Angel Investor Gives Open Source PnP A Massive Boost

January 4, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 18 Comments

We love it when an Open Source hardware project grows up and turns into a sustainable business, bootstrapped with nothing but hard work and great ideas, but it’s a really tough prospect to do it using your own money, ploughing the profits from any sales back into development and not taking a dime in wages whilst you do so. People obviously need an income to live off, and that time spent working on a startup is time you can’t spend earning your keep. So it’s with great pleasure that we can bring you the latest news from [Stephen Hawes] and his pick-and-place machine plans. In the year since we last checked in with the project, development has continued at a steady pace, with the guys quickly outgrowing the garage workspace, whilst they prepare PnP machine kits ready for sale.

The big news is that [Joel Spolsky], co-founder of Stack Exchange, creator of Kanban management tool, Trello, and angel investor, has made a sizable ($100K USD) investment in the company which has allowed them to take on a 3,000+ sq. ft office space, and given them the funds for stock and all that boring business overhead stuff. [Stephen] takes time to explain that [Joel] will not have any control of the company, and all hardware and software will remain fully Open Source. For those interested [Joel] implemented his investment as a SAFE note (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and as such, [Joel] will only make a return in the form of a small share allocation, if they hit the big-time in the future. Can’t really say fairer than that!

[Stephen] did recently receive a ‘cease and desist’ notice regarding his use of the ‘Index’ name for the project, since that is already a trademarked term, defended by somebody else, the project will need change name very soon. A minor setback, but it is a bit annoying that a chunk of that investment now has to go to a lawyer to make sure that the name they do eventually choose isn’t already taken and is safe to use.

In terms of the machine itself, it is now is fully operating, with multiple automatic tape feeders, featuring up and down-facing machine vision, and all that OpenPnP goodness. It has even been demonstrated placing parts for its own custom motherboard PCB, reprap style. Nice!

We wish [Stephen] and partner [Lucian] all the success they deserve, and hope they get those kits out there, because there are people around these parts that need an affordable, hackable, desktop PnP machine ASAP, this scribe included!

Here’s the earlier story covering the machine, but it’s not the only Open Source PnP machine we’ve seen – here’s another one from a few years ago.

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Metal mechanoid security patrol ride-on made from scrap

Homemade Scrapyard Security Mech Gives Uncle Super Powers

January 3, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 26 Comments

[Handy Geng] is back again with another bonkers build, that we just can’t not cover. His Uncle came to visit the workshop one day and said he’d love to go there every day, and could even watch over it when [Handy Geng] was away. But being an older chap and needing a stick to get around, he would not be much use if ‘bad guys’ decided to pay a visit. The obvious solution was to build a ride-on security mech which Uncle could ride on, (video, embedded below) and use to defend the shop from bandits.

The build starts with him unloading a large pair of tracked wheel units from his truck, which caused a chuckle around these parts when we tried to imagine the scrap yard he’d just visited! The build video is more of a spot-weld-come-assembly log, with the less interesting sub assembly construction omitted. If he’d included all the details, this video would have been hours long. Though, we’d probably watch that anyway.

Features of the final construction include, but not limited to, dual motors for on-the-spot turns, night-time patrol lights, dual pneumatic fists for attack mode, dual water cannons for a more gentle approach and rear facing speakers blasting out Chinese opera for the ultimate deterrent. Practical touches include an integrated glasses case for the ready-readers, and a walking cane holder, so the mech was Uncle-ready. He seemed impressed from the grin on his face!

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Matrix Digital Rain On The IBM PC With A High Persistence Monitor

January 3, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 11 Comments

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 20-odd years, you will have come across The Matrix series of movies, and the cool green ‘digital rain’ effect used frequently. This inspired [Oli Wright] to wonder what it would look like if instead of running the animation on a modern display, using a digitally produced phosphor persistence effect, it was implemented on some retro PC hardware, using an actual high-persistence phosphor Green Monochrome monitor. (Video embedded, below) As luck would have it, [Oli] owns a 40-year-old IBM PC 5150 as well as the matching IBM 5151 monitor, so it was a simple matter to implement the effect in 8088 assembler to create falling sequences of characters. The final binary is less than 256 bytes!

The IBM 5151’s long display persistence was intended to reduce the visibility of display flicker due to the low scan rate, but has the unfortunate side effect of smearing horribly when the image changes. This is exactly what [Oli] needed to implement this effect and we think it looks jolly fine.

[Oli] made use of the excellent PCjs browser-based emulator written by [Jeff Parsons] to demonstrate what the software is doing, without the effect being evident. If you like, you can try it out for yourselves, as the assembly listing is available on the project GitHub.

Of course, we’ve covered the digital rain effect many. many times before, for example, with this Arduino Library, and here’s a custom PC case side panel from way back in December 2021, if you can remember those days.

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Swiss Army Knife Of Power Tool Carts

January 2, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 9 Comments

When you’re into woodworking in a serious way, you’re going to eventually want some power tools. With such efficiency of operation, things can go pear-shaped quickly, with wood dust getting absolutely everywhere. It’s not always practical (or desirable) to work outdoors, and many of us only have small workshops to do our making in. But woodworking tools eat space quickly. Centralized extraction is one solution, but all that fixed rigid ducting forces one to fix the tool locations, which isn’t always a good thing. Moveable tool carts are nothing new, we’ve seen many solutions over the years, but this build by [Peter Waldraff] is rather slick (video embedded below,) includes some really nice features in a very compact — and critically — moveable format.

