Humanoid robots, even scaled-down ones, tend to be expensive. The Berkeley Humanoid Lite offers a more accessible and economical option by centering the design around 3D printed actuators that make up the bulk of the robot’s frame.
The actuators are made by combining motors with printed cycloidal gearboxes and an embedded magnetic encoder. They’re modular, so even if one has no desire to recreate the whole robot it might be worth checking out the actuator design details to see if they might be useful in some other way.
The Berkeley Humanoid Lite isn’t a finished product so much as an open-source, easily customized reference design. The GitHub repository contains everything one might need, and you can watch some basic demonstrations, including VR-driven teleoperation, in the video embedded below.
Needing less than 70 grams of filament, [Chefkoch]’s 3D printed PCB vise solder station might be a good way to use up some filament spool leftovers and get yourself a handy tool in return.
What we like about this design is that it is multi-functional, and cleverly uses the solder spool as a counterweight to add stability that might otherwise be lacking in such a compact design.
The assembly can be reconfigured so that the jaws are either horizontal or vertical; the solder spool is held conveniently either way. The whole thing is 3D printed, so there’s no other hardware or fasteners involved. It’s probably best suited to small boards, but it’s also compact, entirely 3D printed, and doesn’t need much filament.
Still have some filament left over and want a nifty solder feeder to go with it? Check out the solder scroll, a pen-like DIY tool that makes handheld solder feeding a little less of a hassle.
[Matt Lenhard] has an interesting writeup explaining exactly how fraudsters offer access to cutting-edge AI models at a tenth of the price. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the secret is to get tokens for free from anywhere they can and by any means necessary. Then wrap them in a pretty relay API, and sell access to it.
Relaying tokens is not by itself a shady practice. That distinction belongs to services that obtain tokens fraudulently, opening the door to selling them at rates far below market value. This practice is widespread and profitable, in part because the abuse is so hard to pin down and stop.
One source of tokens is free credits on new accounts. New accounts are spooled up as fast as possible, hammered until they’re empty, then it’s done all over again. Another method is to sign up as pay-after, possibly with a stolen card, and simply ensure the account has no valid payment method once the bill comes due. Or set up a temporary card, pay some minimum up front and consume as much as possible, then initiate a chargeback. It doesn’t matter if individually each of these doesn’t amount to much before they get flagged, because it’s being leveraged relentlessly on a massive scale by automated systems.
There are the shadier methods, too. Fraudsters don’t just target providers directly. Consumer software products with AI features get reverse-engineered, then the back ends hammered for all they are worth. Poorly-coded support chatbots can be highjacked into serving fraudsters’ traffic instead of just their own. It doesn’t actually matter where the tokens come from, after all. As long as the fraudsters are obtaining them for free (or at least below their costs) then it’s profit.
That last point is one [Matt] zeroes in on with advice on how to mitigate this abuse. He goes into detail in his writeup but what it comes down to is recognizing that it’s a numbers game. Fraudsters depend entirely on obtaining tokens for free, or nearly free. So just like using an AI to keep phone scammers tied up, anything that raises friction increases the fraudster’s costs, in turn encouraging them to find an easier target.
The Quest virtual reality headset gets a fully unlocked bootloader thanks to the QuestStack tool, which automates a complex process of privilege escalation to provide stable, privileged access to the hardware. This solidly frees the headset from its existence as a device tied to Meta’s walled garden, although the tool only works on the Quest 1.
The first-generation Quest headset is an older (released in 2019) piece of hardware that is still perfectly capable, although it has been surpassed by later models in terms of performance and optics.
It has also been essentially forgotten as far as parent company Meta is concerned, with no requirement for new content to be compatible with it, nor consideration in general given to the device for some time now.
Hardware that is no longer supported should be opened. The Oculus Go got an official unlocked OS build which was a positive thing, but the Go was also a pretty limited device. The Quest 1 — the ‘Oculus’ part of the name having been dropped around the time Facebook renamed itself to ‘Meta’ — is considerably more capable than the Go was. Now people can have privileged access to its hardware, which may help save some of them from junk piles while enabling folks to do as they please with the hardware they purchased.
Printed footwear is an intriguing idea, but as far as projects go it is somewhat more complex than it first appears. This guide to 3D printing your own clogs not only provides a solid process, but also acts as a list of the challenges and pitfalls involved. After all, a piece of footwear is actually a fairly large object. Failed prints can be costly and time-consuming, so a guide like this is a valuable resource.
