Inebriator Servers Up All The Cocktails

August 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

The robotic bartender, lovingly named the Inebriator, is a work of mastery. We think you’ll be surprised by the simplicity and grace of its beverage dispensing system.

The most obvious part is the lineup of nine liquor bottles across the top with LED backlight for style. Each has a valve on it that is meant to be pressed on by the rim of a glass in order to dispense its payload. To dose the glass with alcohol the Inebriator drives a trolley along one axis beneath the line of bottles. When in position it has an actuator arm the rises up and depresses the bottle’s valve mechanism. Once all the liquor is in the glass it moves to the left side to be topped off with mixers. These are stored in bottles in a cooler under the table. They are pressurized with nitrogen, and an electronically actuated value lets the liquid flow. Drinks are selected on a character display, and there’s a weight sensor in the trolley to ensure that a drink isn’t mixed without a vessel to receive it.

You don’t want to miss seeing this in action after the break.

Continue reading “Inebriator Servers Up All The Cocktails” →

Bluetooth Control In A Power Strip

August 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Mansour] had a ceramic space heater mounted near the ceiling of his room. Since heat rises this is not the best design. He upgraded to an infrared heater which works a lot better, but lacks the timer function he used on the old unit. His solution wasn’t just to add a timer. He ended up building a Bluetooth module into a power strip in order to control the device wirelessly. He ends up losing all but two outlets on the strip, but everything fits inside the original case so we think it’s a reasonable trade-off.

He uses relays on both the live and neutral wires to switch the two outlets. These are driven via MOSFETs to protect the ATmega168 which controls the board. The microcontroller and Bluetooth module both need a regulated DC power source, so he included a transformer and regulator in the mix. After the break you can see him demonstrating the system using two lamps. There’s even a terminal interface which lets you select different control commands by sending the appropriate character. This interface makes script a breeze.

At least this power strip doesn’t spy on you.

Continue reading “Bluetooth Control In A Power Strip” →

Soft Robots Given Veins The Let Them Change Their Stripes

August 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

If it were alive this robot would be classified as an invertebrate. It lacks a backbone and interestingly enough, all other bones are missing as well. The Harvard researchers that developed it call it a soft robot. It’s made out of silicone and uses pathways built into the substance to move. By adding pressurized air to these pathways the appendages flex relative to each other. In fact, after the break you can see a video of a starfish-shaped soft robot picking up an egg.

Now they’ve gone one step further. By adding another layer to the top, or even embedding it in the body, the robot gains the ability to change color. Above you can see a soft robot that started without any color (other than the translucent white of the silicone) and is now being changed to red. As the dye is injected it is propagating from the right side to the left. The team believes this could be useful in a swarm robotics situation. If you have a slew of these things searching for something in the dark they could pump glowing dye through their skin when they’ve found it. The demo can be seen after the jump.

Continue reading “Soft Robots Given Veins The Let Them Change Their Stripes” →

BGA Soldering With A Paint Stripper And Stopwatch

August 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

Having just received a shiny set of PCBs from the fab-house [Devbisme] needed a way to solder the main chip in place. It has a Ball-Grid Array footprint which is notoriously difficult to populate in a home lab. But he makes it look pretty easy and decided to share a video tutorial of the process.

The main tool he used is the paint stripper (heat gun) seen above. Since he didn’t have his own fancy reflow oven he made things work with the gun as his heat source. First he applies a generous layer of liquid solder flux to the BGA footprint on the board. Next he melts some solder onto the tip of his iron and uses it to tin all of the board’s BGA pads. Then it’s time for the critical step of positioning the chip. He uses vacuum tweezers to set it in place, and traditional tweezers to fine-tune its position. From here he heats with the paint stripper for two minutes, starting far above the board and slowly moving closer, with the reverse at the end of the soldering process. Once cool the board is cleaned with distilled water and blown dry with compressed air. After a visual inspection he finishes the application with a 30 minute stay in a 300 degree oven. We’ve included the video after the break for your convenience.

We’ve seen a similar technique used for replacing a chip on an already populated board.

Continue reading “BGA Soldering With A Paint Stripper And Stopwatch” →

A Desktop Binary Clock

August 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys No comments

This is the desktop binary clock which [Tim the Floating Wombat] recently finished building. He calls it the Obfuscating Chronoscope since it’s a bit more difficult to read than your traditional analog or digital timepieces. But the simple design looks neat and it’s a great way to learn about board layout and microcontroller code.

He started by solving a few questions about the display technique. He wanted to use as few LEDs as possible. He settled on just four, and to prevent unnecessary confusion, decided to make sure each type of display (seconds, minutes, hours) would have at least one LED on at a time. Hours are easy enough to display, but with just four bits how can minutes be shown? He uses a 5-minute resolution, always rounding up to the next division of five. This way the first bit will be illuminated on the hour.

A PIC 24F16KA102 microcontroller keeps time using its built-in RTC and a clock crystal. It puts itself into deep sleep mode after displaying the time. The black knob at the bottom is a push-button which resets the chip, waking it up just long enough show the time once again.

Reverse Engineering A Syma 107 Toy Helicopter IR Protocol

August 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Half the fun of buying toys for your kids is getting your hands on them when they no longer play with them. [Kerry Wong] seems to be in this boat. He bought a Syma S107G helicopter for his son. The flying toy is IR controlled and he reverse engineered the protocol it uses. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this type of thing with the toy. In fact, we already know the protocol has been sniffed and there is even a jammer project floating around out there. But we took a good look at this because of what you can learn from [Kerry’s] process.

He starts by connecting an IR photo diode to his oscilloscope. This gave him the timing between commands and allowed him to verify that the signals are encoded in a 38 kHz carrier signal. He then switched over to an IR module designed to demodulate this frequency. From there he captures and graphs all of the possible control configuration, establishing a timing and command set for the device. He finishes it off by building a replacement controller based on an Arduino. You can see a video of that hardware after the break.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering A Syma 107 Toy Helicopter IR Protocol” →

Making Images And Videos Using A Diy Fluoroscopic X-ray

August 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 85 Comments

[Jozef] has been playing around with X-rays. Specifically, he’s been using his own setup to make fluoroscopic images, a type of x-ray photography that allows for video images to be made. If you’ve ever seen those x-ray movies of someone swallowing, that’s fluoroscopy (we’re fans of the other oddities like this video of a skeleton playing the trumpet).

The image above is [Jozef’s] own hand. He exposed it for about one second, filming the event from the opposite side of a Curix Ortho Regular Screen. The screen fluoresces when hit by the particles from an x-ray tube he picked up on eBay. This particular event dosed his hand with about 10 rads. We have no clue as to what levels are safe (and a quick search didn’t enlighten us) so talk amongst yourselves in the comments section.

Of course [Jozef] didn’t stop with still images, he put a turntable between the tube and the screen and took a bunch of x-ray videos of revolving electronics. You’ll find the video embedded after the break.

Continue reading “Making Images And Videos Using A Diy Fluoroscopic X-ray” →