Author: Lewin Day

Glasses Frames Crafted Out Of Wood

January 9, 2019 by 10 Comments

Most glasses and sunglasses on the market make use of metal or plastic frames. It’s relatively easy to create all manner of interesting frame geometries, tolerances can be easily controlled for fitting optical elements, and they’re robust materials that can withstand daily use. Wood falls short on all of these measures, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to make a beautiful pair of glasses.

ZYLO is a company making wooden eyewear, and this video from [Paide] shows the build process in detail. Modern tools are used to make things as efficient as possible. Parts are lasercut and engraved to form the main part of the frames as well as the temples (the arms that sit over the ears to hold them on your face). A special jig is used to impart a curve on the laminated wood parts before further assembly is undertaken. Metal pre-fabricated hinges and screws are used to bolt everything together like most other modern sunglasses, but there’s significant hand finishing involved, including delicate inlays and highlighting logo features.

In contrast, Manuel Arroyave works very differently in the creation of his Cedoro glasses. Sheets are first laminated together, before the shape is roughed out by a special horizontal axis milling setup. Even small details like the hinges are delicately hand-crafted out of wood and fitted with tiny wooden dowels.

It goes to show that there’s always more than one way to get a job done. We’re tempted to break out the laser cutter and get started on some custom shades ourselves. Perhaps though, you’re too tired to put your sunglasses on by yourself? Nevermind, there’s a solution for that, too. Video after the break.

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The T-Pain Toy Is Now a Guitar Effect

January 9, 2019 by 7 Comments

T-Pain is rapper hailing from Florida, who made his name through creative use of the Autotune effect. Nobody quite does it like T-Pain to this day, but kids the world over got the chance with the release of the “I Am T-Pain” microphone, which puts effects on the user’s vocal to make them sound as fly as possible, batteries not included. In the spirit of musical exploration, [Simon] decided it would be interesting to turn the effect into a guitar pedal.

Initial plans were to wire the microphone to an input jack, and the speaker to an output jack, but things didn’t remain so simple. The toy comes with a line-in and a headphone jack already, but the wiring scheme is strange and one of the inputs can also act as an output under certain conditions. [Simon] took the kitchen sink approach, throwing a bunch of jacks at the circuit and putting it all in a pedal case with some knobs to twiddle some parameters.

The final result is a warbly, lo-fi vibrato when a guitar signal is fed in. It’s quite different from how the original toy sounds, but recalls us somewhat of the Anti-nautilus pedal when used in conjunction with a looper. Video after the break.  Continue reading “The T-Pain Toy Is Now a Guitar Effect” →

Delta Robot Is Sorting Golf Balls And Taking Names

January 9, 2019 by 14 Comments

It’s a common situation faced by every hard-working American – you get home after a long day at the calcium mines, and find yourself stuck with a pile of colored golf balls that simply aren’t going to sort themselves. Finally, you can put away your sorting funnels and ball-handling gloves – [Anthony] has the solution.

That’s right – it’s a delta robot, tasked with the job of sorting golf balls by color. A Pixy2 object tracking camera is used to survey the table, with the delta arms twitching around to allow the camera to get an unobstructed view. Once the position of the balls is known, a bubble sort is run and the balls rearranged into their correct color order.

[Anthony] readily admits the bubble sort is very inefficient at this task; it was an intentional choice so it could be later compared with other sorting methods. [Anthony] also goes into detail, sharing the development process of the suction gripper as well as discussing damping methods to reduce noise.

Delta machines are always fun to watch, and are a good choice for sorting machines. We’ve seen some really tiny ones, too. Video after the break.

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Preserving Floppy Disks Via Logic Analyser

January 8, 2019 by 26 Comments

The floppy disk is a technology that is known only to the youth of today as the inspiration for the Save icon. There’s a lot of retro computing history tied up in these fragile platters, thus preservation is key. But how to go about it? [CHZ-Soft] has found an easy way, using a logic analyzer and a healthy dose of Python.

Floppy drives have particularly low-level interfaces, offering up little more than a few signals to indicate the position of the head on the disk, and pulses to indicate changes in magnetic flux. The data is encoded in the pattern of flux changes. This has important implications as far as preservation goes – it’s best to record the flux changes themselves, and create an image of the exact magnetic state of the disk, and then process that later, rather than trying to decode the disk at the time of reading and backing up just the data itself. This gives the best likelihood of decoding the disk and preserving an accurate image of floppy formats as they existed in the real world. It’s also largely platform agnostic – you can record the flux changes, then figure out the format later.

