DIY Wire Bender Gets Wires All Bent Into Shape

October 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 30 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve shown a DIY wire bending machine, and [How To Mechatronics] has come up with an elegant design with easy construction through the use of 3D-printed parts which handle most of the inherent complexity. This one also has a Z-axis so that you can produce 3D wire shapes. And as with all wire bending machines, it’s fun to watch it in action, which you can do in the video below along with seeing the step-by-step construction.

One nice feature is that he’s included a limit switch for automatically positioning the Z-axis when you first turn it on. It also uses a single 12 volt supply for all the motors, and the Arduino that acts as the brains. The 5 volts for the one servo motor is converted from 12 using an LM7805 voltage regulator. He’s also done a nice job packaging the Arduino, stepper motor driver boards, and the discrete components all onto a single custom surface mount PCB.

The bender isn’t without some issues though, such as that there’s no automatic method for giving it bending instructions. You can write code for the steps into an Arduino sketch, which is really just a lot of copy and paste, and he’s also provided a manual mode. In manual mode, you give it simple commands from a serial terminal. However, it would be only one step more to get those same commands from a file, or perhaps even convert from G-code or some other format.

Another issue is that the wire straightener puts too much tension on the wire, preventing the feeder from being able to pull the wire along. One solution is to feed it pre-straightened wire, not too much to ask for since it’s really the bending we’re after. But fixing this problem outright could be as simple as changing two parts. For the feeder, the wire is pulled between copper pipe and a flat steel bearing, and we can’t help wondering whether perhaps replacing them with a knurled cylinder and a grooved one would work as the people at [PENSA] did with their DIWire which we wrote about back in 2012. Sadly, the blog entries we linked to no longer work but a search shows that their instructable is still up if you want to check out their feeder parts.

As for the applications, we can think of sculpting, fractal antennas, tracks for marble machines, and really anything which could use a wireframe for its structure. Ideas anyone?

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Glasses For The Hearing Impaired?

October 14, 2018 by Al Williams 10 Comments

If you don’t have hearing loss, it is easy to forget just how much you depend on your ears. Hearing aids are great if you can afford them, but they aren’t like glasses where they immediately improve your sense in almost every way. In addition to having to get used to a hearing aid you’ll often find increased noise and even feedback. If you’ve been to a theater lately, you may have noticed a closed caption display system somewhere nearby that you can sit within visual range of should you be hard of hearing. That limits your seat choices though, and requires you to split your attention between the stage and the device. The National Theatre of London is using Epson smart glasses to put the captions right in your individual line of vision (see video below).

The Epson glasses are similar to the Google Glass that caused such a stir a few years ago, and it seems like such a great application we are surprised it has taken this long to be created. We were also surprised to hear about the length of the project, amazingly it took four years. The Epson glasses can take HDMI or USB-C inputs, so it seems as though a Raspberry Pi, a battery, and the glasses could have made this a weekend project.

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Hackaday Links: October 14, 2018

October 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Here’s something of interest of 3D printing enthusiasts. How do you print lightweight 3D objects? [Tom Stanton] does a lot of stuff with 3D printing and RC airplanes, so yeah, he’s probably the guy you want to talk to. His solution is Simplify3D, printing two layers for whatever nozzle diameter you have, some skills with Fusion360, and some interesting design features that include integrated ribs.

Moog released their first polyphonic analog synth in 35 years. It’s massive, and it costs eight thousand dollars.

There’s a RISC-V contest, sponsored by Google, Antmicro, and Microchip. The goal is to encourage designers to create innovative FPGA and soft CPU implementations with the RISC-V ISA. There are four categories, the smallest implementation for SpartFusion2 or IGLOO2 boards, and the smallest implementation that fits on an iCE40 UltraPlus board. The two additional categories are the highest performance implementation for these boards. The prize is $6k.

” I heard about polarization filters and now I’m getting a hundred thousand dollars” — some moron. IRL Glasses are glasses that block screens. When you wear them, you can’t watch TV. This is great, as now all advertising is on TVs for some inexplicable reason, and gives these people an excuse to use frames from John Carpenter’s masterpiece They Live in their Kickstarter campaign. Question time: why don’t all polarized sunglasses do this. Because there’s a difference between linear and circular polarized lenses. Question: there have been linear polarized sunglasses sitting in the trash since the release of James Cameron’s Avatar. Why now? No idea.

Alexa is on the ESP32. Espressif released their Alexa SDK that supports conversations, music and audio serivces (Alexa, play Despacito), and alarms. The supported hardware is physically quite large, but it can be extended to other ESP32-based platforms that have SPI RAM.

