Day: April 2, 2018

It Looks Like A Nintendo, But It’s Running A Pi: A Gamer’s Long-Sought Dream Handheld

April 2, 2018 by 6 Comments

[Christopher Foote] didn’t play quite as many games as he wanted to as a child. After years of catching up using the RetroPie and the PiGRRL 2, it was when he first picked up a Switch’s joy-cons that inspiration struck. Behold: the PiSwitch!

Realizing they operated on Bluetooth tech, [Foote] spent a fair chunk of time getting the joy-cons to properly pair to the Raspberry Pi 3 and function as one controller. Once done, he relied on Linux Joystick Mapper to manage the keybindings with some extra legwork besides to get the analog sticks working properly.

To make this console mobile, he’s packed a 6600mAh battery and Adafruit Powerboost 1000c into the device, added a second headphone jack and speaker for commuting and home enjoyment, and a Pi V2 camera module. A 3D printed case, encapsulating these components and a seven-inch touchscreen, also allows the joy-cons to be detached — though he plans on updating its design in the future.

The PiSwitch boots into a custom UI  that lets you select different services — RetroPie, Kodi, Debian, and the terminal — while the joy-cons seamlessly function together or individually regardless of the activity. Check out the quick intro tour for this project after the break!

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Emboss Your Own Seals With A Laser Cutter

April 2, 2018 by 6 Comments

Parchment might be a thing of the past, but for those of us who still use paper an embossed seal can give everything from your official documents to your love letters a bold new feeling of authenticity. As far as getting your own seals made, plenty of folks will settle for having a 3rd party make them a seal, but not us. [Jason] shows us just how simple it is to raster our own seals with a laser cutter.

As far as the process goes, there are no tricks outside the typical workflow for raster engraving. Here, [Jason] simply creates a positive and (mirrored) negative seal pattern for each side of the seal embosser. The pattern is set for raster engraving, and the notched outline will be vector cut. From here, he simply exports the design, and the laser handles the rest.

This hack turned out so cleanly it almost seems like it could got into professional use–and it already is! Some extra Google-fu told us that it’s actually a fairly standard technique across the embossing industry for making embossing seals. Nevertheless, we couldn’t share our excitement for just how accessible this technique can be to anyone within reach of some time on a laser cutter.

[Jason] is using Delrin as his material to capture the design, which cuts cleanly and nicely handles the stress of being squished against your legal documents a couple hundred times. We’ve had our fair share of love on these pages for this engineering plastic. If you’re looking to get a closer look at this material, have a go at our materials-to-know debrief and then get yourself equipped with some design principles so that you’re ready to throw dozens of designs at it.

It’s not the first time the crafting and hacking communities intermingle and start sharing tools. In fact, if you’ve got yourself a vinyl cutter kicking around, why not have a go at churning out a few pcb stencils?

Thanks for the tip, [Doug]!

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From Plastic Bottle To Plastic Brush

April 2, 2018 by 8 Comments

We first saw someone turn a plastic bottle into plastic ribbon about four years ago. Since then, we’ve wondered what this abundant, sturdy material could be used for besides just tying things together.

[Waldemar Sha] has answered that question with his excellent brush made from scrap wood and plastic bottle rope. Turning seven 1-litre bottles into curly bristle fodder was easy enough, but they have to be straight to brush effectively. No problem for [Waldemar]. He wound it all up on a  spinning homemade jig that’s anchored in a bench vise. The jig is designed to slide into a small electric sandwich grill he had lying around, and he just flips it after a while so the rope straightens evenly.

We really like the way he secured the bristles into the brush base. After drilling the holes, he sawed lengthwise channels that are deep enough for a bamboo skewer. Each group of bristles is hung over the skewer and down through the hole, and everything is glued in place before the handle is added. Sweep past the break to watch him tidy his workbench, and then learn how to make your own plastic rope.

