Day: August 4, 2017

Pogo Pin Serial Adapter Thing

August 4, 2017 by 37 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was working on a small project of mine, and I faced a rather large problem. I had to program nearly five hundred badges in a week. I needed a small programming adapter that would allow me to stab a few pads on a badge with six pogo pins, press a button, and move onto the next badge.

While not true for all things in life, sometimes you need to trade quality for expediency. This is how I built a terrible but completely functional USB to serial adapter to program hundreds of badges in just a few hours.

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Simple 3D-Printed Circuitry

August 4, 2017 by 12 Comments

One of the problems encountered thus far with 3D-printing circuits with conductive filament is that it doesn’t really bond to anything, let alone solder, so how does one use it?

[mikey77] wrote an Instructable showing how to print circuit boards and create simple circuits, using shape of the plastic as a way to control the circuit. We like how he used using the flexible nature of the filament to make buttons, with two layers of conductive material coming together with the press of a finger.

He also created a linear potentiometer with a 3D-printed wiper that increases the ohms of the connection the farther it’s pushed. The filament doesn’t have the same conductivity as copper so [mikey] was able make resistors by stringing pieces of conductive plastic between two leads. There are also some hexagonal touch pads that turned out very nice.

We’ve published a lot of posts about DIY circuitry, including a previous effort of [mikey]’s, 3D-printed solderless circuits, plus another post about printing point-to-point circuits on a 3D printer.

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OpenCV Turret Tracks Motion, Busts Airsoft Pellets

August 4, 2017 by 7 Comments

In the eternal struggle for office dominance, the motion-tracking Airsoft/Nerf/whatever, the autonomous turret seems to be the nuclear option. [Aaron] and [Davis] built a motion-tracking turret that uses openCV to detect movement, before hitting a relay to trigger the gun.

There’s a Raspberry Pi controlling a Logitech C210 Pi-compatible webcam, with a stepper hat for the Pi controlling two NEMA steppers that aim the gun. The design is simple but elegant, with a rotating base and an assembly that raises and lowers the weapon.

The openCV intrigues us. We want to see a openCV-powered turret with color detection, so your own team doesn’t get blasted along with your hapless enemies. Or if guarding your cubicle, how about a little openCV facial recognition?

If you want to take a stab at your own, [Aaron] and [Davis] show how they built their project in their Hackaday.io page and their Python script can be found on GitHub.  Otherwise, check out the Counter Strike Airsoft robot, the Airsoft sentry gun, and the Nerf turret powered by Slack we published previously. Continue reading “OpenCV Turret Tracks Motion, Busts Airsoft Pellets” →