Extremely Thorough Formlabs Form 2 Teardown By Bunnie

March 26, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 10 Comments

[Bunnie Huang] recently had the opportunity to do a thorough teardown of the new Formlabs Form 2 printer. It’s a long read, so just head over there and immerse yourself in every detail. If you want the cliff notes, though, read this but still go look at all the pretty pictures.

First, it’s a major upgrade with pretty much every component. The CPU is a huge step up, the interface went from monochrome to full color touch screen, the connectivity has been upgraded with WiFi and Ethernet, the optics are much better and safer, the power supply is integrated, there are lots of little improvements that handle things like bed leveling, calibration, resin stirring, pausing jobs, and resin refilling during a print. Bunnie practically gushes at all the features and impressive engineering that went into the Form 2.

You can compare the teardown of the Form 2 to [Bunnie’s] teardown of the Form 1 printer back in 2013.

YAGDO – Yet Another Garage Door Opener

March 25, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 19 Comments

It seems like every few months we cover another garage door opener, and the concept is quickly becoming the “Hello World” of DIY home automation. In this installment, reader [ray] made his own garage door opener and chose the ESP8266 as the wireless interface of choice, but spiced the application up with an ultrasonic sensor that detects whether the car is in the garage and a web app that shows history, plus integration with Blynk for remote access. For posterity, he made the project open source as well.

The video is well produced with lots of details and instructions, and the circuit board and assembly are refined and clean. It may be a “Hello World”, but it’s done right.

Some of the other garage door hacks we’ve covered in the last year include the fingerprint scanner opener, the IM-ME opener, the motion-based security opener, the cat-enabled opener, the OpenCV Pi opener, and a Bluetooth Low Energy opener.

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Tombstone Brings New Life To Board

March 19, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 24 Comments

Making revisions to existing PCBs with surface mount components often leads to creative solutions, and this insertion of a switch over a tombstoned resistor is no exception. According to [kubatyszko], “this is an FPGA-based Amiga clone. R15 serves as joint-stereo mixing signal between channels to make it easier on headphone users (Amiga has 4 channels, 2 left and 2 right). Removing R15 makes the stereo 100% ‘original’ with fully independent channels. Didn’t want to make it permanent so I decided to put a switch.”

Whether [kubatyszko] intends it or not, this solution is not going to be permanent without some additional work to mechanically secure the switch. We’ve tried this sort of thing before and it sometimes results in the contact area of the resistor being ripped off the substrate and separated from the rest of the resistor, rendering it useless. However, the creative use of the pads to get some additional functionality out of the board deserves some kudos.

We love creative fixes for board problems but it’s been a really long time since we’ve seen several of them collected in one place. We’d love to hear your favorite tricks so let us know in the comments below.

SATA Cable Replaces DC Motor Brushes As Macgyver Looks On

March 18, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 21 Comments

[dmalhar] was digging around in his bins for motors and found one with missing brushes. Being resourceful (and not able to find another motor), he managed to tear apart a SATA cable and form the pins into brushes with just the right amount of spring. Yes, this looks like a cheap motor, but in the moment of necessity availability wins, and this hack is truly commendable. If he had used a paperclip, MacGyver would have been proud, but the SATA cable pins make us proud.

Normally the brushes of DC motors are made with a graphite or some other material which provides a small amount of resistance so that when the motor is spinning the brushes will provide a gradual shift of current from one commutator to the next. Also, the softness of the carbon makes the brush wear down instead of the commutator, and in large motors the brushes are replaceable. In cheap motors the engineers design the brush material around the expected lifetime of the product. In [dmalhar’s] case, the motor just got its lifetime extended by a while.

Tools Of The Trade – Solder Paste Dispensing

March 10, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 50 Comments

The general process of circuit board assembly goes like this: You order your PCBs. You also order your components. For surface mount components, you apply solder paste to the pads, put the components on top, and then heat the board up so the solder paste flows and makes a bond. Then for through hole components you put the leads through the holes, and solder them with an iron or a solder wave or dip. Then you do an inspection for defects, program any microcontrollers, and finally test the completed board to make sure everything runs.

The tricky part is in volumes. If you’re only doing a few boards, it’s usually easiest to assemble them by hand. In the thousands you usually outsource. But new tools, and cheap hacked tools, have made it easier to automate small batches, and scale up into the thousands before outsourcing assembly.

In this new series which we’re calling Tools of the Trade we’ll be covering a variety of tools used for building products, and we’re starting with circuit board assembly. Let’s investigate our tools of the trade: solder paste dispensing. Continue reading “Tools Of The Trade – Solder Paste Dispensing” →

Bullet-time Video Effect By Throwing Your Phone Around

March 7, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 43 Comments

Ski areas are setting formal policies for drones left and right, but what happens when your drone isn’t a drone but is instead a tethered iPhone with wings swinging around you like a ball-and-chain flail as you careen down a mountain? [nicvuignier] decided to explore the possibility of capturing bullet-time video of his ski runs by essentially swinging his phone around him on a tether. The phone is attached to a winged carrier of his own design, 3D printed in PLA.

One would think this would likely result in all kinds of disaster, but we haven’t seen the outtakes yet, and the making-of video has an interesting perspective on each of the challenges he encountered in perfecting the carrier, ranging from keeping it stable and upright, to reducing the motion sickness with the spinning perspective, and keeping it durable enough to withstand the harsh environment and protect the phone.

He has open sourced the design, which works for either iPhone or GoPro models, or it is available for preorder if you are worried about catastrophic delamination of your 3D printed model resulting in much more bullet-like projectile motion.

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Floppy Drive Hides SD Card Reader

February 28, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 23 Comments

[gilmour509] posted a thorough gallery of a new custom-built computer and case made to look like a 1995 IBM Aptiva. While the whole build is impressive, the most clever part involves a 3 1/2″ floppy disk that hides an SD card and works like a regular USB flash drive when inserted into the floppy drive.

He makes use of the fact that floppy disk edge card connectors have the same spacing as SD cards. Add in a hacked USB card reader, some careful cutting and assembly, and [gilmour509] has a very convincing floppy drive with gigabytes of space.

The best part is that with everything put together, the floppy disks and floppy drive look completely unmodified. He even made the file explorer icon show a floppy drive.

The faux-Aptiva gallery includes the full build, but skip to about 2/3 down to see the floppy SD card section.

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