mouse that suited his aesthetics around it. The final model is available on GrabCAD.

Edit: Woops, looks like we accidentally slandered a great Slovenian community CNC project. Check out the comments for more info. Original text in italics.

Next came the CNC. It looks like he’s using one of those Chinese 3040 mills that are popular right now. The electronics are no good, but if you luck out you can get a decent set of mechanics out of one. He did a two side milling operation on a wood block, using four small holes to align the gcode before each step, and then milled the bottom out of aluminum. Lastly, he milled the buttons out of aluminum as well, and turned a knurled scroll wheel on his lathe.
The end result looks exceedingly high end, and it would be a hard first guess to assume the internals were equivalent to a $10 Amazon house brand mouse.

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Home-Made Solenoid Motor

February 19, 2016 by Richard Baguley 28 Comments

Want to really understand how something works? Make one yourself. That’s the approach that Reddit user [Oskarbjo] took with this neat electric motor build. He made the whole thing from scratch, using an Arduino, 3D printing, and ample quantities of wire to create a solenoid motor. This transforms the linear force of a solenoid, where a magnet is moved by a magnetic field, into rotary force. It’s rather like an internal combustion engine, but driven by electricity instead of explosions. Hopefully.

[Oskarbjo]’s engine seems to work, including a rather neat mechanism to detect the rotation of the shaft and relay that back to the controller. He hasn’t posted much detail in the build process, unfortunately, but did say that “If you’d want to build something similar I can probably help you out a bit, but half the fun is coming up with your own solutions.” Amen to that. We’ve seen a few neat solenoid motor builds, but this one wins points for starting from scratch. There is an Instagram video of the motor running after the break.

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What Can We Learn From A Cheap Induction Cooktop?

February 19, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 16 Comments

Sometimes tearing down a cheap appliance is more interesting that tearing down an expensive one. A lot of the best engineering happens when cost is an issue. You may not solve the problem well, but you can solve it well enough for a discount shelf.

[openschemes] purchased a 1.8kW induction hot plate at a low price off Amazon. The reasons for the discount soon became apparent. The worst of which was a fully intolerable amount of high frequency switching noise. Wanting to know how it worked, he took it apart.

After he had it apart on his desk, he deciphered the circuit, and wrote about it clearly. As usual with extremely cheap electronics, some clever hacks were employed. The single micro-controller was used for monitoring, and generated a PWM signal that was instantly converted to DC through some filters. All the switching was done the old fashioned way, which explained why the hotplate seemed so brainless to [openschemes] when he first turned it on.

Lastly, he did some work on manually controlling the cooktop for whatever reason. The good news? He managed to figure out how to control it. Unfortunately he also destroyed his unit in the process, via a misapplication of 1200 volts. A fitting end, and we learned a lot!

Thanks [David Balfour] for the tip!

Rope Braiding Machine Built Entirely From LEGO Technics

February 19, 2016 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

If you’ve ever seen a rope-braiding machine in action, you know they’re amazing machines where bobbins of thread whirl and spin in a complex dance to weave the threads under and over each other. Building one of these machines must be incredibly difficult; building one out of LEGO Technics pieces is darn near insane.

[Nico71], as hardcore a Technics builder as they come, tackled this complex build and made it work. A large drum spins horizontally and carries three groups of three planetary-mounted thread bobbins. The entire drum spins in one direction while the bobbins and another die with three holes spin the other way. The resulting braids are then fed through another spinning die, and the resulting 9-strand rope is taken up by a winding drum. The drum has a self-reversing feeding mechanism to keep the finished spool neat and tidy. The most impressive thing about the build, though, is the fact that it’s all powered by a single motor, and that everything is synchronized via gears, shafts, sprockets, chains and clutches. It’s a Technics tour de force you can see in action after the break.

[Nico71]’s build are pretty amazing. Some are pure art, others are models of classic cars and motorcycles, but things like his loom and the calculator he’s working on now are remarkable. Of course if you need to see more of the mesmerizing ballet of rope-braiding machines, check out this 16-bobbin hand-cranked version.

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The OpenR/C Project

February 19, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

[Daniel Norée] started the OpenR/C project back in 2012 when he bought a Thing-O-Matic. In search of a project to test out his new printer, he set his sights on a remote controlled car, which as he put it,”… seemed like the perfect candidate, as it presents a lot of challenges with somewhat intricate moving parts along with the need for a certain level of precision and durability.”

After releasing his second design, the OpenR/C Truggy, he realized a community was forming around this idea, and needed a place to communicate. So, he created a Google+ group. Today, the Truggy has been downloaded over 100,000 times and the Google group has over 5,000 members. It’s a very active community of RC and 3d printing enthusiasts who are testing the limits of what a 3d printer can do.

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Aquire Awesome Audio For BeagleBone

February 19, 2016 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

[Henrik Langer] put his powerful audio acquisition and output board up on Hackaday.io, and we thought we’d point it out to you. It’s one of those projects that used to be pro audio just a few years back, but is doable (and affordable) DIY today: dual stereo inputs and four(!) stereo outputs, all sampled at 24 bits and up to 192 kHz. It’s configured as a BeagleBone cape, and comes with a customized Linux distribution for the ‘Bone.

What would you do with such a thing? It’s essentially a recording studio in your pocket, with a computer attached. The video (linked below the break) demonstrates using the device as a real-time stereo delay effect unit, but that’s only making use of one channel. Between effects, recording, and then all sorts of much-better-than-CD quality sound synthesis and playback possibilities, it’s an open-ended audio playground.

And all that from what is essentially a (very well-done) breakout board for a fancy DAC/ADC chip from Analog Devices: the AD1938. We’d love to have one of these on our desktop. Check out [Henrik]’s GitHub for the PCB and build instructions and BOM and everything else you’d need to get started. Very nice job!

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Variable Instruction Computing: What Is Old Is New Again

February 19, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 63 Comments

Every twenty to twenty-five years, trends and fads start reappearing. 2016 is shaping up to be a repeat of 1992; the X-files is back on the air, and a three-way presidential election is a possibility. Star Trek is coming back, again. Roll these observations back another twenty-five years, and you have The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and riots at the DNC convention in Chicago.

History repeating itself is not the exclusive domain of politics and popular culture. It happens with tech, too: the cloud is just an extension of thin clients which are an extension of time-sharing. Everything old is new again.

For the last few years, Soft Machines, a fabless semiconductor company running in stealth mode, released the first preview for an entirely new processor architecture. This new architecture, VISC, offers higher performance per Watt than anything available on the market. If you’ve been paying attention for the last decade or so, the future of computing isn’t 200-Watt space heaters that also double as powerful CPUs. The future is low power machines that are good enough to run Facebook or run some JavaScript. With servers, performance per Watt is possibly the most important metric. How will Soft Machines upend the semiconductor market with new processors and new architectures? If you know your history, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

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