By repurposing older cabinets, [Peter] demonstrates some real upcycling, with little going to waste and the end result looks great too! There is a centralized M-Class (we guess) dust extractor with a removable vacuum pipe which is easily removed to hook up to the smaller hand-held tools. These are hidden in a section near the flip-up planer, ready for action. An auto-start switch for the small dust extractor is wired-in to the smaller tools to add a little ease of use while reducing the likelihood of forgetting to switch it on. We’ve all done that.

For the semi-fixed larger tools, such as the miter and table saws, a separate, higher flow rate moveable dust extractor can be wheeled over and hooked up to the integrated plenum chamber, which grabs the higher volume of dust and chips produced.

A nice touch was to mount the miter saw section on sliding rails. This allows the whole assembly to slide sideways a little, giving more available width at the table saw for ripping wider sheets. With another little tweak of some latches, the whole miter section can flip over, providing even more access to the table saw, or just a small workbench! Cracking stuff!

Need some help getting good with wood, [Eric Strebel] has some great tips for you! And if you’re needs are simpler and smaller, much much smaller, here’s a finger-sized plane for you.

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Teaching A DC Servo Motor To Act Like A Stepper

January 1, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 13 Comments

[Frank Herrmann] had an interesting idea to turn a geared DC motor into a servo motor assembly, but with a stepper motor-like interface. By stacking some small PCBs behind the motor body, it was possible to squeeze a DRV8837 DC motor driver and a pair of hall effect sensors on the first PCB layer, with the magnetic encoder nestled tightly behind it. Pin headers at the edge of the PCB connect to a second PCB bearing the microcontroller, which is based on the cheap STM32L432. The second PCB also holds an associated LDO and debug LED. Together, this handful of parts provide all that is needed to read the encoder, control the motor rotation and listen on the ‘stepper motor driver’ interface pins hooked up to the motion controller upstream. The Arduino source for this can be found on the project GitHub.

Whilst [Frank] mentions that this assembly has a weight and torque advantage over a NEMA 17 sized stepper motor, but we see no hard data on accuracy and repeatability which would be important for precise operations like 3D printing.

This project is part of a larger goal to make a complete 3D printer based around these ‘DC motor stepper motors’ which we will watch with interest.

While we’re on the subject of closed-loop control of DC motors, here’s another attempt to do the same, without the integration. If these are too small for you, then you always repurpose some windscreen washer motors.

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3D Printering: Adding A Web Interface Where There Was None Before

December 31, 2021 by Dave Rowntree 8 Comments

[Renzo Mischianti] got himself a Chinese 3D printer, specifically a FlyingBear Ghost 5. (Cracking name, huh?) He was more than a little irritated with the fact that whilst the controller, an MKS Robin Nano, did have a integrated Wi-FI module, it provided no browser-based interface for monitoring and control purposes. This seemed a bit short-sighted in this day and age, to say the least. Not being at all happy with that situation, [Renzo] proceeded to write dedicated Wi-Fi firmware using websockets, but not without fully documenting his journey in a detailed series of the blog posts.

The resulting BeePrint web interface supports all the usual functions you would expect when managing a printer, everything from monitoring warm-up at the prep stage, to keeping tabs on the potential spaghetti monster via the connected IP camera. All good stuff. [Renzo] used an ESP32-cam, which is a low-cost 2 MP unit from our friends at Olimex, but we suspect it wouldn’t vastly difficult to add your own IP camera into the mix.

[Renzo] has a YT channel detailing quite a few other projects, which is definitely worth some viewing time in our opinion.

We’ve been covering 3D printer hacking since the dinosaurs were roaming. This is the oldest, and still one of the strangest, posts that we could find in a quick search. Anyone care to find something older?

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Customisable Micro-Coded Controller Helps With In-Circuit Debugging

December 30, 2021 by Dave Rowntree No comments

Over on Hackaday.io, [Zoltan Pekic] has been busy building a stack of tools for assisting with verifying and debugging retro computing applications. He presents his take on using Intel hex files for customised in-circuit testing, which is based upon simple microcoded sequencers, which are generated automatically from a high level description.

The idea is that it is very useful to be able to use an FPGA development board to emulate the memory bus component of the CPU, allowing direct memory access for design validation purposes. This approach will also allow the production of a test rig to perform board level verification. The microcode compiler (MCC) generates all the VHDL, and support files needed to target a Xilinx FPGA based dev board, but is generic enough to enable targeting other platforms with a little adaptation.

Another interesting use case enables in-circuit tracing of buggy memory accesses, with the microcode sequencer decoding the accesses and dumping the relevant information out to either a serial port, or even direct to an embedded VGA controller, hardware allowing.

This automated approach to generating customisable microcoded hardware is a very nice trick to have in your bag, and even if it only helps in certain circumstances, [Zoltan] notes that it at least serves as an interesting example of the architecture of computers from history, if not much else.

Source for the example 8085 project can be found on the project GitHub, and the toolchain source can found here also.

For an interesting practical use of microding to implement emulations of historical hardware, checkout this neat switchable reproduction calculator project.