Array Of Useless Machines Is Useless

February 5, 2020 by Richard Baguley 38 Comments

What’s the collective noun for a group of useless machines? A passel of useless machines? A failure? A waste? A 404? Whatever you want to call it, [Martin Raynsford] has produced one here with this collection of 24 useless machines arranged into a 5 by 6 array. He produced it for an event at a hackerspace to amuse visitors, and it certainly seems to do the job in the video after the break.

[Martin] built the case by modifying the design of his Useless Machine kit, stretching out the case to hold multiple mechanisms. The original plan was to use a 6 by 6 matrix, but that wouldn’t fit into the laser cutter, so it ended up with 24 mechanisms in a 5 by 6 array. All of those are driven by 2 AAA batteries, and the mechanisms are efficient enough that it survived a full day of button flipping before it began to run out of juice.

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The Options For Low Cost ROV Tethers

January 27, 2020 by Richard Baguley 22 Comments

Wireless connections are cool and all, but sometimes you just need a bit of copper. This interesting article on SV Seeker discusses the various ways of making a tether for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). They experimented with a number of different cables, including gel-filled Cat 5 designed for burial and wrapping the cable in polypropylene rope to keep it protected and buoyant. They also looked at using a single core solid coax cable with an Ethernet to coax converter on either end wrapped in stretch webbing. The upside of using coax would be the length: it can handle over a mile of cable, which should be more than enough for this project. The downside is that they found that the coax stretches under strain, messing with the signal.

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Hubble Telescope Power Supply Tester On EBay

January 26, 2020 by Richard Baguley 38 Comments

Got $75K spare? Then this is the eBay deal for you! [jvanorsdal] pointed us to this eBay bargain: the VPI Vehicle Power Interface Rack & Console Hubble Space Telescope. This was the actual system used to test the power systems of the Hubble Space Telescope before it was launched, so it’s a genuine piece of space history.

For the price you get two, yes two CRT displays, six HP power supplies and a huge amount of hand-wired history. Even if you aren’t going to bid, it is worth taking a look at the insides of this thing, as it is all hand-soldered and the cable routing is a thing of beauty. I have absolutely no use for this, but I totally want it for my living room.

There are a few gotchas, though. Because it is NASA space hardware, you can’t export it to places like Iran, and the shipping cost for the US is a cool $1.5K. Considering the size of the thing, that is not so bad, perhaps: it is built into a three rack metal cabinet with built-in wheels that measures over 7 feet long and weighs over 800 lbs.

Interested? It is on sale for $75k, and there is a handy buy it now button on the site.

We all love space history here at Hackaday. Back in 2019, our own [Tom Nardi] got to spend an evening with the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

RasterCarve Converts Images To CNC

January 19, 2020 by Richard Baguley 11 Comments

CNC machines are an essential part of the hacker’s toolset. These computer-controlled cutters of wood, metal and other materials can translate a design into a prototype in short order, making the process of iterating a project much easier. However, the software to create these designs can be expensive, so [Franklin Wei] decided to write his own. In particular, he decided to write his own program to engrave images, converting a photo into a toolpath that can be cut. The result is RasterCarve, a web app that converts an image into a GCode that can be fed into a CNC machine.

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You’ve Got Mail?

November 30, 2019 by Richard Baguley 24 Comments

Life is full of tough decisions, such as deciding whether you want to go to the end of the drive to check if the mail has arrived. These questions are made even more arduous in the winter months, but [Catpin] has a solution. The Mail Box Alert uses an Electric Imp, a solar panel and a proximity sensor to let you know if you’ve got mail.

It’s a neat build, with the brains provided by that Electric Imp which handles most of the heavy lifting. This wakes up every five minutes and checks whether the status of a small proximity sensor has changed. If it has, it pings a website. The unit sits at the bottom of the postbox, so if your friendly neighborhood post person has put in any letters, it will have changed. The Imp is powered by a small battery, which is in turn charged by a solar panel. That means that it doesn’t require any power cables or other wiring, as long as it is in the range of WiFi. With the addition of a 15-hours overnight deep sleep, [Catpin] found that the whole thing could be run from a couple of 18650 LiPo batteries.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the writeup was discussing the problems that he found with the build, such as the fact that a LiPo battery won’t perform that well in a Wisconsin winter. So, this was replaced with a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery that should be a bit more tolerant of the chill. There is also a writeup on how to create the same project using an ESP8266 if required.

IREnE Goes Around

November 23, 2019 by Richard Baguley 3 Comments

Timelapse rigs are awesome because you can spice up your videos with more interesting panning and tilting timelapse shots. So, why not build yourself one? That’s what [td0g] decided to do, and the result is IREnE, a rather nice homemade 3DOF rig that fits onto a standard tripod. 3DOF means that it has three degrees of freedom: the camera can be rotated on the tripod, moved linearly on an extending arm away from the tripod head and rotated around its own axis. In other words: it can pan past an object while rotating the camera to keep the object centered in the frame.

IREnE stands for Inverted Radial Extension Eggtimer, a play on the dual radial nature of the device and how photographers use egg timers for this sort of thing. It’s also a sneaky tribute to a foe of Sherlock Holmes. The rig is driven by three NEMA 17 motors and an ATMega328p, all powered by a Dewalt powertool battery and his own DeWatt power adapter. the rig also has a secondary function with minor modifications as a pancake printer.

Breakfast aside, there are a few caveats to this project. While a tripod is fine for stabilizing a camera on the top of it, offsetting the weight like this makes the tripod unstable. [td0g] did add a few welded stabilizer bars that brace it to more stable, but the whole thing should be used with some caution. The camera sits on a 1-inch square aluminium extruder that [td0g] claims is robust enough to hold his Canon D7, but I am not sure I would trust it with my expensive equipment.

This is the fifth high-quality build we have seen from [td0g]: we previously covered the excellent high-speed LED flash, great telescope mount, high-speed chronograph, and wood-burning ATX power supply hack.

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We Are Bowled Over By The BouLED

November 8, 2019 by Richard Baguley 3 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of cubic LED creations recently, but this one takes it a bit further. The BouLED is a work-in-progress icosahedric LED display, a globe-like sphere made of 20 flat triangular LED-lit faces. When combined with sensors inside the display, it will be able to stabilize the image. In other words: you can pick it up and rotate it, but the image will stay steady. It is created as part of their degree work by [Matthias Rabault], [Lucas Lebailly] and [Hichem Ghandri] who are students at the Télécom Paris school.

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