Author: George Graves

59 Articles

Why Starting A Kickstarter Could Kick Your Butt

October 19, 2015 by 59 Comments

So you’ve come up with a great idea and now you’re thinking about starting a crowdfunding campaign – and why not, all the cool kids are doing it. Now, let’s say you already have a working prototype, or maybe you even built a small run for friends online. You’ve made 10 here, or 20 there. Sure it took some time, but making 1000, or 10,000 would be so much easier once you get all the orders in, right? Wrong.

Before you even think of setting up something like a Kickstarter, we would like to invite you to have a seat and watch this series of videos covering the things many people don’t know about manufacturing. It’s going to cost you 7 hours of sofa time, but if you’re serious about getting something to production these seven hours will pay in spades. Dragon Innovation has had many notable clients over the years – Pebble, Sphero, Makerbot, to name a few. They help startups find their way through the manufacturing mine-feild, for a fee of course. The founders are former iRobot employees, and have quite a bit of hard fought, yet free knowledge to share.

You’ll learn about how important decisions early on can make huge impacts on the success or failure of a product. There’s quite a bit of raw technical info on injection molding, design for manufacture, testing, pricing and everything under the sun. So do yourself (and everyone else) a favor, and before you click submit on that Kickstarter campaign, sit back and enjoy this free seminar.

We’re really enjoying the manufacturing oriented videos which have been popping up. Just a couple of weeks ago we came across a pair of hardware talks from [Bunnie Huang] that were a pleasure to watch. At 20 minutes this might be a good primer before you take the plunge with the playlist below.

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Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie 3D Printed RC Truck

October 17, 2015 by 26 Comments

I think it’s safe to say that almost all of us grew up playing with toy cars. They were cheap, and darn near  indestructible. Some went by the brand name of “Hot Wheels”, and others “Matchbox”. As a kid, you most likely spent many an hour on the floor imagining your “toy” to be a real car – and of course, adding the all important sound effects. Vroom-vroommmmm!

Flash forward to 2015, and see how things have changed. There are several “micro” RC cars and trucks on the market you can buy for about $10, but this is the first micro-sized, DIY, 3D printed, 4×4 truck we’ve seen. And to add to that, it even has a working articulated front end loader.

Coming in at a minute 1/87th scale, this tiny truck and matching controller boasts 6 channels, 4-wheel drive, and a working trailer hitch. In the video after the break, you can see the amazing amount of work that [Mortimer] had to put into this build to get everything to fit in such a small space. Although the video is German, we think it’s fairly easy to see what’s going on. [Mortimer] is sharing the 3D printed files on his Shapeways page if you would like to give this build a go.

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A Guy Named Bernoulli And Ducted Propeller Designs

September 28, 2015 by 50 Comments

Want to learn why ducted propellers improve both thrust and efficiency? Well, we’ve got both the lesson and the teacher for you. [Bruce Simpson] isn’t exactly a household name, but we bet most of you already know who he is. He’s the guy from New Zealand that in 2003 set out to make a $5000 DIY Cruise Missile – and he claims that he would have succeeded if the NZ Government hadn’t got in the way. Now-a-days [Bruce] focuses most of his energy on his two YouTube channels, RC Model Reviews and XJet.

Back to the lesson at hand: In the video after the break, he does a wonderful job explaining how the walls of a duct work to stop the high pressure area of the propeller from moving to the low pressure area. You’ll see something similar on the wings of jets aircraft. There will be a small vertical fin on the end of the wing, and much like a duct, it’s job is to physically separate the two areas and prevent tip vortex effects. That in turn increases efficiency. [Bruce] has some other great RC/model type videos, so if you like what you see, you might want to subscribe. Or you can learn more about the DIY Cruise Missile saga.

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Captain Disillusion To The Rescue

September 23, 2015 by 35 Comments

We all get those emails from well meaning friends and family members about some internet video that “you just have to watch – it’s unbelievable!” Facebook is full of such posts that get passed around more than a doobie at a Grateful Dead concert. If you’re like us, they often make you cringe a bit knowing that they are fake, but you just can’t put your finger on why, or how they did it. All you know is some fancy video trickery is involved.

