Day: April 30, 2017

Printing Bed Off-Kilter? Blu-Tack To The Rescue!

April 30, 2017 by 9 Comments

For all their applications, 3D printers can be finicky machines. From extruder problems, misaligned or missing layers, to finding an overnight print turned into a tangled mess, and that’s all assuming your printer bed is perfectly leveled. [Ricardo de Azambuja’s] new linear delta printer was frustrating him. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t retain the bed leveling calibration, so he had to improvise — Blu-Tack to the rescue.

It turns out [Azambuja]’s problem was so bad that the filament wouldn’t even attempt to adhere to the printing bed. So, he turned to Printrun Pronterface and a combination of its homing feature and the piece-of-paper method to get a rough estimate of how much the bed needed to be adjusted — and a similar estimate of how big of a gob of Blu-Tack was needed.

Pressing the bed into place, he re-ran Pronterface to make sure he was on the level. [Azambuja] notes that you would have to redo this for every print, but it was good enough to print off a trio of bed leveling gears he designed so he doesn’t have to go through this headache again for some time.

Continue reading “Printing Bed Off-Kilter? Blu-Tack To The Rescue!” →

Little EBay Tesla Coil Gets An Upgrade

April 30, 2017 by 14 Comments

Like so many of the projects we feature, this one started with a cheap eBay module purchase. In this case, it was a little Tesla coil that made decent sized arcs but wasn’t quite good enough. The result was a super-sized solid state Tesla coil with better results and room to grow.

As [GreatScott!] discovered, the little eBay Tesla coil has a pretty neat design. The exciter is a Slayer circuit, a super simple one-transistor design. His reverse engineering revealed that the primary coil is simply a loop trace on the PCB under the secondary coil. Sadly, his attempt to replace the primary and reproduce the Slayer exciter resulted in anemic performance. What’s a hacker to do in that case except build a bigger coil? Much bigger — like “build your own winding jig” bigger. Twelve hundred secondary turns and an appropriately menacing-looking primary later, the results were — still anemic. It turns out the Slayer is just not up to the task. He turned to an inverter circuit that was previously used in a wireless energy transfer circuit, and we finally get to see a little of the Tesla coil magic. But wait! There’s more to come, as future videos will tweak the circuit and optimize the coil for better performance.

It’s no surprise that Tesla coils are a popular project around here, especially the musical kinds, from the tiny to the large. Music doesn’t seem to be on [GreatScott!]’s mind, though, and we’ll be watching with interest to see where he takes this build.

Continue reading “Little EBay Tesla Coil Gets An Upgrade” →

Hackaday Links: April 30, 2017

April 30, 2017 by 14 Comments

This last week was SEFF, a week of electric-powered remote-controlled aircraft above 1700 feet of Bermuda grass in the middle of Georgia. [Damon Atwood] has been bringing his 16-foot-wingspan Emmaselle to SEFF for a few years now, and this year we’re getting a great video of the flight. This is, or was at one time, the 3rd largest electric RC on the planet. It’s flying on 11S, and is absolutely beautiful in the air.

Speaking of electric RC meetups, Flite Fest West is going on right now. Flite Fest East will be July 13th through the 16th. Here’s the link to the relevant YouTube channel.

One of the very inexpensive 3D printers announced at CES by Monoprice is now on sale. It’s the improved $200 Cartesian, not the $150 delta. As I saw at CES last January, this is a slight improvement over the already fantastic V1 version of this printer. Improvements include an all metal hot end (an E3D clone) and working WiFi on the main board. Still waiting on the $150 delta printer? The only thing I can tell you is that it’s coming out soon.

StippleGen is an application from Evil Mad Scientists Labs to create stippled drawings. Stippling is dots, but not halftone. [HEXceramic] is using StippleGen to create laser cut molds for making ceramic tiles. The results look awesome, and I can’t wait to see one of these fired.

Hackaday has been voted, ‘The Hacker News of Hardware‘ by the Hacker News community. I would have included this in the links post last week, but feared that would be seen as manipulating the upvote system on Hacker News. This is great, but of course you already know Hackaday is seen as a reputable source of hardware and embedded news!

As a rule, Hackaday is nonpartisan and not political at all. In fact, two of my headlines have been shot down so far this year for using the word ‘trump’ as a verb. You’re welcome. This project is too cool, so we’re going to bend a few rules. This is a Trump gummi. It’s the rarest gummi of them all. It was carved by gummi artisans who work exclusively in the medium of gummi.

