Author: Dan Maloney

3367 Articles

Laser Projector Relies On Steppers Rather Than Galvanometers

November 2, 2022 by 29 Comments

Laser light shows have always been real crowd-pleasers. There’s just something about the frenetic movement of a single point of intensely bright light making fluid animations that really captures the imagination. Large-scale laser shows require a lot of gear, of course, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in on the fun yourself using something like this homebrew X-Y laser projector.

This is actually [Stanley]’s second pass at a stepper-based DIY projector; we featured his previous build back in 2016. This time around, he wanted to move beyond the “module mix-and-match” style of construction, so rather than use an Arduino and stepper shield, he rolled his own controller PCB to hold an ESP32 and a pair of STSPIN220 stepper drivers. The business end of the new version saw improvements, too — given that he was seeing unwanted softening of corners and curving of straight lines in the first projector’s images, he opted for smaller steppers holding smaller mirrors this time around. There’s also a new 3D printed chassis to hold everything, simplifying the build and keeping the two mirrors in better alignment.

The video below has the build details and some nice footage of the projector in action — it’s hard to go wrong with lasers and smoke. The performance seems pretty good, so the improvements seem to have paid off. And for those of you tapping out your “Should have used galvos” comments below, relax; [Stanley] says he’s thinking about ways to make his own galvanometers for the next version.

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Trinocular Lens Makes Digital Wigglegrams Easier To Take

October 30, 2022 by 13 Comments

Everyone likes a good animated GIF, except for some Hackaday commenters who apparently prefer to live a joyless existence. And we can’t think of a better way to celebrate moving pictures than with a 3D printed trinocular camera that makes digital Wigglegrams a snap to create.

What’s a Wigglegram, you say? We’ve seen them before, but the basic idea is to take three separate photographs through three different lenses at the same time, so that the parallax error from each lens results in three slightly different perspectives. Stringing the three frames together as a GIF later results in an interesting illusion of depth and motion. According to [scealux], the inspiration for building this camera came from photographer [Kirby Gladstein]’s work, which we have to admit is pretty cool.

While [Kirby] uses a special lenticular film camera for her images, [scealux] decided to start his build with a Sony a6300 mirrorless digital camera. A 3D printed lens body with a focusing mechanism holds three small lenses which were harvested from disposable 35 mm film cameras — are those still a thing? Each lens sits in front of a set of baffles to control the light and ensure each of the three images falls on a distinct part of the camera’s image sensor.

The resulting trio of images shows significant vignetting, but that only adds to the charm of the finished GIF, which is created in Photoshop. That’s a manual and somewhat tedious process, but [scealux] says he has some macros to speed things up. Grainy though they may be, we like these Wigglegrams; we don’t even hate the vertical format. What we’d really like to see, though, is to see everything done in-camera. We’ve seen a GIF camera before, and while automating the post-processing would be a challenge, it seems feasible.

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Hackaday Links: October 30, 2022

October 30, 2022 by 7 Comments

Sad news for kids and adults alike as Lego announces the end of the Mindstorms line. The much-wish-listed line of robotics construction toys will be discontinued by the end of this year, nearly a quarter-century after its 1998 introduction, while support for the mobile apps will continue for another couple of years. It’s probably fair to say that Mindstorms launched an entire generation of engineering careers, as it provided a way to quickly prototype ideas that would have been difficult to realize without the snap-fit parts and easily programmed controllers. For our money, that ability to rapidly move from idea to working model was perhaps the strongest argument for using Mindstorms, since it prevented that loss of momentum that so often kills projects. That was before the maker movement, though, and now that servos and microcontrollers are only an Amazon order away and custom plastic structural elements can pop off a 3D printer in a couple of hours, we can see how Mindstorms might no longer be profitable. So maybe it’s a good day to drag out the Mindstorms, or even just that big box of Lego parts, and just sit on the carpet and make something.

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Hackaday Podcast 191: Researchers Parse Starlink, Switches Sense Muscles, And LFT Plays The Commodordion

October 28, 2022 by 4 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney get together for a look at everything cool under the hardware-hacking sun.

Think you need to learn how to read nerve impulses to run a prosthetic hand? Think again — try spring-loaded plungers and some Hall effect sensors. What’s Starlink saying? We’re not sure, but if you’re clever enough you can use the radio link for ad hoc global positioning. Historically awful keyboards, pan-and-scan cable weather stations, invisibility cloaks, plumbing fittings for electrical controls — we’ll talk about it all. And if you’ve never heard two Commodore 64s and a stack of old floppies turned into an electronic accordion, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

Download it your own bad self!