Well, fear not! [Captain Disillusion] is here!!!! Although he doesn’t put out videos on a regular basis, when he does, we find them very entertaining and informative – we thought you might as well. Think of his Youtube channel like Mythbusters for those annoying viral videos. In his latest work, he debunks a video that was passed around several year back. The original video claimed you can take a cup that is upside down and full of water and it will remain in the shape of the cup – just by giving it a good spin as you lift up. We won’t ruin the surprise for you, but lets just say there was some computer magic involved.

We can’t help but to think his videos might be a great way to get kids (and perhaps some adults) into critical thinking, and not accepting everything they see on the internet at face value. If you like what you see, you can watch the full video after the break, or subscribe to his Youtube channel.

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3D Cable Robot Uses The Building As Its Exoskeleton.

September 21, 2015 by 28 Comments

There’s not much information about this commercial product, but it looks so interesting, we just had to share it. It doesn’t seem there is anything too magical happening here: some motors (presumably some type of servo or stepper with positioning feedback) some cables and pulleys, and an end effector of your choosing. Oh, and just some clever math to solve the inverse kinematics – not that inverse kinematics is all that easy! You can see the robot at work in the video after the break.

Most likely you’ve already seen the end results of such a three-dimensional cable driven system on your TV. If you’re a fan of most field sports, the SkyCam system is what’s used to deliver the stunning aerial shots that really put you into the game. We’ve covered this sort of mechanism before, but only in two dimensions. Usually we see the concept used as a white-board plotter like this extremely methodical Polargraph or one built with K’NEX.

We can’t help but wonder how this might be adapted into other situations?  Perhaps, you could use small light-weight cables (fishing line) and pulleys to make a living-room beer delivery system or TV remote retrieval claw?  Or could it become the mechanics of a really large format 3D printer? If any of you do rig up some sort of house-hold beverage fetching robot, be sure to let us know via the tipline.

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Dear TSA: This Is Why You Shouldn’t Post Pictures Of Your Keys Online

September 18, 2015 by 121 Comments

We have to hand it to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). They seem to have a perfect track record of screwing up – and that’s not an easy thing to accomplish if you think about it. If it’s not reports of TSA agents stealing valuables or inappropriately groping passengers, there is the fun fact that in all the years since it was created in 2001, the agency hasn’t caught a single person seeking to do harm in the friendly skies. We’re actually okay with that if it means nobody is trying to do anything shady.

The most recent TSA folly seemed to practically fall into the Internet’s lap when a reporter for the The Washington Post published a hi-res picture of the entire set of TSA master keys while writing an article about how the TSA handles your bags after checking them at the counter. Well, the lock picking community when nuts and in a short time had 3D printed versions available and working. You can see it in action in the (twitter) video after the break.

For those that are not familiar with travel in the US, you are not allowed to use just any old lock on your bags. It has to be approved by the TSA – and that means that they have to be able to open it. So the TSA agents have a set of master keys that can open any bag if they need to look inside for some reason. If you put a non-TSA approved lock on the bag, that can make them a little angry, and you risk having your bag delayed or even cut open.

Of course, you can get into just about any suitcase with a ball point pen, so maybe this isn’t a real “security” issue, but it sure isn’t what you want to see from the agency that is supposed to protect you. Who knew that you could make keys from a photograph? We did way back in 2009 and way more in depth this May… maybe the TSA should start reading Hackaday?

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Why 100 Watt EBay LEDs Are Not Your Friends

September 14, 2015 by 101 Comments

LEDs are amazing things. As time marches on, they are being used in more and more lighting applications – everything from household bulbs to automotive headlights. But the push for smaller, cheaper, and brighter LEDs seems to have hit a snag for some of the less reputable manufactures.

Case in point, [bigclivedotcom] has been testing of some 100 Watt LEDs from eBay. When these LEDs work correctly, they put out a face-melting beam of light that you wouldn’t dare looking into (picture the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark). They also have some unusual specs for an LED, like running on 30 Volts – and that’s a lot compared to the forward voltage of most LEDs at around 2.5 volts@20 mA.

So what gives? Well many of these high-wattage LEDs use a string of several LEDs in series. And as [bigclivedotcom] points out, this can be a real problem when a few of the LEDs begin to fail and act more like a low value resistor than a typical LED. In the videos after the break you can see [bigclivedotcom] test the LEDs to get a better look and what’s happening and why.

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