Author: Matthew Carlson

289 Articles

Electric Surfboard Gets An Overhaul

September 6, 2022 by 5 Comments

One of the realities of building your own hardware is that it will more often than not lead to constant tinkering and revisions. [Simon]’s 3D printed electric surfboard is no exception as it recently got an overhaul. The motors were upgraded from 5000 W to 7500 W, most parts were redesigned to use bearings, and the impellers were swapped out. Luckily, almost all the electronics inside were suitable for reuse.

We previously covered the surfboard in question, and we’re always excited to see an old project revisited. The bearing reduces vibrations and allows the system to last longer. Despite the water cooling on the motors, the temperatures were still getting relatively high when running full tilt. So rather than buying more efficient (and more expensive) motors, he opted to reduce the load on the motors by changing out the impeller from a double to a single. But this meant cutting and grinding a new shaft as now needed to be one impeller shorter.

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Stable Diffusion And Why It Matters

September 6, 2022 by 51 Comments

You might not have heard about Stable Diffusion. As of writing this article, it’s less than a few weeks old. Perhaps you’ve heard about it and some of the hubbub around it. It is an AI model that can generate images based on a text prompt or an input image. Why is it important, how do you use it, and why should you care?

This year we have seen several image generation AIs such as Dall-e 2, Imagen, and even Craiyon. Nvidia’s Canvas AI allows someone to create a crude image with various colors representing different elements, such as mountains or water. Canvas can transform it into a beautiful landscape. What makes Stable Diffusion special? For starters, it is open source under the Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license, which is relatively permissive. Additionally, you can run Stable Diffusion (SD) on your computer rather than via the cloud, accessed by a website or API. They recommend a 3xxx series NVIDIA GPU with at least 6GB of RAM to get decent results. But due to its open-source nature, patches and tweaks enable it to be CPU only, AMD powered, or even Mac friendly.

This touches on the more important thing about SD. The community and energy around it. There are dozens of repos with different features, web UIs, and optimizations. People are training new models or fine-tuning models to generate different styles of content better. There are plugins to Photoshop and Krita. Other models are incorporated into the flow, such as image upscaling or face correction. The speed at which this has come into existence is dizzying. Right now, it’s a bit of the wild west. Continue reading “Stable Diffusion And Why It Matters” →

Digging Out An Underground Workshop

September 6, 2022 by 31 Comments

[Michael] of Teaching Tech moved, and with a large crawlspace under the house, he decided to turn it into a workshop.

There were a few challenges that needed to be addressed first. He had to dig out the crawlspace to provide a level surface, though the depth was limited by the concrete footers the building stands on. The house is sitting on and around large amounts of limestone, which is excellent from a stability standpoint but causes problems for [Michael]. Water can easily travel through limestone, meaning it ends up in his newly dug-out crawlspace. He dug trenches for water to exit and laid down gravel. After a few attempts to level the floor, he found some recycled plastic floor mats and finally got them where he liked them.

Wheeling his tools down a long and steep hill to the shop looks like most of the challenge. But with a few additions to the shop, like hard tube dust extractions and a french cleat system, he has an incredibly functional dedicated shop space.

If your crawlspace is too small for people, a tiny remote-controlled forklift could turn it into the storage space you need.

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Choose Your Own Vector Map

August 22, 2022 by 7 Comments

There are adults out there driving who were born after Google Earth came out. Potentially distressing facts aside, those who were around to remember the magic of scrolling in and out with infinite levels of detail was an experience that burned into our brains. Perhaps still curious 21 years later, [Craig Kochis] dove into how vector maps work by implementing one himself.

