3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day!

March 3, 2014 by James Hobson 20 Comments

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[Amr] recently built a 3D printer and came across his first practical application for it — his jacket’s zipper broke!

What we like about this project is [Amr] goes through the entire design process to finished product in his video. He starts by showing us the failed zipper, explaining where and why it failed, and then identifies the design features he needs to keep in order to make a functional replacement. To help accomplish this he checks out the Wikipedia article on zippers which shows an excellent animation of what happens inside of the zipper.

Now confident in his knowledge of all things zipper, he begins to model his replacement using SolidWorks, which is an industry standard among 3D CAD packages — for more information on how to use SolidWorks, we’ve been covering it in our 3D Printering articles! Continue reading “3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day!” →

Photosphere’ing Made Easy And Cheap

March 1, 2014 by James Hobson 22 Comments

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Android phones have a cool function called Photo Sphere — unfortunately, unless you’re very steady and can manipulate the phone around its camera’s axis… the results aren’t that amazing. Unless you make a cheap 360 degree panorama head for your tripod that is!

[Oliver Krohn] designed this super simple adapter which you can mount on any tripod. It’s a U-shaped bent piece of aluminum, a bottle cap with a 1/4-20 nut, a thick piece of wire, and a cellphone case. The wire is bent with a notch to sit just below the camera’s lens on the cellphone — it is also placed directly above the tripods panning axis. This puts the nodal point in the perfect place, which allows for a great photo sphere every time.

To see how it works (and the amazing results!) stick around for the following video.

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Smart Thermostats For An Old Club House

February 28, 2014 by James Hobson 8 Comments

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[Michael] is a Scout Leader in the Netherlands, where they have a great clubhouse—a “Landhuis.” The only problem? It’s old, and it’s not an efficient place to heat!

The building currently has two furnaces to cope with its many nooks and crannies, with individual thermostats in each of the five rooms. If a thermostat was activated in one of the rooms, it would control a valve in the furnace responsible for that room. Depending on which valve the furnace is attached to, a furnace would start. As you can imagine, this is an extremely inefficient system if you are heating two different rooms (and using two different furnaces!) It’s all on or off with no in-between.

As true scouts, they try to adhere to the simple principle of “why buy it when you can build it?” Commercial systems are expensive, and besides, they needed a project to work on! They’ve designed a smart(er) system using an Arduino Mega 2560 with five DS18B20 temperature sensors set up in each room, and even threw together a nice enclosure for it! They’ve included the source code on GitHub (in Dutch), so if you’re interested in setting up something similar you can check it out.

[Michael] will be around in the comments section, so if you have any feedback or questions, let him know!

Wireless Charging… Have A Heart

February 28, 2014 by James Hobson 12 Comments

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[Gal Naim] recently finished off an awesome Valentine’s day present for special someone. It’s a wireless charging heart for your phone!

He already had the Qi wireless charger but wasn’t much of a fan as it “looks so boring”. So he took it apart to salvage the charging circuit for his new project. As luck would have it, the Qi is very simple on the inside — all he had to do was lengthen the power wires to the coil. He then designed his heart in SolidWorks — Don’t forget to check out our 3D Printering tutorials on this — and printed it out in a nice candy apple red. To maximize the charging current he’s left the inductive loop on the outside so it can be as close to the phone as possible — he spray painted it red and it actually looks pretty cool!

The next step was adding the wireless charging capability to the phone, we’ve covered how to add this to any phone before, but for [Gal] it was as simple as cutting down the Qi Receiver card to fit in the phone.

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Ridiculously Accurate Mission Control Panel

February 27, 2014 by James Hobson 32 Comments

We are absolutely blown away by the level of detail that went into this amazing mission control panel that [Jeff Highsmith] made for his son.

His kid just started school and needed a desk to do homework on. They had recently visited the Kennedy Space Center, and his son found a new interest in all things space — So [Jeff] took the opportunity to make the desk into this mind-boggling control panel.

We saw a similar project recently, but this one seems to take it to the next level. The desk itself is hand-made from MDF sheet and with oak boards making up the structural members. He’s cut out over a dozen individual control panels, added switches, LEDs and potentiometers, and printed the labels on transparencies which give the whole thing a very professional and finished look. An iPad sits in the middle which plays a curated collection of space videos.

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Persistence Of Vision Would Make A Great HUD

February 27, 2014 by James Hobson 33 Comments

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[Eduardo Zola] has just put the finishing touches on this awesome real-time persistence of vision display which displays text as you type!

It looks like the display is mounted on a small DC fan, which [Eduardo] powers using a bench top power supply. This allows him to fine tune the speed manually, without adjusting the the actual POV controller. The display receives the characters from the keyboard via a small USB RF receiver, and it has got a pretty snappy response time.

There isn’t too much more info on the project, but it certainly gives us an idea — could persistence of vision be used to create a kind of heads up display in a vehicle? What do you think?
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RFID Keepsake Box Is Sweet And Secure

February 27, 2014 by James Hobson 17 Comments

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[Mike Buss] wanted to make his girlfriend something unique for her upcoming birthday — she had mentioned she wanted something to keep small mementos in, but [Mike] decided to step it up a notch on the awesomeness scale.

You see, a few years ago [Mike] read about the Reverse Geocache Puzzle by [Mikal Hart], which is an awesome box that gives you feedback as to how far away you are from the “secret” location that the box will open at — To raise the stakes however, if you ask for the distance more than 20 times it locks itself forever! Now, unfortunately, a memento box wouldn’t be very useful if you had to go to a secret place every time you wanted to open it… so [Mike] decided to secure it another way, using RFID!

It makes use of an Arduino, a Parallax RFID Reader, a micro servo, a button, an RGB LED, and a cleverly designed latch made of a metal eye hook and small copper rod. Since the box is battery powered, [Mike] has added an extremely clever fail safe mechanism. The 9V battery inside includes two extra contacts to the outside of the box via small screws. Completely inconspicuous, but if the battery is dead, simply hold a new 9V to the screws with the RFID card in place, and bam, the box opens!

We’re pretty sure she’s going to like it — check it out after the break!

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