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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A Homemade Tube Amplifier Featuring Homemade Tubes

October 27, 2022 by 23 Comments

With the wealth of cheap and highly integrated audio amplifier modules on the market today, it takes a special dedication to roll your own from parts. Especially when those parts include vacuum tubes, and doubly so when you make the vacuum tubes from scratch too.

Now, we get it — some readers are going to find it hard to invest an hour in watching [jdflyback] make a pair of triodes to build his amplifier. But really, you’ve got to check this out. Making vacuum tubes with all the proper equipment — glassblower’s lathe, various kinds of oxy-fuel torches, all the right hand tools — is hard enough. But when your lathe is a cordless drill, and you’re using a spot welder that looks like it’s cobbled together from junk, your tube-making game gets a lot harder. Given all that, you’d expect the tubes to look a lot rougher than they are, but even with plain tungsten wire heaters and grids made from thick copper wire, they actually work pretty well. Sure, the heaters glow as bright as light bulbs, but that’s all part of the charm.

Speaking of charm, we just love the amp these tubes went into. Built in 1920s breadboard-style, the features some beautiful vintage mica capacitors and wirewound resistors, plus a variable resistor the likes of which we’ve never seen. The one nod to modernity is the clever use of doorbell transformers, one for a choke and one for the speaker transformer. They don’t sound great, but there’s no doubt they work.

We may have seen other homemade vacuum tubes before — we even recently featured a DIY X-ray tube — but there’s something about [jdflyback]’s tubes that really gets us going.

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Digital Kitchen Spoon Makes Weighing Your Ingredients A Snap

October 27, 2022 by 14 Comments

There seem to be two camps when it comes to recipes: those based on volume-based measurements, and those based on the weight of ingredients. Gravimetric measurements have the advantage of better accuracy, but at the price of not being able to quickly scoop out a bit of this and a dash of that. It would be nice to get the convenience of volumetric measurements with the accuracy of weighing your ingredients, wouldn’t it?

It would, and that’s just what [Penguin DIY] did with this digital kitchen spoon scale. The build started with, perhaps not surprisingly, a large mixing spoon and a very small kitchen scale. The bowl of the spoon got lopped off the handle and attached to the strain gauge, which was removed from the scale along with its LCD display and circuit board. To hold everything, a somewhat stocky handle was fabricated from epoxy resin sandwiched between aluminum bolsters. Compartments for the original electronics parts, as well as a LiPo battery and USB charger module, were carved out of the resin block, and the electronics were mounted so that the display and controls are easily accessible. The video below shows the build as well as the spoon-scale in action in the kitchen.

We think this is not only a great idea but a fantastic execution. The black epoxy and aluminum look amazing together on the handle, almost like a commercial product. And sure, it would have been easy enough to build a scale from scratch — heck, you might even be able to do away with the strain gauge — but tearing apart an existing scale seems like the right move here.

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Flight Simulator Focuses On The Other Side Of The Cockpit Door

October 25, 2022 by 22 Comments

When one thinks of getting into a flight simulator, one assumes that it’ll be from the pilot’s point of view. But this alternative flight simulator takes a different tack, by letting you live out your air travel fantasies from the passenger’s point of view.

Those of you looking for a full-motion simulation of the passenger cabin experience will be disappointed, as [Alex Shakespeare] — we assume no relation — has built a minimal airliner cabin for this simulator. That makes sense, though; ideally, an airline pilot aims to provide passengers with as dull a ride as possible. Where a flight is at its most exciting, and what [Alex] captures nicely here, is the final approach to your destination, when the airport and its surrounding environs finally come into view after a long time staring at clouds. This is done by mounting an LCD monitor outside the window of a reasonable facsimile of an airliner cabin, complete with a row of seats. A control panel that originally lived in an airliner cockpit serves to select video of approaches to airports in various exotic destinations, like Las Vegas. The video is played by a Pi Zero, while an ESP32 takes care of controlling the lights, fans, and attendant call buttons in the quite realistic-looking overhead panel. Extra points for the button that plays the Ryanair arrival jingle.

[Alex]’s simulator is impressively complete, if somewhat puzzling in conception. We don’t judge, though, and it looks like it might be fun for visitors, especially when the drinks cart comes by.

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