First of all, a 3D printer that can handle multi-material printing is called for. The footwear itself will be printed in TPU 90A as a sweet spot for hardness, but the print will require supports and those supports will need to peel away cleanly. The solution is a shoe printed in TPU with a rigid support structure of PLA. Using two different materials in the same print with anything remotely resembling efficiency calls for either a dual-nozzle print head, or a multi-toolhead printer.
3D printing one’s own clogs can be rewarding, if not necessarily cost-effective.
Here we want to take a moment and say that while the guide itself suggests PETG is also a suitable support structure, we suspect this might only be true for the exact filament formulations used in the guide. The safer approach is to use PLA. Why? As we’ve seen in other tests, PETG has been observed to stick extremely well to flex filaments in general, whereas PLA doesn’t really want to stick to anything other than PLA. The exact formulations of TPU and PETG used in the guide might be compatible with one another, but in general we recommend sticking to PLA as a rigid support for flexible filament.
Assuming a capable printer and suitable materials are nailed down, one also needs to worry about keeping the TPU dry. It is very sensitive to moisture, which directly affects print quality. You’ll also need to dial in the settings — a gyroid-patterned infill of 15% provides the right amount of “squish”, which is most effectively fine-tuned by changing the infill pattern rather than the density.
Is it worth the time and effort and filament cost to print one’s own pair of slip-ons versus simply buying a pair of Crocs®? Maybe not, but it can still be rewarding and this guide will help minimize any failed prints in the process. And if you do get a nice print but the TPU is sticking a little too well to the build plate, reach for the isopropyl alcohol.
The Ting FX EP-2350 by Teenage Engineering is a standalone microphone with a few extras, including samples and built-in effect presets that can be modified by the user. It also has a distinctive design, and [Sam Holland] does an in-depth teardown that offers some insights that are worth keeping in one’s back pocket. The large, side-mounted lever in particular is an interesting bit, but more about that in a moment.
Inside the device is a single PCB, which has a cutout in the middle for a pair of AAA cells. A Raspberry Pi 2350 drives the device’s functions, supported by various components which [Sam] identifies, although he mostly looks at everything from the perspective of a mechanical engineer as he critiques the design. It’s a clean-looking, intentionally low-fi design that belies how complex the device really is.
The multi-function, chunky, spring-loaded side lever is of particular interest. It has three sensors: two switches and a potentiometer. One switch detects when the lever is at rest, or depressed by any amount at all. The potentiometer mates with the pivot point of the lever, allowing the device to directly sense how far the lever is pushed. The last switch triggers when the lever is pushed all the way in. Together, it forms an intuitive input that combines powering on (the device wakes up from sleep mode as soon as the lever is pressed) with the ability to adjust effects in proportion with how far the lever is pressed, while also bottoming out with a distinct click that itself acts as an input signal.
One other interesting bit is the light pipes that carry light from multiple indicator LEDs to the outside of the device. A textured surface acts as a diffuser and helps the lit surface look smooth, while a coating of silver paint prevents light bleed and (probably) maximizes light transmission through the plastic. Hot glue makes a pretty good light pipe material but if DIY light pipes end up in your next project, sanding the exit surface and giving the rest a coating of silver paint just might be worth a shot. Continue reading “Teardown Shows Low-Fi Microphone Is Surprisingly Sophisticated”→
A manual skill like soldering is so much easier to learn and grasp when one can watch it in action, and there’s a brand new way to do that using virtual reality (VR). It isn’t just a series of 3D videos shot at someone’s workbench, either.
See soldering in action from any angle, with fine details preserved even close up.
PCB Hand-Soldering Basics is a series of thirteen videos that demonstrate soldering using Gaussian splats, a method of displaying 3D content that allows the viewer to freely look at things from any angle. Gaussian splats aren’t new, but what makes this different is the sheer level of detail and the fact that it’s focused on handheld tool use rather than displaying a famous location, landmark, or something similarly “big”.
Throughout the videos fine detail on the iron, parts, and the PCB itself remain visible from any angle and even from close up. Here’s a short video captured from within a VR headset that is probably the next best thing to seeing it yourself.
An educational production, it was was made in cooperation with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. A few more details are in a LinkedIn post by [Tanmay Lad], who was part of the team involved in the production. The goal is to offer a unique, front-row seat to hand soldering with the ability to zoom in or look at it in 3D from any angle.
Not familiar with Gaussian splats? We’ve previously covered a great overview. They look great and are computationally cheap to render, and being able to get up close and see such detail is not really something one expects.
The actuators are made by combining motors with printed cycloidal gearboxes and an embedded magnetic encoder. They’re modular, so even if one has no desire to recreate the whole robot it might be worth checking out the actuator design details to see if they might be useful in some other way.
