Have you ever seen a product in the store and been shocked at what the manufacturer was trying to charge for it? Since you’re reading Hackaday, we can safely assume the answer to that question; building a homebrew version of some commercial product for a fraction of its retail price is practically a rite of passage around these parts. So it’s fitting that for his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Madaeon] submitted the “DIYson”, an open source version of a popular high-end vacuum made by a British company who’s name you can surely guess.
As [Madaeon] explains on the project’s Hackaday.io page, the idea behind “cyclonic” vacuums is not particularly complex. Essentially, with a powerful enough blower and carefully designed chamber, the incoming air will spin around so fast that dust is pulled out by centrifugal force. The trick is getting it working on a small enough scale to be a handheld device. Especially given the energy requirements for the blower motor.
Luckily for the modern hacker, we’re living in the “Golden Age” of DIY. With a 3D printer you can produce plastic components with complex geometry, and thanks to a resurgence in remote controlled aircraft, powerful motors and high capacity lithium-ion batteries are easily obtainable. Powered by what’s essentially the hardware that would go into an electric ducted fan plane, the total cost of all the electronics for the DIYson comes in right around $60 USD. Even with a roll of printer filament added to the mix, you’re still comfortably at half the cost of the “name brand” alternative.
With some refinements, [Madaeon] hopes that this open source dust-buster will be a staple of labs and hackerspaces all over the world. Judging by the performance his early prototype shows in the video after the break, we know we wouldn’t mind having one.
Cool! Just add the HEPA filter and you’ll have a true clone.
All lawyers form a queue on the left please.
I think you may have mixed up your pronouns.
Cool project. I could see this not just as a way to save some money, but to put good lightweight dust collection easily near individual tools on demand.
Scratch my first comment, he simply has someone else doing the demo and in the project page photo.
Great build! And yup, sounds like a Dyson, too!
If you used something commonly disposed of to capture the dirt, like maybe 1 gallon jugs, milk cartons, or amazon shipping boxes, you could just detach the full cannister, drop it in the trash, and attach a “fresh” one without creating the cloud of dust and debris associated with emptying a bucket.
Its 2019, don’t trash things like milk jugs. Recycle them.
Major points for the name alone.
As with most vacuum cleaners, it has great potential as a sci-fi weapon. See the vacuum -with-a-funnel of the Mole Men in Superman. Scared me good when I was a wee lad. I still think of them first whenever I see on old vac. http://www.multiversitycomics.com/tv/adventures-of-superman-unknown-people/
This inspires! I have been thinking about a portable vacuum to collect seeds from invasive plants. Some like, Garlic Mustard, have thousands of seeds per plant that can pop out of pods if disturbed. Something which hoovers and chops might be worth trying…
I wonder how easy would it be to make a scaled up version for the whole house, using 5 gallon buckets as the collection bin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfrXIiJyqkQ
Depends on your skill. For me it’s no-go, but for guys like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c19NzKRkv7E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN1QW_BTArQ&list=PLBfiYOoCeIJv1FjCDit8dGyfAbpe_lRRG
it seems like no problem at all ;)
Wow, that sucks so hard, which in this case is high praise.
Shouldn’t the inner port of the exhaust be high above the dust canister floor, in the center of the vortex?
Seems to me that pulling air so close from where the dust fell from the vortex would tend to suck up dusto out again
https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/1848581557742640188.png
Also the intake should be INSIDE the cone for the centrifugal force to increase as the dust falls down the cone’s sides toward smaller radius.
I think the ergonomics are bad and problems with the wrist and tendons are foreseeable.
Inside the cone,
for a higher force for the velocity – due to the smaller diameter,
the cone should be a cylinder – so the separation force is equal and debris doesn’t flow up the inside of the cylinder/cone,
it should be open at both the top and bottom, and short enough it can’t end up in the debris at the bottom
debris settles out down the cylinder due to gravity
air in middle of cylinder, and near top, has low/no debris and that clean air flows out the top
look at the water/oil separation tubes
hmmm
posts are not listed as the Reply to that is selected and Replay To that is displayed
used to work…
Friend of mine applied for job at D*son after university. Compulsive maker of things since he was a child. He made it past the skype interview with a synthetic human to the real interview with a real human. He pointed out that when he took everything out of his cylindrical shop vac apart from (crucially) the L shaped piece of plastic where the hose enters the side of the cylinder, that deflects the air so it swirls around the rim, this removes about 95% of the dirt with ‘no loss of suction’ either. He is happy to put up with the other 5% coming back out on the grounds of simplicity, no HEPA filters to extract/clean and monster suction. He was not offered the job for some reason – Heretic.
With so many factors to consider, here is the list of best vacuum cleaners, perfect for keeping your home dust-free. This is very useful BTW!