Pivena – The Open Source Raspberry Pi Case

August 15, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

Raspberry Pi Laptop

Still not too sure how to house your awesome Raspberry Pi B model? Don’t worry, [Timothy Giles] has got you covered! He’s just finished this very sleek open source PIvena case for anyone to use.

Why is it called the PIvena? He’s basing it off of [Bunnie’s] Novena project which is a hobby-based open source laptop! For more information you can checkout the recent interview we had with [Bunnie] himself!

Anyway, back to the hack — it features a laser cut case which has plenty of room for the Pi and any additional hardware you want to add. Like the Novena, the screen also functions as a lid, opening up to reveal the electronics, allowing for easy tinkering. All the files can be acquired over at Thingiverse, and he has assembly instructions available on Instructables. Continue reading “Pivena – The Open Source Raspberry Pi Case” →

World’s Most Expensive Industrial Pipe Cover

August 14, 2014 by James Hobson 38 Comments

Crystal LED Structure
It’s not hard to get HaD’s attention when you cram 1000’s of RGB LEDs into a single project. In fact, this funky crystal pipe has over 9000 of them!

The rather unique project was privately commissioned to cover up an exposed pipe in a new building. It seems like a bit of overkill to us, but the engineers at Asylum were more than excited to deliver. The pipe covering features 2,912 control modules for the RGB LEDs and are controlled by a dedicated Linux PC built into the installment. A website was created to allow the client to control the lights from any computer or mobile device.

Each crystal shard was individually glued to the surface (there’s around 3000 of them!) using UV hardening glue. It was a painstakingly slow process, but well worth the result as it looks like it’s out of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude!
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Hydroforming In The Garage With A Pressure Washer

August 13, 2014 by James Hobson 74 Comments

Ever heard of hydroforming? It’s a manufacturing process used to form sheet metal into shapes using water at extremely high pressures. Not something you can do at home… unless of course you’re [Colin Furze].

Hydroforming works by evenly distributing pressure via water (conveniently, in-compressible) against sheet metal inside of a mold. Many automotive parts are created in this fashion. Typical systems run at around 15,000 PSI.

After building a giant pulse jet engine (complete with butt) to fart on France, [Colin] got the idea from a YouTube comment to try to do hydroforming at home — bending the sheet metal for the giant derriere wasn’t that easy. Hydroforming on the other hand is a surprisingly simple process. Weld some sheet metal together, add a pipe fitting to connect your cheap pressure washer and boom — hydoformed metal parts.

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Upgrade That Cheap-o Laser Cutter!

August 13, 2014 by James Hobson 44 Comments

Laser cutters are perhaps one of the most useful tools in a hackerspace’s arsenal of tools, rivaled only by 3D printers and CNC mills. The problem is they’re quite expensive — unless you get one of the cheap little ones from China that is! Unfortunately, you get what you pay for. Lucky for us though they aren’t that hard to upgrade!

[Dan Beaven] just finished upgrading his 40W CO2 laser to use an Arduino Mega 2560 and RAMPS 1.4 — wanting to share his knowledge he’s posted a guide to help others do the same. The upgrade itself isn’t that difficult, although can be a bit messy for wiring. In the future [Dan] hopes to design a PCB with all the connectors so it’s as simple as plugging it into the RAMPS board.

To control the laser he’s using firmware from the Lansing Makers Network (GitHub) designed for use with marlin electronics. He’s modified it a bit for his own purposes (Google Drive) including a low output LASAR activation signal.The cool thing with setting up your laser with this hardware is that you can use a laser output plugin right in Inkscape!

Cutting Records Out Of CDs

August 12, 2014 by James Hobson 38 Comments

3D Printed Record Lathe

Lovers of records rejoice! Did you know you can cut your own vinyl using something called a record lathe? [Beau Walker] just put the finishing touches on his 3D printed record lathe, and the results speak for themselves!

A Recording Lathe was once used for cutting records, and previously, wax cylinders – if you want to get really old school. [Beau], being an analog lover, decided he had to try making his own. He designed the whole thing in FreeCAD and got 3D printing. A single stepper motor drives the lead screw which moves the writing head back and forth as the record spins in place. As to not waste materials, he’s reusing old CD’s for his newly created vinyls. Two 25W speakers cause vibrations in the needle to cut into the disc, via a clever little mechanism.

The system works pretty well, but he wants to replace the turntable with another stepper motor for finer control of the recording — sometimes the turntable slows down during recording under load which messes up the sound. There’s a video of it in action on his site that we can’t embed here, so you should definitely go check it out!

Of course you could skip the middleman and go straight to 3D printing your records…

PirateCade Is An Impressive Feat Of Woodworking And Design

August 12, 2014 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Retro Arcade Machine Keeps the Classics

A six month journey of blood sweat and tears is finally over for [David Carver] and what he is left with is nothing short of beautiful. He calls it the PirateCade. We call it the perfect arcade cabinet.

This project is actually [David’s] very first Raspberry Pi project – at least it was, until his Pi crapped out on him. After running into too many problems with it and SD card corruptions, [David] decided against the RetroPie project platform and decided to upgrade to a full-blown PC, using an AtomicFE front-end and the Ultimark Ipac.

The entire cabinet is hand made out of solid wood; he didn’t have access to any fancy CNC routers or laser cutters. We gotta hand it to him, he’s quite the cabinet maker for an electronics guy. Continue reading “PirateCade Is An Impressive Feat Of Woodworking And Design” →

Funky Looking Motor Is Powered By Static Electricity

August 9, 2014 by James Hobson 26 Comments

[Steven Dufresne] of Rimstar.org is at it again with another very functional science experiment. This week he’s showing us how he made a large electrostatic motor, also known as a Corona Motor.

A Corona motor makes use of a cool
phenomenon called the Corona discharge, which is the ionization of a fluid
(in this case, air) surrounding a conductor that is energized. He’s done other high voltage experiments that take advantage of this, like his Ion Wind propelled Star Trek Enterprise!

The motor works by using an even number of electrodes on the motor, each electrically charged; positive, negative, positive, negative, etc.

Because each electrode is the opposite charge, they want to repel each other — but since the cylinder is electrically insulated, the charges have no where to go — instead the cylinder begins to rotate as the charges attract back and forth — when a positive charge on the insulation meets a negatively charged electrode, the charge is removed by ionization (creating the corona effect), and the cycle continues. The direction of rotation is determined by the angle of the electrodes. The motor can get going pretty fast but doesn’t have that much torque or power.

Continue reading “Funky Looking Motor Is Powered By Static Electricity” →