Antique Pocket Watch Project Updates Antique Pocket Watch

December 8, 2019 by Kerry Scharfglass 54 Comments

Here at Hackaday we have a bit of a preoccupation with timepieces. Maybe it’s the deeply personal connection to an object you wear on your body, or the need for ultimate reliability. Perhaps it’s just a fascination with the notion of time itself. Whatever the case, we don’t seem to be alone as there is a constant stream of time-related projects coming through our virtual doors. For this article we’ve unearthed the LED Pocketwatch 1.0 by [Dr. Pauline Pounds] from way back in 2009 (ironically via a post about a wristwatch from last year!). Fortunately for us the Internet Archive has saved this heirloom nouveau from the internet dustbin so we can appreciate the craftsmanship involved in [Dr. Pounds]’ work.

Check out the wonderful, spiral routing!

My how far we’ve come; a decade after this project was posted a hacker might choose to 3d print a case for a new wearable, but in 2009 that would have been an entire project by itself! [Dr. Pounds] chose to use the casing from an antique Elgin pocket watch. Even through the mists of a grainy demo video we can imagine how soft the well-worn casing must be from heavy use. This particular unit was chosen because it was a hefty 50mm in diameter, leaving plenty of room inside for a 44mm double sided PCBA with 133 0603 LEDs (60 seconds, 60 minutes, 12 hours), a PIC 16F946, an ERM, and a 110mAh LiPo. But what really sets the LED Pocketwatch 1.0 apart is the user interface.

The ERM is attached directly to the rear of the case in order to best conduct vibration to the outside world. For maximum authenticity it blips on the second, to give a sense that the digital watch is mechanically ticking like the original. The original pocket watch was designed with a closing lid which is released when the stem is pressed. [Dr. Pounds] integrated a button and encoder with the end of the stem (on the PCBA) so the device can be aware of this interaction; on lid open it wakes the device to display the time on the LEDs. The real pièce de résistance is that he also integrated a minuscule rotary encoder, so when the stem is pressed you can rotate it to set the time. It’s all quite elegantly integrated and imminently usable.

At this point we’d love to link to sources, detailed drawings, or CAD files, but unfortunately we haven’t found any. If this has you inspired check out some of the other pocket watches we’ve posted about in the past. If you’re interested in a live demo of the LED Pocketwatch 1.0, check out the original video after the break.

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RC Strandbeest Is A Head Above The Rest

December 8, 2019 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Prolific maker [Jeremy Cook] recently put the finishing touches (at least, for now) on his impressive ClearCrawler remote controlled Strandbeest, which includes among other things a surprisingly expressive “head” complete with LED matrix eyes. For anyone in the audience who was only mildly terrified of these multi-legged robotic beasties before, you may want to avert your eyes from the video after the break.

The clever locomotive design of [Theo Jansen] known as Strandbeest is a legged walker. What makes it special is that the legs themselves are not independent, but work together for a gliding action more akin to wheeled bots. [Jeremy’s] work with ClearCrawler has taken this to another level of precision and mechanization.

Before installation of the electronics, the ClearCrawler had to be tethered to a bench power supply, and could only move forward and backward. Once the locomotion was working as expected, [Jeremy] was ready to install some brains into the beast.

The robot is controlled by a dual motor driver and an Arduino Nano socketed in an I/O expansion board. Communication between the Nano onboard the walker and the hand-held remote control is provided by of a pair of nRF24L01 modules. The controller itself is a simple affair, comprised of a joystick shield plugged into an Arduino Uno.

The robot’s head is made up of a chunk of clear polycarbonate tube with a 3D printed internal frame to hold the dual 8×8 LED matrices that serve as its animated eyes. This arrangement is mounted on a servo pan and tilt mount, which is controlled by an analog stick on the controller. While the head doesn’t currently serve any practical function, it does give [Jeremy] a chance to emote a bit with his creation; a popular trick when he shows the ClearCrawler off.

A few years ago we covered this robot’s predecessor, the considerably larger ClearWalker. While that machine was surely a beauty to behold, this smaller and more agile iteration of the concept is quite a bit more practical.

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Hackaday Links: December 8, 2019

December 8, 2019 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Now that November of 2019 has passed, it’s a shame that some of the predictions made in Blade Runner for this future haven’t yet come true. Oh sure, 109 million people living in Los Angeles would be fun and all, but until we get our flying cars, we’ll just have to console ourselves with the ability to “Enhance!” photographs. While the new service, AI Image Enlarger, can’t tease out three-dimensional information, the app is intended to sharpen enlargements of low-resolution images, improving the focus and bringing up details in the darker parts of the image. The marketing material claims that the app uses machine learning, and is looking for volunteers to upload high-resolution images to improve its training set.

We’ve been on a bit of a nano-satellite bender around here lately, with last week’s Hack Chat discussing simulators for CubeSats, and next week’s focusing on open-source thrusters for PocketQube satellites. So we appreciated the timing of a video announcing the launch of the first public LoRa relay satellite. The PocketCube-format satellite, dubbed FossaSat-1, went for a ride to space along with six other small payloads on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched from New Zealand. Andreas Spiess has a short video preview of the FossaSat-1 mission, which was designed to test the capabilities of a space-based IoT link that almost anyone can access with cheap and readily available parts; a ground station should only cost a couple of bucks, but you will need an amateur radio license to uplink.