Is there a better use of recycled plastic than making tools? Check out this joiner’s mallet made from milk jugs. Continue reading “From Plastic Bottle To Plastic Brush” →

Giant F1 Car Is 3D Printed And Radio Controlled

April 2, 2018 by 16 Comments

The OpenRC F1 car is a radio control car you can 3D print and assemble yourself. You make the parts, glue them together, and then add your RC gear. That’s all well and good, but could it be done… bigger? [3D Printing Nerd] decided to tackle this one at 4x scale.

It goes without saying that this took some work. The model has to be carved up into sections that would actually fit on the printers to hand. This can take some planning to ensure the parts still come out nicely, as they may be printed in different orientations or with different slicer settings than originally intended.

That’s just the start, though. Once they’re printed, the parts need to be accurately aligned and glued together, which is a whole extra set of challenges. Urethane, epoxy and superglue adhesives are all pressed into service here to get the job done.

It’s a multipart build, as it’s a huge undertaking to 3D print anything on this scale. It’s a great example of taking a fun project, and turning up the silly factor to 11. And of course, at the end of the day, you’ve got a gigantic RC car to play with. Perhaps the only bigger RC cars we’ve seen have been… actual cars.

A Well-Chronicled Adventure In Tiny Robotics

April 2, 2018 by 6 Comments

Some of us get into robotics dreaming of big heavy metal, some of us go in the opposite direction to build tiny robots scurrying around our tabletops. Our Hackaday.io community has no shortage of robots both big and small, each an expression of its maker’s ideals. For 2018 Hackaday Prize, [Bill Weiler] entered his vision in the form of Project Johnson Tiny Robot.

[Bill] is well aware of the challenges presented by working at a scale this small. (If he wasn’t before, he certainly is now…) Forging ahead with his ideas on how to build a tiny robot, and it’ll be interesting to see how they pan out. Though no matter the results, he has already earned our praise for setting aside the time to document his progress in detail and share his experience with the community. We can all follow along with his discoveries, disappointments, and triumphs. Learning about durometer scale in the context of rubber-band tires. Exploring features and limitations of Bluetooth hardware and writing code for said hardware. Debugging problems in the circuit board. And of course the best part – seeing prototypes assembled and running around!

As of this writing, [Bill] had just completed assembly of his V2 prototype which highlighted some issues for further development. Given his trend of documenting and sharing, soon we’ll be able to read about diagnosing the problems and how they’ll be addressed. It’s great to have a thoroughly documented project and we warmly welcome his robot to the ranks of cool tiny robots of Hackaday.io.

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Bringing Fiction To Life With 3D Printing

April 2, 2018 by 27 Comments

I print something nearly every day, and over the last few years, I’ve created hundreds of practical items. Parts to repair my car, specialized tools, scientific instruments, the list goes on and on. It’s very difficult for me to imagine going back to a time where I didn’t have the ability to rapidly create and replicate physical objects at home. I can say with complete honesty that it has been an absolutely life-changing technology for me, personally.

But to everyone else in my life, my friends and family, 3D printers are magical boxes which can produce gadgets, weapons, and characters from their favorite games and movies. Nobody wants to see the parts I made to get my girlfriend’s 1980’s Honda back on the road before she had to go to work in the morning, they want to see the Minecraft block I made for my daughter. I can’t get anyone interested in a device I made to detect the algal density of a sample of water, but they all want me to run off a set of the stones from The Fifth Element for them.

As I recently finished just such a project, a 3D printed limpet mine from Battlefield 1, I thought I would share some thoughts on the best practices for turning fiction into non-fiction.

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Zen And The Art Of Japanese Tea Robots

April 2, 2018 by 10 Comments

In Japan, tea ceremony (cha-dou) is revered as a way to a gain deeper insights into life and philosophy. Traditional Japanese tea ceremony practitioners put in long hours to master the intricacies and details of pouring tea. The road to becoming a tea master is crucial as it develops the practitioner’s mental state as well as physical technique.

However if you don’t have time to master the “way of tea”, then you can build a bot and automate your zen experience. That’s exactly what the people at Ano Labs did when they built their Japanese Tea Ceremony Robot #151A.

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