[CHZ-Soft] takes this approach, explaining how to use a Saleae logic analyser and a serial port to control a floppy drive and read out the flux changes on the disk. It’s all controlled automatically through a Python script, which automates the process and stores the results in the Supercard Pro file format, which is supported by a variety of software. This method takes about 14MB to store the magnetic image of a 720KB disk, and can even reveal a fingerprint of the drive used to write the disk, based on factors such as jitter and timing.

It’s an impressive hack that shows that preservation-grade backups of floppy disks can be achieved without spending big money or using specialist hardware. We’ve seen other projects in this space before, too.

Make Your Own Dowels At Home

January 8, 2019 by 28 Comments

Dowels are a useful woodworking technology making it easy to connect several pieces of timber, particularly with the aid of adhesive. However, depending on where you live, it can be difficult to come by a wide variety of stock. This is particularly important if you’re concerned about appearances – cheap pine dowels could spoil the look of a delicately finished hardwood piece, for example.

Thankfully, it’s easy to make your own dowels at home. [Pask Makes] has used a simple dowel plate before, but this time, decided to build the deluxe version. A thick steel plate is drilled with a series of holes, and then mounted to a wooden block. Square stock can then be forced through the holes to produce the dowels.

[Pask] notes that there are several methods to use the dowel plate. Hammering the wood stock through the holes works best for hardwoods, while fitting the square stock into the chuck of a power drill and forcing it through while spinning gives a better finish on softer woods. There are also useful tips on how best to produce dowels, with notes on strength and grain orientation.

It’s a useful tool to have in your workshop, and means you can turn just about any wood into dowels for your woodworking projects. If you’re fresh to the world of wood, worry not – we’ve got the primer to get you started. Video after the break.

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Bad Apple!! Via The Arduino Mega

January 8, 2019 by 13 Comments

The Arduino Mega is a useful tool for the maker. Generally, once one has come up with plans for blinking LEDs that require more IO than is available on the Arduino Uno, one graduates to the Mega and goes for broke. However, it’s not typically what we’d consider as our first choice for video work. [Stephane] begs to differ, and coded this Bad Apple!! demo for the Arduino Mega 2560.

For those unfamiliar, video on the Arduino is actually somewhat of a solved problem – merely requiring a pair of resistors and some nifty code. The real meat of this hack is the video storage itself. It’s been done before, but by streaming data off an SD card or serial link. [Stephane] was determined to store everything on the Arduino itself, and thus the hack begun. Video data is stored as 1 bit per pixel, as it’s a simple black and white video as per the original inspiration. LZ77 compression was used to cram the data down without requiring too much RAM, which is a limited resource on the Mega. It’s video only, as the Mega is tapped out handling 3 minutes and 39 seconds of video storage, but future work may include syncing with a second Arduino to deliver the soundtrack.

It’s a hack that shows off [Stephane]’s ability to get impressive performance out of limited platforms. We’ve seen this before, with his excellent Star Fox port to the Arduboy. Video after the break.

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Star Fox Comes To Arduboy

January 7, 2019 by 5 Comments

The original Star Fox for the SNES was a landmark game. With the Super FX chip built into the cartridge, it presented the first 3D accelerated home console experience. The series has spanned several consoles and over two decades. Now, it’s getting an (albeit unofficial) port to the Arduboy, thanks to [Stephane Hockenhull].

Impressively, the game fits in under 28KB, and [Stephane] hasn’t skimped on the development details. The process begun with setting up a basic 3D engine on the Arduboy, followed by some tests of various gameplay ideas. The final implementation bears a strong similarity to the original SNES gameplay. At this point, work moved out of the Arduino IDE into [Stephane]’s custom development environment to speed things along. A PC port was used to save time programming the flash every iteration.

The tricks used to pull this off are many and varied. There are neat hacks used to optimise the storage of the 3D model data, implement lightweight collision detection, and generate random levels. Everything was done in order to make the game fit into the smallest space possible.

Running smooth 3D graphics on a 16MHz 8-bit microcontroller is an impressive feat, and a testament to [Stephane]’s coding abilities. We can’t wait to see more 3D development on the platform. Meanwhile, if the Arduboy doesn’t quite have the look you want, there’s a solution for that too. Video after the break.

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