Day: July 9, 2020

The Simplest TS100 Upgrade Leads Down A Cable Testing Rabbit Hole

July 9, 2020 by 49 Comments

By now, I must have had my Miniware TS100 soldering iron for nearly three years. It redefined what could be expected from the decent end of the budget soldering iron spectrum when it came on the market, and it’s still the one to beat even after those years. Small, lightweight, powerful, and hackable, it has even spawned direct imitations.

If the TS100 has a fault, it comes not from the iron itself but from its cable. A high-grade iron will have an extra-flexible PVC or silicone cable, but the TS100 does not have a cable of its own. Instead it relies on whatever cable comes on its power supply, which is frequently a laptop unit built with portable computing rather than soldering in mind. So to use it is to be constantly battling against its noticable lack of flexibility, a minor worry but one that I find irksome. I determined to find a solution, making a DC extension cable more flexible than that on my power supply. Continue reading “The Simplest TS100 Upgrade Leads Down A Cable Testing Rabbit Hole” →

Open Source Stream Deck Does It Without Touch Screens

July 9, 2020 by 32 Comments

[Adam Welch] has built macro pads in the past out of pre-fab key matrices and handfuls of Cherry MX clones. But all the stickers and custom keycaps in the world wouldn’t make those macro pads as versatile as a stream deck — those visual shortcut panels with tiny touchscreens for each button that some streamers use to change A/V settings or switch between applications.

Let’s face it, stream decks are expensive. But 0.96″ OLED displays are not, and neither are SMD tactile buttons. Why not imitate a screen deck on the cheap by making it so the screens actuate buttons behind them? [Adam] based this baby on the clever design of [Kilian Gosewisch]’s FreeDeck, and they ended up working together to improve it with a dedicated PCB.

The brains of the operation is an Arduino Pro Micro, which addresses each screen individually via two 74HC4051 mux ICs. Thanks to an SD card module, there’s no need to flash the ‘duino every time you want to change a shortcut or its picture. Even if this deck doesn’t hold up forever, it won’t break the bank to build another one. Poke past the break for the build video, which has all the links you’d need to make your own, including a handy configurator.

There’s more than one way to do a visual macro pad. Here’s one that uses a single screen and splits it Brady Bunch style to match the matrix.

Continue reading “Open Source Stream Deck Does It Without Touch Screens” →

Open-Source Grinder Makes Compression Screws For Plastic Extruders Easy

July 9, 2020 by 13 Comments

In a world that’s literally awash in plastic waste, it seems a pity to have to buy fresh rolls of plastic filament to feed our 3D-printers, only to have them generate yet more plastic waste. Breaking that vicious cycle requires melding plastic recycling with additive manufacturing, and that takes some clever tooling with parts that aren’t easy to come by, like the compression screws that power plastics extruders.

This open-source compression screw grinder aims to make small-scale plastic recyclers easier to build. Coming from the lab of [Joshua Pearce] at the Michigan Technological University in collaboration with [Jacob Franz], the device is sort of a combination of a small lathe and a grinder. A piece of round steel stock is held by a chuck with the free end supported by bearings in a tailstock. On the bed of the machine is an X-Y carriage made of 3D-printed parts and pieces of electrical conduit. The carriage moves down the length of the bed as the stock rotates thanks to a pulley and a threaded rod, carrying a cordless angle grinder with a thick grinding wheel. A template attached to the front apron controls how deep the grinder cuts as it tracks along the rod; different templates allow the screw profile to be easily customized. The video below shows the machine in action and the complicated screw profiles it’s capable of producing.

We’ve seen lots of homebrew plastic extruders before, most of which use repurposed auger-type drill bits as compression screws. Those lack the variable geometry of a proper compression screw, so [Joshua] and [Jacob] making all the design documents for this machine available should be a boon to recycling experimenters.

Continue reading “Open-Source Grinder Makes Compression Screws For Plastic Extruders Easy” →