Printing PCBs On A Junked Epson Printer

April 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

When it comes to making PCBs at home really quickly, there’s not much to improve upon with [Ryan]’s bodged up Epson printer that prints an etch mask directly on a piece of copper clad board.

Like most of the direct to copper PCB printer conversions we’ve covered ( 1, 2, 3 ), [Ryan]’s build relied on an Epson printer and Mis Pro yellow ink. The Mis Pro ink is one of the most etch-resistive substances that can be shot out of an inkjet printer, and Epson printer cartridges use a piezo pump that is perfect for squirting ink out on command.

After tearing the printer apart and lifting the print head a bit, [Ryan] needed a proper feed system to control where on the copper he was printing. He managed to make a board carrier out of a sheet of aluminum. By taping down the copper clad board, everything seems to work phenomenally.

After the break you can check out how fast [Ryan] can print out a fully etch-resisted PCB. It’s not improbable that he could produce a few dozen boards an hour; something our toner transfer PCB production method would kill for.

via makezine

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Finding The Average Of Every Font

April 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

An old book – the smell, the texture of the slowly rotting paper, and the smudges and margin notes accrued over decades – is one of the finer points in life taken for granted much too often. We’re bombarded with high precision vector typefaces all day, but [Dan]’s Avería font is beautiful in its irregularity. [Dan] made a font that is the average of all the fonts installed on his computer, and the result looks surprisingly great.

[Dan] started his journey down the generative font path by making images of every letter of all his fonts and mashing them together with a PHP script. The result was a terribly blurry font, and unfortunately this had been done before. [Dan] wanted a font with clearly defined edges, though, so the obvious solution would be to take the grayscale result of his first experiment, set a threshold, and make a monochromatic image. This plan didn’t pan out, and [Dan] needed a cleverer way to go about things.

The solution to the problem is astonishingly simple; [Dan] took the perimeter of each font glyph and divided it into hundreds of points. These points could then be averaged in 2D space making a real ‘average’ font.

Even though this project isn’t the usual ‘Arduino doing something’ fare, [Dan] came up with a really clever way of doing something that produced something really cool. It’s enough of a hack in our books. Tip ‘o the hat to [Aleks Clark] for sending this one in.

Build Your Next Robot With Amazon Supply

April 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 42 Comments

If you’re a home hardware hacker in the United States, chances are most of your electrical components come from Mouser or Digikey, your hardware and tools from Grainger, and your raw materials from McMaster-Carr. This setup is great – we’d hate to locally source parts for a robot – but organizing larger orders can be a bit of a pain. Enter Amazon Supply, the new place to buy business and industrial equipment.

Right now the selection is a little thin, but if you’re looking for a single place to buy a quality soldering iron, a 0.005″ endmill or a set of brass balls, now you’ve got a one stop shop with the insanely fast shipping Amazon has won our hearts with.

While Amazon Supply isn’t selling even the most basic electrical component, the service was just launched, and if there’s a market, [Bezos] will go after it. Time will tell if our beloved vendors have a serious competitor on their hands.

Thanks [Vasili] for sending this in.

Cheap And Easy Linear Supported Rail

April 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

Some of the very largest – and coolest – CNC machines use supported linear rail for their movement axes. For any home tinkerer trying to reproduce these supported rails, the problem of cost comes up very quick; these rails can run over $100 for just a few feet. [Michael] came up with a great way to build his own supported rail so he can build his very large CNC router.

There aren’t many tools needed to build [Michael]’s rail. He put a 90° notch in a 2×4 to support his 25mm rail, and clamped it down with a piece of plywood. After drilling a 5/16″ hole every 12 cm, he tapped these holes out to receive 3/8″ threaded rod. Yes, we also hate the mix of metric and imperial units in that description, but the results speak for themselves.

The now-supported rail was mounted to a piece of MDF with a few bolts and washers. MDF isn’t the most dimensionally stable material, so [Michael] will be covering the whole thing in a coat of epoxy very soon. Now, he’s one step closer to his gigantic CNC gantry router.

You can check out [Michael]’s demo video after the break.

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Finding Your Keys With Bluetooth

April 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

[doragasu]’s wife is always misplacing her keys. To solve this problem, [doragasu] created a small Bluetooth-enabled key fob that is able to remotely sound an alarm when commanded to by a cell phone.

The case and LiPo battery of [doragasu]’s project comes from a small photo frame key fob. The LCD display and PCB of the photo frame were tossed aside for a future project, and the design of the circuit started. The Bluetooth buzzer key fob is based around an MSP430 microcontroller because of their extremely low power requirements.

On the software side of things, [doragasu] built a J2ME app to connect to the key fob and turn the buzzer on. His app is portable to any Android phone, and versions can be ported to Windows, OS X and iOS devices.

How does it work? Well, [doragasu]’s wife sometimes forgets to charge her key fob, rendering the whole project useless. There are ideas for updating the device to a Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy device, but no actionable plans. Still, very good work. You can check out [doragasu]’s walkthrough and demo video after the break.

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Automated Bed Leveling With Our 3D Printer

April 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Anyone with a RepRap or other 3D printer knows how much of a pain leveling the bed is. To get a good quality print, the bed – the surface the printer prints on – must be exactingly level, and may the engineering gods help you if your surface has the slightest bump in it. [Atntias] is developing a solution to this problem: an auto leveling platform that shouldn’t require any parts at all if you already have a metal bed.

The idea is incredibly simple: Just ground your metal bed, and apply a small voltage to the tip of your hot end. [Atntias]’ code (available on GitHub) probes the surface of the bed and shoots out a 3D mesh of your current bed profile. This can be used as a GCode offset, so the bottom of your print is always directly on the top of the bed.

Although the utility of leveling a bed down to the micron level is of questionable utility for 3D printers, it’s vitally important if you want to mill a PCB on your printer. [Atntias] says his idea is currently being implemented into the Marlin firmware, so it looks like another firmware update is in our future.

Thanks go to [technodream] for sending this one in. Check out the video after the break to see the bed leveling process in action.

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Building New Interfaces With An IPad

April 22, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

There’s a word – synchronicity – to describe two disparate events that occur together in a meaningful way. We see this a lot in the Hackaday tip line; two people send in somewhat similar hacks solving similar problems in similar ways nearly simultaneously. Here’s two builds by [Bryce] and [spektakx] that hit our inbox within minutes of each other that both implement existing interfaces with iPads.

iPad turntable controller

[spektakx] sent in an iPad powered DJ MIDI controller he built as a prototype to test out the size, orientation and layout for an upcoming build. The turntable controllers are simple USB affairs made to jog and scratch records digitally. Although [spektakx] admits it’s a little unfinished, it’s still just a prototype. Also, he can use a Windows 7 tablet laptop for ‘more suited’ hardware. Check out [spektakx]’ video demo after the break.

an iPad cash register

[Hacktheory] found [Bryce]’s Flickr photolog of a DIY ‘Square’ cash register. The electronics part of this build is practically non-existent; it’s just an iPad with a credit card readers that plugs into the headphone jack. Yes, we just saw these ‘Square’ credit card readers this last week. The fabrication portion of this build is incredible – [Bryce] has a few wonderful pieces of walnut there, and did an exceptional job with the wood work. It’s probably not well suited to high-volume retail, but we couldn’t think of a better cash register for a boutique shop.

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