Couch Potato Refined: Self-Rotating TV Uses Plywood Gears

July 26, 2018 by Al Williams 20 Comments

When we first saw [Mikeasaurus’] project to rotate his TV 90 degrees in case he wanted to lay down and channel surf we were ready to be unimpressed. But it grew on us as we read about how he fabricated his own gearing system to make a car seat motor rotate the TV.

The gearing system is made from plywood and the design was from geargenerator.com, a freebie design tool we’ve covered before. You’d think you’d need a laser cutter, but in this case, the gear forms were printed out, glued on the plywood and then cut out manually. Each gear is made of several laminated together.

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Shining A Light On Hearing Loss

July 26, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 16 Comments

When auditory cells are modified to receive light, do you see sound, or hear light? To some trained gerbils at University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany under the care of [Tobias Moser], the question is moot. The gerbils were instructed to move to a different part of their cage when administrators played a sound, and when cochlear lights were activated on their modified cells, the gerbils obeyed their conditioning and went where they were supposed to go.

In the linked article, there is software which allows you to simulate what it is like to hear through a cochlear implant, or you can check out the video below the break which is not related to the article. Either way, improvements to the technology are welcome, and according to [Tobias]: “Optical stimulation may be the breakthrough to increase frequency resolution, and continue improving the cochlear implant”. The first cochlear implant was installed in 1964 so it has long history and a solid future.

This is not the only method for improving cochlear implants, and some don’t require any modified cells, but [Tobias] explained his reasoning. “I essentially took the harder route with optogenetics because it has a mechanism I understand,” and if that does not sound like so many hackers who reach for the tools they are familiar with, we don’t know what does. Revel in your Arduinos, 555 timers, transistors, or optogenetically modified cells, and know that your choice of tool is as powerful as the wielder.

Optogenetics could become a hot ticket at bio maker spaces. We have talked about optogenetics in lab rodents before, but it also finds purchase in zebrafish and roundworm.

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Dual-Port Memory And Raspberry Pi Team Up For Retro Console Multicart

July 26, 2018 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

There’s something powerful about reliving the experience of using a game console from our personal good old days, especially the tactile memories stored up from hundreds of hours handling a chintzy joystick or the sound and feel of inserting a game cartridge. Emulators have their place, but they fall far short of period-correct hardware in the nostalgia department.

That’s not to say that the retro gear can’t use a little help in terms of usability, which is why [Scott M. Baker] built this Raspberry Pi multi-cartridge for his Atari 5200. The idea is to maintain the experience of the cartridge interface without having to keep stacks of cartridges around for all the games he wants to play. [Scott] leveraged the approach he used when he built a virtual floppy drive for a homebrew PC/XT: dual-port memory. The IDT7007 is a 32k chip that lives between the Atari 5200 and a Raspberry Pi Zero and can be addressed by both systems; the Pi to write ROM images to the memory, and the console to read them. He had to deal with some fussy details like chip select logic and dealing with the cartridge interlock signals, not to mention the difference in voltage between the memory chip’s logic levels and that of the Pi. Retro game-play occupies the first part of the video below; skip to 6:45 for build details.

The one quibble we have is trying to jam everything into an old cartridge. It’s critical to replicating the tactile experience, and while we don’t think we’d have gone so far as to injection mold a custom cartridge to house everything without any protrusions, we might have 3D-printed a custom cartridge instead. In the end it doesn’t detract much from the finished project, though, and we appreciate the mix of old and new tech.

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An MRI-Safe 3D Printed Pneumatic Stepper Motor

July 26, 2018 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

You will no doubt have seen those videos where MRI machines suck up all sorts of metallic objects with hilariously disastrous results. The magnetic field in one of these machines can easily pull in metal objects from across the room, exerting a force of several hundred pounds on any ferrous object unlucky enough to wander too close. As you can probably imagine, designing mechanical devices that can operate in such an intense magnetic field is exceptionally difficult.