Listen To A Song Made From Custom Nintendo LABO Waveform Cards

October 14, 2018 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

[Hunter Irving] has been busy with the Nintendo LABO’s piano for the Nintendo Switch. In particular he’s been very busy creating his own custom waveform cards, which greatly expands the capabilities of the hackable cardboard contraption. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we covered his original method of creating 3D printed waveform cards that are compatible with the piano, but he’s taken his work further since then. Not only has he created new and more complex cards by sampling instruments from Super Nintendo games, he’s even experimented with cards based on vowel sounds in an effort to see just how far things can go. By layering the right vowel sounds just so, he was able to make the (barely identifiable) phrases I-LIKE-YOU, YOU-LIKE-ME, and LET’S-A-GO.

Those three phrases make up the (vaguely recognizable) lyrics of a song he composed using his custom waveform cards for the Nintendo LABO’s piano, appropriately titled I Like You. The song is at the 6:26 mark in the video embedded below, but the whole video is worth a watch to catch up on [Hunter]’s work. The song is also hosted on soundcloud.

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Synthesizing Mother Nature’s Sounds Like You’ve Never Seen Before

October 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 13 Comments

We’ve all heard the range of sounds to be made electronically from mostly discrete components, but what [Kelly Heaton] has achieved with her many experiments is a whole other world, the world of nature to be exact. Her seemingly chaotic circuits create a nighttime symphony of frogs, crickets, and katydids, and a pleasant stroll through her Hackaday.io logs makes how she does it crystal clear and is surely as delightful as taking a nocturnal stroll through her Virginia countryside.

The visual and aural sensations of the video below will surely tempt you further, but in case it doesn’t, here’s a taste. When Radio Shack went out of business, she lost her source of very specific piezo buzzers and so had to reverse engineers theirs to build her own, right down to making her own amplifiers on circular circuit boards and vacuum forming and laser cutting the housings. For the sounds, she starts out with a simple astable multivibrator circuit, demonstrating how to create asymmetry by changing capacitors, and then combining two of the circuits to get something which sounds just like a cricket. She then shows how to add katydids which enhance the nighttime symphony with percussive sounds much like a snare drum or hi-hat. It’s all tied together with her Mother Nature Board built up from a white noise generator, Schmitt trigger, and shift registers to turn on and off the different sound circuits, providing a more unpredictable and realistic nighttime soundscape. The video below shows the combined result, though she admits she’ll never really be finished. And be sure to check out even more photos and videos of her amazing work in the gallery on her Hackaday.io page.

For the more familiar range of sounds, though no less varied, check out our own [Elliot William’s] series, Logic Noise, where he takes us through an extensive exploration of a less Mother Naturely soundscape.

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Flash: Arduino Vidor FPGA Instructions Hit France

October 14, 2018 by Al Williams 12 Comments

If you speak French and you have an Arduino Vidor 4000, you are in luck because there’s some good news. The good news is there’s finally some inside information about how to configure the onboard FPGA yourself. The bad news though is that it is pretty sparse. If your high school French isn’t up to the task, there’s always Google Translate.

We knew some of this already. You’ll need Quartus, the FPGA design tool from Altera — er, Intel — and we know about the sample project on GitHub, too. Instead of using conventional Verilog or VHDL, the new information uses schematic capture, but that’s OK. All the design entry winds up in the same place, so it should be easy to adapt to the language of your choice. In fact, in part 2 they show both some schematics and some Verilog. Google Translate does have a little trouble with code comments, though. If you want something even stouter, there’s an example that uses Verilog to output a video frame.

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Detect Elevated Carbon Monoxide (Levels)

October 14, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 27 Comments

The molar mass of carbon monoxide (CO) is 28.0, and the molar mass of air is 28.8, so CO will rise in an ambient atmosphere. It makes sense to detect it farther from the ground, but getting a tall ladder is not convenient and certainly doesn’t make for fast deployment. What do you do if you don’t care for heights and want to know the CO levels in a gymnasium or a tall foyer? Here to save the day, is the Red Balloon Carbon Monoxide Detector.

Circuit.io generates the diagram and code to operate the CO sensor and turn a healthy green light to a warning red if unsafe levels are detected. The user holds the batteries, Arduino, and light while a red balloon lifts the sensor up to fifteen feet, or approximately five ~~three~~ meters. It is an analog sensor which needs some time to warm up so it pays to be warned about that wire length and startup.

Having a CO sentinel is a wise choice for this odorless gas.

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