We know GitHub has become the de facto standard for source control and has morphed into a collaboration and project management platform used by everybody who’s anybody in the hacking community. But have you ever wished for a collaboration platform that was a little more in tune with the needs of hardware designers? Then InventHub might be of interest to you. Currently in a limited beta – we tried to sign up for the early access program but seem to have been put on a waiting list – it seems like this will be a platform that brings versioning directly to the ECAD package of your choice. Through plugins to KiCad, Eagle, and all the major ECAD players you’ll be able to collaborate with other designers and see their changes marked up on the schematic — sort of a visual diff. It seems interesting, and we’ll be keeping an eye on developments.

Amazon is now offering a stripped-down version of their Echo smart speaker called Input, which teams up with speakers that you already own to satisfy all your privacy invasion needs on the super cheap — only $10. At that price, it’s hard to resist buying one just to pop it open, which is what Brian Dorey did with his. The teardown is pretty standard, and the innards are pretty much what you’d expect from a modern piece of surveillance apparatus, but the neat trick here involved the flash memory chip on the main board. Brian accidentally overheated it while trying to free up the metal shield over it, and the BGA chip came loose. So naturally, he looked up the pinout and soldered it to a micro-SD card adapter with fine magnet wire. He was able to slip it into a USB SD card reader and see the whole file system for the Input. It was a nice hack, and a good teardown.

This FPV Tank Explores The Lawn

December 8, 2019 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Radio control is good and all, and it’s always fun to watch a little vehicle scoot about the backyard. But there’s always something to be said for feeling as though you’re really in control. First person view, or FPV, is the way to do it, and [Brian] has gone down that route with this tidy tank build.

The tank is 3D printed, from the chassis right down to the wheels. There’s even a moving “eye” up front containing the FPV camera, controlled by a servo, allowing the driver to look up and down. A 5.8 GHz transmitter is used to send the signal back to the driver’s goggles. The tracks are a snap-together design that are fully 3D printed, requiring no additional metal links or hardware. Forward propulsion is courtesy of a pair of 12 volt gear motors, driven from an L298N motor driver. An Arduino Nano is used in conjunction with Spektrum RC gear to receive signals and tell the tank where to go.

It’s a tidy build that would be great fun to drive through the bushes or through the house. We’ve seen even tinier builds used to inspect crawlspaces. If you build one of your own, be sure to let us know.

From Fail To Wail: Guitar Picks Made From 3D Printed Waste

December 8, 2019 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Between failed prints and iterative designs that need a few attempts before you nail them down, a certain amount of wasted material is essentially unavoidable when 3D printing. The good news is that PLA is a bioplastic and can be broken down via industrial composting, but even still, any method that allows you to reuse this material at home is worth taking a look at.

In a recent video, [Noah Zeck] details one potential use for your scrap plastic by turning his failed 3D prints into guitar picks. The idea here could really be applied to anything you can make out of thin plastic sheeting, but the fact that you can easily and cheaply produce picks with a commercially available punch makes this application particularly appealing.

The first step in this process is about as low-tech as it gets: wrap your scrap printed parts in rags, and beat them with a sledge hammer. This breaks them up into smaller and more manageable pieces, which is important for the next step. If the parts are small enough and you’ve got a decently powerful blender you don’t mind devoting to plastic recycling, we imagine that would make short work of this step as well.

Once suitably pulverized, [Noah] puts the plastic on a piece of glass and gets it warmed up with a heat gun. PLA has a fairly low glass transition temperature, so it shouldn’t take much time to soften. Then he puts a second piece of glass on top and squeezes them together to get a thin, flat sheet of plastic. Once cooled, he punches his guitar picks out of the sheet, with bonus points if the colors swirled around into interesting patterns. If you’re not musically inclined, we’ve seen a very similar method used to produce colorful floor tiles.

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Controlling Tremors As They Happen

December 8, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 26 Comments

Some neurological disorders, like Parkinson’s disease, can cause muscle tremors which can get worse as time goes along. In the beginning it may not be too difficult to manage, but as the disease progresses the tremors get worse and worse, until day-to-day movements are extremely difficult. Even picking up a fork or pouring a glass of water becomes nearly impossible. Some helpful tools have been designed to limit the impacts of the tremors, but this new device seeks to dampen the tremors directly.

A research team from Fresno State has been developing the Tremelo, which is a hand stabilizer that straps onto the arm of a person suffering from tremors. It has sets of tuned mass dampers in each of two enclosures, which rapidly shift the weights inside to counter the motion of the wearer’s tremors. The device has already shown success in 36 trial patients and does an incredible job at limiting the amount of tremors the user experiences, and also has a bonus of being non-invasive for the wearer.

The team has successfully trialed the program, but is currently seeking funding on Indiegogo. The project seems worthwhile and is a novel approach to a common problem. In the past, devices (admittedly with a much cheaper price tag) try to solve the problem externally rather than in the direction that the Tremelo has gone, and it’s a unique idea that shows a lot of promise.

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Death To All Coca Cola Cans With This Miniature Arduino Powered Cannon

December 8, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 8 Comments

[MJKZZ] sends in this entertaining little tutorial on building a small automated cannon out of a syringe.

He starts the build off by modifying an arc lighter, the fancy kind one might use to light a fire on a windy day, so that it can be controlled by a micro-controller. The arc is moved to the needle end of the syringe with a careful application of wires and hot glue. When the syringe is filled with a bit of alcohol and the original plunger is pressed back in a small spark will send it flying back out in a very satisfying fashion.

Of course it wouldn’t be a proper hack without an Arduino added on for no reason other than the joy of doing so. [MKJZZ] adds an ultrasonic sensor into the mix which, when triggered appropriately by an invading object fires the arc lighter using a reed relay.

He demonstrates the build by eliminating an intruding coke can on his work bench. You can see it in the video after the break. All in all a very fun hack.

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