Build A 3D Printer Workhorse, Not An Amazing Disappointment Machine

July 6, 2016 by Moritz Walter 68 Comments

3D printers have become incredibly cheap, you can get a fully workable unit for $200 – even without throwing your money down a crowdfunded abyss. Looking at the folks who still buy kits or even build their own 3D printer from scratch, investing far more than those $200 and so many hours of work into a machine you can buy for cheap, the question “Why the heck would you do that?” may justifiably arise.

The answer is simple: DIY 3D printers done right are rugged workhorses. They work every single time, they never break, and even if: they are an inexhaustible source of spare parts for themselves. They have exactly the quality and functionality you build them to have. No clutter and nothing’s missing. However, the term DIY 3D printer, in its current commonly accepted use, actually means: the first and the last 3D printer someone ever built, which often ends in the amazing disappointment machine.

This post is dedicated to unlocking the full potential in all of these builds, and to turning almost any combination of threaded rods and plywood into a workshop-grade piece of equipment.

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Using The Vive’s Lighthouse With DIY Electronics

July 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

The HTC Vive is the clear winner of the oncoming VR war, and is ready to enter the hallowed halls of beloved consumer electronics behind the Apple Watch, Smart Home devices, the 3Com Audrey, and Microsoft’s MSN TV. This means there’s going to be a lot of Vives on the secondhand market very soon, opening the doors to some interesting repurposing of some very cool hardware.

[Trammell Hudson] has been messing around with the Vive’s Lighthouse – the IR emitting cube that gives the Vive its sense of direction. There’s nothing really special about this simple box, and it can indeed be used to give any microcontroller project an orientation sensor.

The Vive’s Lighthouse is an exceptionally cool piece of tech that uses multiple scanning IR laser diodes and a bank of LEDs that allows the Vive to sense its own orientation. It does this by alternately blinking and scanning lasers from left to right and top to bottom. The relevant measurements that can be determined from two Lighthouses are the horizontal angle from the first lighthouse, the vertical angle from the first lighthouse, and the horizontal angle from the second lighthouse. That’s all you need to orient the Vive in 3D space.

To get a simple microcontroller to do the same trick, [Trammell] is using a fast phototransistor with a 120° field of view. This setup only works out to about a meter away from the Lighthouses, but that’s enough for testing.

[Trammell] is working on a Lighthouse library for the Arduino and ESP8266, and so far, everything works. He’s able to get the angle of a breadboard to a Lighthouse with just a little bit of code. This is a great enabling build that is going to allow a lot of people to build some very cool stuff, and we can’t wait to see what happens next.

Seeing The Truly Invisible With DIY Shortwave UV Imaging

July 6, 2016 by Donald Papp 19 Comments

We’ve all seen how to peel IR filters off digital cameras so they can see a little better in the dark, but there’s so much more to this next project than that. How about being able to see things normally completely outside the visual spectrum, like hydrogen combustion or electrical discharges?

[David Prutchi] has just shared his incredible work on making his own shortwave ultraviolet viewers for imaging entirely outside of the normal visible spectrum – in other words, seeing the truly invisible. The project has not only fascinating application examples, but provides detailed information about how to build two different imagers – complete with exact part numbers and sources.

If you’re thinking UV is a broad brush, you’re right. [David Prutchi] says he is most interested in Solar Blind UV (SBUV):

Solar radiation in the 240 nm to 280 nm range is completely absorbed by the ozone in the atmosphere and cannot reach Earth’s surface…

Without interference from background light, even very weak levels of UV are detectable. This allows ultraviolet-emitting phenomena (e.g. electrical discharges, hydrogen combustion, etc.) to be detectable in full daylight.

There is more to the process than simply slapping a UV filter onto a camera, but happily he addresses all the details and the information is also available as a PDF whitepaper. [David Prutchi] has been working with imaging for a long time, and with his sharing of detailed build plans and exact part numbers maybe others will get in on the fun. He’s also previously shared full build plans for a Raspberry Pi based multispectral imager, [David’s] DOLPHi Polarization Camera was a finalist in the 2015 Hackaday Prize, and he spoke at the Hackaday SuperConference about the usefulness of advanced imaging techniques for things like tissue analysis in medical procedures, and landmine detection for the purposes of cleaning up hazardous areas.