Salvaging A Commercial-grade Pick And Place Machine

September 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Why build a pick and place machine from the ground up when you can start with a full featured, but non-functional unit, and bring it back to life. That’s exactly what [Charliex] is doing with this Juki 360 rebuild.

A bit of background is in order here. [Charliex] is working alongside other hackers at Null Space Labs to restore this hardware. The Los Angeles based hackerspace sponsored the hardware badges at this year’s LayerOne, each of which was hand assembled. They’d like to avoid that tedium next year, which led to this project.

The seller of the used Juki 360 listed it in working condition, but it seems that they were polishing a turd since it is basically non-functional. The link at the top of this post is the second testimonial of their work so far. It covers the use of an Arduino board as a replacement interface, as well as a bunch of sensor repair, pneumatic testing, and motor driver firmware tweaking. If you’d like to see the initial teardown and hardware diagnostics don’t miss the first post in their adventure.

Engine Hacks: Snow Chucking — Because Snow Blowing Is For Commoners

September 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

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Winter’s coming, and you don’t want to be outdone by your neighbor’s new snow blower. We think it’s pretty safe to say you’ll be the envy of gearheads throughout the neighborhood if you can build your own snow blower around a V8 engine. [Kai Grundt] is a metal fabricator by day and a ~~horror movie prop~~ yard implement builder by night. He pulled the engine out of his Chevy truck and then filled in parts around it to make this 412 HP snow blower.

The tank treads that it rides are each have their own dedicated hydraulic pump, making it easy to drive and steer this 800 pound whale. One of the first orders of business for the beast was to throw snow from two houses away, burying his buddy’s car. That’s the price you pay for laughing in a guy’s face when he describes his next project. It sounds like [Kai] was planning on selling kits so you could more easily replicate the build, but we couldn’t find any additional info on that. If you’ve got the details, please let us know by leaving a comment.

[Thanks Danman1453]

Material Of Choice: Felt Pen On Glass

September 4, 2011 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

If you’re paying big bucks for those floor-to-ceiling windows why not make them into a canvas for your art as well. Der Kritzler is a motorized plotter that can make this into a reality. It’s a laser-cut pen holder suspended from a pair belt pulleys. Those belts have counterweights, which make it easier for the stepper motors to move the pen jig smoothly. The firmware running on the Arduino that controls Der Kritzler has some very precise setup requirements. Since there is no feedback for the Arduino to sense the position of the pen, the two stepper motors must be exactly 1500 mm apart with 1060mm of toothed belt between the carriage and each stepper motor when the power is turned on.

Input images are converted to code for the device using a processing sketch. So far [Alex] has tried out a couple of different effects, starting with a vector graphic, or using some open source tools to convert bitmaps to vector graphics. Don’t miss his video demonstration embedded after the break.

Continue reading “Material Of Choice: Felt Pen On Glass” →

PIC-based Voice Recorder

September 3, 2011 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

[Vinod] just finished building a voice recorder and it turned out even better than he thought it would. The video after the break shows him recording what is surely one of your favorite songs from his cellphone and then playing it back. The audio quality does sound quite good for a project with very few components.

A PIC 16F877A makes up the majority of the build. Its ADC is used to capture the incoming line from an amplified microphone input (you’ll find that amp schematic half way through his post). He’s storing the data on an MMC card, which was a bit of a hack since the PIC has limited RAM to manage that overhead. The stored data is in a raw format, as the card is not accessed using a file system. This makes it easy to record at a high bit rate, leading to better audio quality. Playback consists of connecting a speaker via a low-pass filter and amplifier circuit to the hardware PWM output on the PIC.

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POV Keychain From Prototype To SMD Board

September 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[Augusto] wrote in to tell us about his keychain-sized persistence of vision project. He built the original prototype on some protoboard, using a PIC 16F627 to drive eight LEDs. Synchronization is managed by a tilt sensor on the board that starts the strobing to match the direction the board is traveling. This is a similar setup as the POV device that used an accelerometer, but it should be quite a bit easier to code for the tilt switch.

Once [Augusto] had the hardware dialed in he set to work laying out a surface mount design. The two AAA batteries were traded for a single 3V coin cell, which is on the back side of the board you see above. This is his first attempt at working with surface mount components and we think he did a great job. Check out the POV in action in the video after the break.

Continue reading “POV Keychain From Prototype To SMD Board” →

Get Out The Graph Paper Get Started On The New Discrete Logic Contest

September 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Here’s another chance to ply your hacking skills for cash and prizes. Dangerous Prototypes has just announced the Open 7400 Logic Competition. First prize is $100 and a bunch of hacking goodies. But even better is that since it was announced, more sponsors have stepped up to increase the kitty, and the number of entries that will get prizes.

The parameters for entry are wide open. You can design anything you want, with emphasis on originality. Make sure you take plenty of pictures and document the project along the way. Their judging will take into consideration the amount of detail posted about the project (hence the ‘Open’ in the contest title).

Need some ideas to get you started? We enjoyed the useless machine that used a 7400 NAND gate. You could always build a time piece of some sort like this no-microcontroller clock. Perhaps hardware control like this stepper motor driver is more to your liking?

[Thanks Moderboy]

Intel’s New Way Of Creating Randomness From Digital Orderliness

September 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 43 Comments

Random number generation is a frequent topic of discussion in projects that involve encryption and security. Intel has just announced a new feature coming to many of their processors that affect random number generation.

The random number generator, which they call Bull Mountain, marks a departure from Intel’s traditional method of generating random number seeds from analog hardware. Bull Mountain relies on all-digital hardware, pitting two inverters against each other and letting thermal noise tip the hand in one direction or the other. The system is monitored at several steps along the way, tuning the hardware to ensure that the random digits are not falling more frequently in one direction or the other. Pairs of 256-bit sequences are then run through a mathematical process to further offset the chance of predictability, before they are then used as a pseudorandom number seed. Why go though all of this? Transitioning to an all-digital process makes it easier and cheaper to reduce the size of microchips.

A new instruction has been added to access this hardware module: RdRand. If it works as promised, this should remove the need for elaborate external hardware as a random number source.

[via Reddit]