Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

Touch Probe For 3D Scanning

April 19, 2006 by 9 Comments

touch probe

Graham calls this touch probe his first useful milling project. He had already built the CNC mill and once he built this probe on the mill he essentially had a 3D scanner. The central hub is supported by three shafts spaced evenly around its axis. These shafts each rest on a pair of ball bearings to make a complete circuit. If the probe bumps into anything, one of the shafts will lift, breaking the circuit. TurboCNC has a built in routine for scanning with a touch probe. The program generates a point file which Graham pulled into Rhino for modeling. His example application was cloning a model airplane prop that had gone out of production. The TurboCNC routine isn’t very quick since the probe always returns to the same height so he’s coding a faster algorithm. This type of touch based scanning was also employed in agiecco’s LEGO 3D scanner.

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Phase Change Cooling System

April 18, 2006 by 29 Comments

phase cooling

Chris Morrell has an impressive write up on all the ins and outs of building a phase change cooling system. Vapor refrigeration moves heat from one area to another by changing the phase of the working fluid. Chris used propane as the working fluid in his system. He’s got instructions covering all of the work involved from brazing the copper tubes, to building and lapping the evaporator blocks, to the final tuning. With no load it’s can hit -45DegC.

This story reminded me to check back on extremecorvette’s cascading cooler from last fall. He started receiving parts last month for a brand new design. I can’t wait to see how that turns out.

[via Paul Stamatiou]

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$20 Fisheye Digital Camera

April 17, 2006 by 20 Comments

fisheye

I know the camera pictured looks kind of wonky, “They just glued a peephole to a digicam, right?” The fisheye camera guide from Aggregate.org goes much further than that. They’ve tried out the $4 peephole lens on almost every camera in the office and have built dedicated ones using $15 pen cameras. I don’t plan on building one of these, but I did find their guide for removing “dark noise” from images really interesting. Sensor noise can be fairly consistent from shot to shot. So with some smart subtraction of a black frame from an image you can remove noise without blurring the image. They have information on masking and projection conversion as well.

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Xbox 360 Water Cooling Tutorial

April 16, 2006 by 23 Comments

360

One of the most amazing things about the Xbox 360 isn’t the graphics or the high price; it’s how much heat the thing puts out. Hot air pours out of the machine and I’ve often considered turning mine into and Easy-Bake convection oven. People have been modifying the boxes since their initial release and xboxexpert, on xbox-scene, decided to put together a guide to help out anyone seeking to watercool their Xbox 360. From the text it sounds like he didn’t even play the thing once he got it from the store, the first thing he did was pull it apart. His setup uses Coolance GPU water blocks and a Thermaltake cooling system powered from the DVD drive 12V line.

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Canon 300D Mod For Astrophotography And IR Imaging

April 15, 2006 by 14 Comments

300d

[Jan-Erik Skata] recently had to perform surgery on his Canon 300D since the secondary mirror would not raise up (and if manually locked wouldn’t autofocus). His repair guide is good; you may remember his focus screen replacement. The thing I found really interesting was the site he referenced for his disassembly: Gary Honis’s Canon Digital Rebel (300D) Modification. Gary removes the IR cut glass from inside the camera and replaces it with a piece of clear glass. He then shows how to setup color correction and confirm that autofocus is still working correctly. He’s even got a mockup for how to add peltier cooling to the CMOS chip.

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PIC Programmer Built From Broken Monitor

April 14, 2006 by 35 Comments

pic programmer

Khoa wanted to give a friend a microcontroller programmer(cache), but didn’t want to spend the money. He found almost every part he needed inside of a broken monitor he had in the closet. The only parts he had to provide were the perf board and the serial port. Even the socket was in the monitor. It was too wide, but he just cut out the center spar and made the socket narrower.

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Hack Media: Monome

April 14, 2006 by 29 Comments

monome

Stop. Watch the video. Monome is an 8×8 grid of backlit buttons for music control. That’s pretty much it. The demo video does an awesome job showing some of the possibilities and I’m sure there will be many interesting developments in the future. I’d love to see what adding a second color for feedback would do.

Will O’Brien from Engadget and I will be attending Make Faire next weekend, where you’ll be able to see and play with the Monome first-hand. We hope to see some of you there.

[via Create Digital Music and Music Thing]

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