But this fully 3D printed pneumatic stepper motor designed by [Foad Sojoodi Farimani] might one day change that. The PneuAct, which he presented at the recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Brisbane, Australia, manages to run at up to 850 RPM with full position control using bursts of air rather than electronic pulses. Made entirely of plastic and without any electronic components, the PneuAct can not only operate in intense magnetic fields but also areas with flammable gases where sparks could potentially cause an explosion.

We often say that a design is “fully” 3D printable, even though it might require screws or other bits of hardware. But in the case of the PneuAct, it’s truly all printed. It has to be, or else the whole thing would be ripped apart when it got to close to the MRI machine. Each and every piece of the motor is printed in ABS, and can be used without any additional machining or cleanup. No lubrication is required, and [Foad] mentions that the whole thing is so cheap that it can be disposable. Which is a huge advantage in medical environments where contamination could be a concern.

Design-wise the PneuAct is essentially an expanded version of the 3D printed air motors we’ve seen previously, but it would be fair to say that none has ever been studied so closely before.

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Bringing Augmented Reality To The Workbench

July 26, 2018 by Donald Papp 12 Comments

[Ted Yapo] has big ideas for using Augmented Reality as a tool to enhance an electronics workbench. His concept uses a camera and projector system working together to detect objects on a workbench, and project information onto and around them. [Ted] envisions virtual displays from DMMs, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other instruments projected onto a convenient place on the actual work area, removing the need to glance back and forth between tools and the instrument display. That’s only the beginning, however. A good camera and projector system could read barcodes on component bags to track inventory, guide manual PCB assembly by projecting which components go where, display reference data, and more.

An open-sourced, accessible machine vision system working in tandem with a projector would open a lot of doors. Fortunately [Ted] has prior experience in this area, having previously written the computer vision code for room-scale dynamic projection environments. That’s solid experience that he can apply to designing a workbench-scale system as his entry for The Hackaday Prize.

Hackaday Belgrade: Luka Mustafa On Exploiting IoT Niches

July 26, 2018 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Ecology is a strange discipline. At its most basic, it’s the study of how living things interact with their environment. It doesn’t so much seek to explain how life works, but rather how lives work together. A guiding principle of ecology is that life finds a way to exploit niches, subregions within the larger world with a particular mix of resources and challenges. It’s actually all quite fascinating.

But what does ecology have to do with Luka Mustafa’s talk at the 2018 Hackaday Belgrade Conference? Everything, as it turns out, and not just because Luka and his colleagues put IoT tools on animals and in their environments to measure and monitor them. It’s also that Luka has found a fascinating niche of his own to exploit, one on the edge of technology and ecology. As CEO of Institute IRNAS, a non-profit technology development group in Slovenia, Luka has leveraged his MEng degree, background in ham radio, and interest in LoRaWAN and other wide-area radio networks to explore ecological niches in ways that would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago, let alone in the days when animal tracking was limited by bulky radio collars.

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This Cetus Printer Is Rigged For Silent Running

July 26, 2018 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

The entry-level 3D-printer market is a rich one, with offerings from many vendors that are surprisingly good. But nothing is perfect, and to hit the $200 price point some compromises are inevitable. That doesn’t mean you have to live with those engineering choices, of course, which makes these cheap printers a great jumping off point for aftermarket mods.

[Linas K] took this route and in the process made his Cetus 3D-printer essentially silent. The first part of the video below reviews the shortcomings of the stock machine and the mechanical changes [Linas] made, including new brackets for the Z-axis slide, relocating the WiFi antenna to someplace sensible, and adding limit switches for each slide. Inside the case, the electronics get a complete reworking, with a custom PCB to house Trinamic stepper drivers for ultraquiet operation. The new board also supports the limit switches as well as thermostatic control of the extruder fan and pads for a platform heater. As a bonus, the new PCB is much smaller than the original, leaving room to tuck the power supply into the case, which is a nice touch. It wasn’t cheap, and it meant basically gutting the printer, but the results are impressively quiet.

We’re tempted to try these silencing mods on our own Cetus, if [Linas] ever publishes the BOM and PCB designs (hint, hint). And Cetus hacking is becoming quite a thing around here. From a trio of Cetus pro-tips to turning a Cetus into a PCB machine, the little printer has a lot to offer.

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