Pinball Machine Needs No Wizard

May 18, 2020 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

Ever since he was a young boy, [Tyler] has played the silver ball. And like us, he’s had a lifelong fascination with the intricate electromechanical beasts that surround them. In his recently-completed senior year of college, [Tyler] assembled a mechatronics dream team of [Kevin, Cody, and Omar] to help turn those visions into self-playing pinball reality.

You can indeed play the machine manually, and the Arduino Mega will keep track of your score just like a regular cabinet. If you need to scratch an itch, ignore a phone call, or just plain want to watch a pinball machine play itself, it can switch back and forth on the fly. The USB camera mounted over the playfield tracks the ball as it speeds around. Whenever it enters the flipper vectors, the appropriate flipper will engage automatically to bat the ball away.

Our favorite part of this build (aside from the fact that it can play itself) is the pachinko multi-ball feature that manages to squeeze in a second game and a second level. This project is wide open, and even if you’re not interested in replicating it, [Tyler] sprinkled a ton of good info and links to more throughout the build logs. Take a tour after the break while we have it set on free play.

[Tyler]’s machine uses actual pinball machine parts, which could quickly ramp up the cost. If you roll your own targets and get creative with solenoid sourcing, building a pinball machine doesn’t have to be a drain on your wallet.

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Laundry Monitor Won’t Generate Static With Roommates

May 15, 2020 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

Laundry. It’s one of life’s inescapable cycles, but at least we have machines now. The downside of this innovation is that since we no longer monitor every step — the rock-beating, the river-rinsing, the line-hanging and -retrieving — the pain of laundry has evolved into the monotony of monitoring the robots’ work.

[Adam] shares his wash-bots with roommates, and they aren’t close enough to combine their lights and darks and turn it into a group activity. They needed an easy way to tell when the machines are done running, and whose stuff is even in there in the first place, so [Adam] built a laundry machine monitor that uses current sensing to detect when the machines are done running and sends a text to the appropriate person.

Each machine has a little Hall effect-sensing module that’s carefully zip-tied around its power cable. The signal from these three-wire boards goes high when the machine is running and low when it’s not. At the beginning of the load, the launderer simply presses their assigned button on the control box, and the ESP32 inside takes care of the rest.

Getting a text when your drawers are clean is about as private as it gets. Clean underwear, don’t care? Put it on a scrolling marquee.

CyberDÛCK Quacks Like A Cyberdeck

May 15, 2020 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

Over the last year or so, we’ve seen an explosion in the popularity of cyberdecks — those highly portable and occasionally wearable computers that would make William Gibson proud. A lot of the cyberdecks we see are based on NUCs or the Raspberry Pi and are essentially post-apocalyptic DIY laptops. But what if you want to play with microcontrollers on the go? Do you really need traditional computing power?

If you build [kmatch98]’s adorable cyberDÛCK, the answer is no. This duck can edit and run CircuitPython files anywhere without a separate computer, as long as you have some kind of USB keyboard. It has a text editor for writing Python scripts the regular way as well as a REPL for running commands on the fly.

One of the biggest hurdles in portable microcontrollering is getting HID access so you can communicate with a keyboard. Flip open cyberDÛCK and you’ll find two ItsyBitsy M4s — one being used as the USB host, and the other controls the display and is meant to be programmed. To get the keyboard input across, [kmatch98] adapted a MicroPython editor to take input from UART. Waddle past the break to check out the sprite demo, and stick around to see [kmatch98] discuss the duck in detail.

We understand if you can’t wait to make one of these yourself. In the meantime, did you know you can code CircuitPython directly from your phone?

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Piston-Powered Pellet Pusher For Peckish Pets

May 14, 2020 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

We all have our new and interesting challenges in lockdown life. If you’ve had to relocate to ride it out, the chances are good that even your challenges have challenges. Lockdown left [Kanoah]’s sister in the lurch when it came to feeding her recently-adopted pet rat, so he came up with a temporary solution to ensure that the rat never misses a meal.

Most of the automated pet feeders we see around here use an auger to move the food. That’s all fine and good, but if you just need to move a singular mass, the screw seems like overkill. [Kanoah]’s feeder is more akin to a pellet-pushing piston. It runs on a Metro Mini, but an Arduino Nano or anything with enough I/O pins would work just fine. The microcontroller starts counting the hours as soon as it has power, and delivers pellets four times a day with a servo-driven piston arm. [Kanoah] has all the files up on Thingiverse if you need a similar solution.

There many ways of solving the problem of dry pet food delivery. Wet food is a completely different animal, but as it turns out, not impossible to automate.

CircuitPython Macro Pad Is One Build That Won’t Bite

May 13, 2020 by Kristina Panos No comments

Have you built a macro keypad yet? This is one of those projects where the need can materialize after the build is complete, because these things are made of wishes and upsides. A totally customized, fun build that streamlines processes for both work and play? Yes please. The only downside is that you actually have to like, know how to build them.

Suffer no more, because [Andy Warburton] can show you exactly how to put a macro pad together without worrying about wiring up a key switch matrix correctly. [Andy]’s keypad uses the very affordable Seeeduino Xiao, a tiny board that natively runs Arduino code. Since it has a SAMD21 processor, [Andy] chose to run CircuitPython on it instead. And lucky for you, he wrote a separate guide for that.

Practicalities aside, the next best thing about macro keyboards is that they can take nearly any shape or form. Print a case from Thingiverse as [Andy] did, or build it into anything you have lying around that’s sturdy enough to stand up to key presses and won’t slide around on your desk.

No room left on the desk? Build a macro foot stool and put those feet to work.

Via r/circuitpython

Printed Jig Is A Welding Rig

May 13, 2020 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

[NixieGuy] was scheming to build robots with cable-driven joints when the pandemic hit. Now that component sourcing is scarce, he’s had to get creative when it comes to continuous cables. These cables need to be as seamless as possible to avoid getting caught on the pulleys, so [Nixie] came up with a way to weld together something he already has on hand — lengths of .45mm steel cable.

The 3D printed jig is designed to be used under a digital microscope, and even clamps to the pillar with screws. Another set of screws holds the two wires in place while they are butt welded between two pieces of copper.

[Nixie] adds a spot of solder paste for good measure, and then joins the wires by attaching his bench power supply set to 20V @ 3.5A to the copper electrodes. We love that [Nixie] took the time to streamline the jig design, because it looks great.

This just goes to show you that great things can happen with limited resources and a little bit of imagination. [Nixie] not only solved his own supply chain problem, he perfected a skill at the same time. If you don’t have a bench supply, you might be able to get away with a battery-powered spot welder, depending on your application.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Infectious Disease Slayer

May 12, 2020 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

In the two months since the harsh realities of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 have come into sharp focus, Americans have become increasingly familiar with a man who has been quietly serving the people since the days when Ronald Reagan was up for re-election. For many, Dr. Anthony Fauci is the national voice of reason in a sea of dubious information. He has arguably become the most trustworthy person the government has to offer in the face of this pandemic.

Officially, Dr. Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a position he was appointed to in 1984. He has worked under six presidents, advising them on every outbreak from the HIV/AIDS epidemic up through Zika and Ebola. Now, he is part of the White House’s coronavirus task force.

At 79 years old, he still works 18-hour days, sticking it to infectious diseases with one hand, and smoothing the feathers of the American people with the other. Dr. Fauci certainly feels like the right person at the right time. So how did he get to this point?

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