Making Luminol From Household Chemicals

October 17, 2011 by Mike Szczys 45 Comments

What to make your own chemiluminescent material? Check out this process that uses common household goods to synthesize luminol. You’ll need some lab equipment, and [NurdRage] mentions some precautions to take as luminol is not itself toxic, but some of the fumes and intermediary chemicals found during the process are.

Start by cutting up some vinyl gloves and boiling them with some rubbing alcohol to extract diethyl hexyl phthalate. After filtering, that gets boiled with water and some drain cleaner. The goal here is to continue the process until you have pure phthalic anhydride. Almost done? Not even getting started. This is a very complicated process, but fascinating to watch. After the break you’ll find the full video, or a five-minute abridged version for those that just want a taste of this experiment.

When we looked at the quantum dot manufacturing process a couple of days ago we asked for more chemistry hacks. This is exactly what we were talking about and are thankful that [Rob] sent in the tip. Keep them coming!

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How To Develop For STM32 Discovery Boards Using Linux

October 17, 2011 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

Some hard work has gone into making it possible to develop for the STM32 Discovery board using a Linux system. The board boasts an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, which can be programmed via the mini-USB port on the side. But the company only supports development through their IDE’s which don’t run natively on Linux. The stlink project aims to solve this, providing a toolchain, and making it possible to flash the microcontroller via the USB connection.

The github project linked above also includes a tutorial to get you started (pdf). In addition to a walk through on compiling the software packages, it includes a simple blink program that you can use to test out your hardware. GDB, the familiar open-source debugger, is used to flash the chip. This is a bare-bones tutorial so if you end up posting about your experiences using this toolchain with the Discovery boards we’d love to hear about it.

[Thanks Texane]

Hackaday Links: October 16, 2011

October 16, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Spinning DNA animation using sprites

[James Bowman] shows a way to use sprites to simulate parts of DNA moving in 3 dimensional space. The animations are driven by an Arduino board and Maple board, which allows a comparison of the processing differences between the two. [Thanks Andrew]

Tiny Pong

This Pong game is so small (translated), you’ll be fighting over who gets a closer view of the screen.

More CNC halftone pieces

[Christian] made a bunch of halftone pictures with a CNC mill. He took the concept from [Metalfusion’s] halftone projects and ran with it. He even posted some video of the machining process (turn down your sound before viewing this one).

Most useless machine

[Jumbleview’s] take on the most useless machine makes the entire lid shut off this rocker switch, instead of using a separate arm for the task.

7400 rectifier

[Noel] is using a couple of 7400 chips in an unorthodox way to form a full-wave rectifier. They’re not powered, but instead used for the internal diodes. It’s his entry in the 7400 contest.

Contest Entry Roulette

October 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Over 150 projects made from scrap parts (translated) have been posted for your viewing pleasure. They make up the entries in the “Make fast the scrap” project from c’t magazine. We already looked in on a toilet paper printer, but there’s a ton of other fun stuff to look at as well.

Every time you load the link at the top, the page picks a different set of entries to display. You can click through all the pages, or reload to play a little project roulette. The image above shows three that caught our eye. To the upper right is a lighbulb-man riding an old computer mouse reverse-cowgirl style. Quirky, but anyone who has access to an electroplating setup can get away with making simple objects like this into awesome desktop sculptures.

Moving clockwise we have a tiny USB drive mated with an old vacuum tube. The machine translation is a bit rough, but it looks like the LED from the thumb drive gives the tube a bit of a red glow. We just think it’s interesting to carry around a vacuum tube with you.

The final banner image shows a gyroscope for a camcorder. This is an awesome setup, which you can see in action after the break. A pair of broken hard drives provide motion stabilization for a camera. The entire assembly has a handle on the top with a universal joint. When the drives are spinning, the platform holds very still, even if the operator is swinging the unit around wildly.

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Panoramic Ball Camera; Toss To Snap A Picture

October 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 72 Comments

This odd-looking ball can automatically take a panoramic image whenever you throw it up into the air. Seriously, that’s then entire set of operating instructions for the device. Inside, a 3D printed frame hosts an array of 36 cellphone cameras, each capable of taking a two megapixel image. Also included is an accelerometer. When it senses the change in momentum associated with the apex of its vertical trajectory it snaps an image with all of the cameras at the same time. The result is a spherical image with no obstructions-like a tripod or other support mechanism. The images are automatically stitched together and displayed on a computer which allows the user to pan and zoom.

The whole story is told in the video after the break. The example images shown are quite good, although there are a few artifacts where the segments meet. Most notably, color variances between the images captured by different CCD modules. We’d image that this can be fixed automatically in software if a talented programmer were willing to put in the time. The thing about spherical photos is that methods using post processing to unwrap an image always have some distortion to them. With that in mind, we think the ball camera is as good a solution as we’ve seen.

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Surface Mount Solder Assitant

October 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Make sure those tiny parts know their place by using this surface mount solder assistant (translated). It’s like a clamp for small packages; gravity and a needle to hold them in place while you do some hand soldering. [Red Devil] started the built by soldering together some brass rails into a hinged frame with a clamp to accept the needle tip. Next, a pair of tubes were added to accept LEDs which light the work area (we think that’s a fantastic touch). Finally, the assembly was mounted to the corner of a square base that makes up the work surface.

This is basically a complex version of a simple gravity clamp. But if you’re doing some assembly line soldering this would be indispensable. For this kind of work, custom jigs are often built. That would still be the case, but this armature removes the need of building something into each jig to hold the SMD components in place.

Hardware Version Control Using Visual DIFF

October 14, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

As the Open Source Hardware movement gathers steam, it has become clear that the tools to work collaboratively on hardware are in the dark ages when compared with slick frameworks like Git used to work on software projects. We’ve read a fair amount about this lately, but the idea of visual difference generation for PCB layout is one of the better proposals we’ve seen.

Of course the big difference when it comes to version control is that software is text, but hardware is graphic and only represented by text for the computer to use. It’s easy to use the ‘diff’ command to show you what text is out and what text is in, but that doesn’t translate to a schematic. [Windell] is using command-line utilities to produce a schematic that colors changes differently for easy visual detection. This means exporting before and after schematics as PDF files or images, then using ImageMagick to process them. He also points out that there’s a package out there called DiffPDF that will let you compare differences in PDF files automatically.

Check out what he has to say in his article, and make sure you get to the bottom where he suggests ways you can help. We agree that it shouldn’t be hard to roll visual diff functionality into open source software packages used for hardware design, and to integrate that into version control systems. It’ll just take some time for the concept to proliferate.