[Michael Welling] designed the PocketBone Mini in KiCad. It’s built around the Octavo Systems OSD3358, and is really, really tiny while designed to be as capable as a full size BeagleBone. He’s doing an interest check to gauge the community’s interest in this tiny, tiny single board computer.

Hackaday Prize Entry: High Speed Sampling For The Raspberry Pi

April 30, 2017 by 8 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has become a firm favorite in our community for its array of GPIOs and other interfaces, as well as its affordable computing power. Unfortunately though despite those many pins, there is a glaring omission in its interfacing capabilities. It lacks an analogue-to-digital converter, so analog inputs have to rely on an expansion card either on those GPIOs or through the USB port.

Most people remain content with simple ADCs such as Microchip’s MCP3008, or perhaps a USB sound card for low frequency moving targets. But not [Kelu124], he’s set his sights on something much faster. The original Pi is reputed to be capable of handling a 10Msamples/s ADC, so he thinks its faster successors should be able to work much faster. To that end, he’s created an ADC pHAT which he thinks should be good for twice that figure.

The choice of silicon is a CA3306E, a 6-bit device that’s rated at 15Msamples/S. It’s something of a dated device as is shown by its DIP package, and a quick look through major suppliers shows it to be no longer available. Happily though, when you look at his GitHub repo it emerges that he’s also producing a board based on the ADC08200, so his software is targetable at other chips.

Whether or not you need your Pi to serve as video digitizer or high-speed instrument, it’s useful and interesting to take a look at a board like this one in action. We often don’t use the raw power of our single board computers, and this project proves that should we ever need to, we can.

If ADCs interest you, take a look at [Bil Herd]’s series on delta-sigma ADCs.

Thanks [Fustini] for the tip.

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Vintage Vending Machine Makes The Perfect Gift

April 30, 2017 by 10 Comments

Nothing says ‘I Love You’ like an old vending machine, and if it is a restored and working vintage Vendo V-80 cola dispenser then you have yourself a winner. [Jan Cumps] from Belgium was assigned the repair of the device in question by a friend. He started off with just a working refrigerator and no electronics. In a series of repairs, he began with replacing the mechanical coin detector’s switches with optical and magnetic sensors to detect the movement of the coin. These sensors are in turn connected to an Arduino which drives the dispensing motor. The motor itself had to be rewound as part of the repair. Since the project is on a deadline, the whole thing is finished using protoboards and through-hole parts. The final system works by dispensing one frosty bottle every time a coin is inserted.

In contrast to most vending machine repairs, this project was a simple one. Instead of using an off-the-shelf coin detector, a simple LED and photodiode pair brought the hack to life. This could easily be adapted to any machine and even be used to create a DIY vending machine on the cheap.  Continue reading “Vintage Vending Machine Makes The Perfect Gift” →

TI 99/4A Weather Station

April 30, 2017 by 21 Comments

If you still have a drawer full of slap bracelets from the 1990s because, you know, they might come back, then you’ll appreciate [Vorticon’s] latest project. Sure, we see lots of weather stations, but this one is controlled by a TI 99/4A computer. This home computer from the 1980s was actually ahead of its time with a 16-bit processor.

The sensors use Xbee modules and an Arduino Uno. Of course, the Uno has more power than the TI computer, but that’s not really the point, right? He’s made a series of videos detailing the construction (you can see the first one below, but there are five, so far).

Continue reading “TI 99/4A Weather Station” →

U.S Air Force Is Going To Get Hacked

April 30, 2017 by 24 Comments

[HackerOne] has announced that US Dept of Defense (DoD) has decided to run their biggest bug bounty program ever, Hack the Air force.

You may remember last year there was the Hack the Pentagon bug bounty program, Well this year on the coattails of last year’s success the DoD has decided to run an even bigger program this year: Hack The Air force. Anyone from “The Five Eyes” countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and of course the United States) can take part. This is a change in format from the Pentagon challenge which was only open to U.S citizens and paid out a total of around $75,000 in bug bounties.

Now obviously there are rules. You can’t just hack The Air Force no matter how much you want “All their base are belong to you”. The DoD want computer hackers to find bugs in their public facing web services and are not so much interested in you penetration testing their weapons systems or any other critical infrastructure. Try that and you may end up with a lovely never-ending tour of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.