Some standard helper functions convert latitude and longitude into Mercator coordinates (x and y coordinates on the screen). He used WebGL to draw a canvas, making the whole thing interactive on the webpage itself. The camera position and zoom level stored as a matrix that is used to transform the map projection. By grabbing polygons that describe the shape of various borders and then converting those polygons into triangles with earcut, [Craig] has a part of a country rendered to a screen. Continue reading “Choose Your Own Vector Map” →

Revamping The Camping Trailer With More Power

August 16, 2022 by 13 Comments

Pulling a trailer behind your bike has an aspect of freedom and exploration to it. However, the reality is that pulling a large, heavy box behind your bike is incredibly draining physically. So [Drew] returned to the drawing board for his bike camper and added a motor, making some tweaks along the way.

We covered his first attempt at a bike trailer; this update encompasses everything he mentioned as future improvements. First, he strengthened the axle, and the trailer mount bolted straight into the chainstay arm for added strength. Then he built a custom battery pack out of 18650 cells clocked in at just under 3kw. Next, he installed a hub motor kit into the bike’s back wheel. Finally, a flexible 100W PV solar panel was added to the roof and routed to a small battery bank inside that provides USB and a few AC outlets for laptops and phones while camping. [Drew] does note that he could charge the big e-bike battery with the smaller bank, but since the e-bike battery is much larger than the small one, it would take a few cycles.

[Drew] takes a journey to a music festival and is happy to report better stability and the battery having fantastic range even without him pedaling. We love seeing a good project revisited, and we hope [Drew] gets some good use out of his camper. Video after the break.

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Getting To The TrackPoint Quicker

August 15, 2022 by 10 Comments

Love it or hate it, TrackPoint can be a powerful tool. Love it or hate it, the idea of moving the mouse without removing your hands from the keys has an appeal. [Alon Swartz] incorporated one into his custom wired split mechanical keyboard and wrote a helpful guide on how to do it yourself.

The first step was to determine the pinout of the Trackpoint, which he provides a handy repository of various devices with annotations and pictures. The next step is swapping the little rubber nub at the top for something a bit longer. As the PCB sits below the keys, a labret cheek piercing happens to be a perfect candidate. Strong, thin, easily obtainable in different lengths, and threaded on one end. With jewelry in hand, [Alon] created a reset circuit with just a few resistors and a capacitor so the teensy can trigger a reset of the Trackpoint. The keyboard’s TMK firmware also needed a few tweaks to support reading the Trackpoint.

It’s a great guide, and we love the use of the jewelry as a piece of the keyboard. A knitting needle was used in a previous attempt to add a Trackpoint to a mechanical keyboard, and we’re excited to see what other household items end up in keyboards.

Mac Mini Mini

August 15, 2022 by 28 Comments

The Mac Mini has been roughly the same size and shape for 12 years, as the current design was released in June 2010. However, despite being the same general form factor, the internals has shrunk over the years. [Snazzy Labs] took advantage of this to make a miniaturized Mac Mini.

With a donor Mac in hand, they cracked it open and found an oversized power supply, a diminutive logic board, and a good bit of space. Unfortunately, the logic board attaches to a wide IO shield. He removed that, and the fan attached to the heatsink (checking to ensure it still booted). Relocating the WiFi antennas was the trickiest part of the whole build. Given that he wanted to shrink the power supply and the Mac Mini accepts just 12 volts, he devised a clever solution to use MagSafe as a connector. However, Magsafe negotiates over a complex protocol when attached. So, rather than smarten his port up, he dumbed the charger down by replacing it with a Microsoft Surface power supply spliced into the MagSafe connector.

With his mini Mac Mini board ready to go, he began designing a case to fit what was now a single-board computer. A fan of the channel offered a design reminiscent of the 2019 Mac Pro. Unfortunately, FDM printing struggled with the cheese-grater pattern, so [Snazzy Labs] printed it in resin with some mica powder. As a result, the mini mini looks fantastic while taking up just 28% of the volume of the original.

They’ve posted the STL files online with detailed instructions and a parts list if you want to recreate it at home. Perhaps with the smaller motherboard, it might be worth revisiting the Mac Mini inside a PowerBook hack from a few years ago. Video after the break.
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