3D Printer Plays Classic MIDIs

March 9, 2015 by James Hobson 7 Comments

For whatever reason we all seem to have this obsession with making things other than speakers into speakers. Hard drives, floppy drives, CD drives, fax machines, inanimate objects, dot-matrix printers, and now — well let’s stay with times — a 3D printer!

[Andrew Sink] wanted to give stepper music a try (is that seriously a genre now? (Yes, we’re calling it Stepstep – Ed.)), so he found HomeConstructor.de, which happens to have an awesome MIDI to G-CODE converter specifically designed for making those steppers hum. His instrument of choice is an original Printrbot but unfortunately it did require a few hours of tweaking the G-Code to get it to work just right.

Feast your ears on this beautiful rendition of the Jurassic Park Theme song below.

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A Secret Door To The Mines Of Moria

March 7, 2015 by James Hobson 9 Comments

What home movie theater is complete without a secret entrance? [Eclipse_007] had the brilliant idea to make this Lord of The Rings themed hidden door, akin to the entrance way to the Mines of Moria.

It’s a custom door panel filled to the brim with LED lights on the underside. The front panel is a large piece of plexi-glass with a vinyl coating on one side. [Eclipse_007] painstakingly cut the design out of the vinyl coating, all by hand. Once installed the door just looks like another part of the wall. But when touched, the door lights up and then swings open, revealing the movie theater. Plans are already in the works to make it voice controlled to open when the password is spoken.

As one reddit user puts it:

That is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen.

I’m trying to imagine an estate agent introducing your house… two bathrooms, double glazing, five bedrooms, the Westgate of Moria which opens into a basement movie theater when you say Mellon, and a stylish modern kitchen…

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A Functional Sonic Screw Driver (Well, Kind Of)

March 6, 2015 by James Hobson 14 Comments

[Jerome Kelty] just finished building this awesome data-logging Sonic Screwdriver with his 6-year-old son [Sam]. The Halloween previous, [Jerome’s] older son had dressed up as the Doctor, which had inspired [Sam] to make his own Sonic Screwdriver — however he declared that his screwdriver needed to actually work!

They sat down together and decided what it needed to be able to do. [Sam] has a pair of hermit crabs, so they thought it would be handy to be able to measure the temperature and the humidity of their habitat. It needed a flashlight for obvious 6-year old reasons, and it had to make the right sound effect when you used it too!

[Jerome’s] first thought was to 3D print it, but was met with a resounding no: “It needs to be metal!”

So out came the sketchpad and they started designing it to be cut on the lathe, using a combination of aluminum, brass and wood.

Many weekends later [Sam] and his dad finished the body of the screwdriver and started work on the electronics. To keep it simple they used an Arduino Pro Mini 5V with a Sparkfun OpenLog to record all the data — and a handful of sensors of course!

After modifying the body a few times they finally got all the electronic guts to fit inside the screw driver. It features an SD card you can remove to see the OpenLog data, but as a “cool factor” [Jerome] also programmed in the temperature sensor to output to the RGB LED, so little [Sam] can point at things to determine how warm or cold they are.

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Caramelizing Sugar With A Laser

March 4, 2015 by James Hobson 20 Comments

If you happen to have access to a laser cutter, you’re bound to try cutting or engraving something it wasn’t designed for. We know we have. [Bonnie] and her friend [Brenda] decided to try something new — caramelizing sugar with a laser.

At their local hackerspace, NYC Resistor, they brought in some chocolate squares and colored sugar and started tinkering with the laser. It’s a 60W CO2 laser by Epilog. After testing a few different options they ended up with the following setting for optimum sugar caramelizing with only one pass:

Speed 100
Power 30
DPI 300

By spreading a thin layer of sugar over top of the chocolate, you can effectively melt and bond the sugar to the chocolate — we suspect playing with the laser focus will also help you fine tune the process for your own confections.

You could just etch the chocolate with the laser as well — but that’s not quite as cool. Perhaps try to up your sushi game, why not laser engrave seaweed before rolling? Or make the perfect laser-cut gingerbread house thanks to designing it in CAD?

Hard Drive… Speakers?

March 3, 2015 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Speakers really aren’t that complex to make. In fact, if you’re clever about it, you can make a speaker out of just about anything. [Afroman] is kicking it old school with a hack he first did back in 2001, but now, in video form: Make your own HDD Speaker!

All you need is an old hard drive you don’t care about anymore, a bit of flexible wire, and an externally powered amplifier (no your cellphone will not work!). If you don’t have an amp, [Afroman] even has a tutorial so you can build your own Class D Amplifier on a breadboard!

First off you’ll need to crack open the HDD enclosure. You might need a torx or hex key to get past the manufacturer’s “safety screws” though. Once it’s open you’ll need to locate the hard drive head — this is the small metal arm that looks kind of like a record player tone arm. It’s actually controlled by a coil, you know, just like a speaker…

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Introducing The Solder Sucker 9000

March 3, 2015 by James Hobson 73 Comments

Using a regular plunger style solder sucker is tedious at best, and usually not that effective. If you’re trying to salvage components off a PCB, sometimes it can take longer than it’s worth to do — short of reflowing the entire board that is! But what if you had something to desolder individual components faster?

After getting fed up with his cheap plunger-based solder sucker, [electro1622] decided to try a different tactic. He reuses components from old PCBs all the time, so he tried something a bit unorthodox to remove them. Compressed air.

Now let’s just preface this with it will be messy, so you might want to set up a box to catch the removed solder. Simply use your iron of choice to heat up the solder globs holding back your components, and then blast it with compressed air out of a small nozzle. Way faster than a solder sucker.

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LED Sound Board Is Not Your Father

February 26, 2015 by James Hobson 10 Comments

Who doesn’t like Star Wars, LEDs, and music? [Stathack] was looking for a unique piece of art to put in his living room… so he decided to make his own Vader EQ.

The EQ is a massive 4′ x 5′ piece made from plywood and MDF. [Stathack] traced the familiar helmet onto it by using a projector to project the outline onto the surface. Not having access to an extra large CNC or laser, he then painstakingly used a jigsaw to cut out all the white pieces of the design — holy cow.

This process only took weeks and weeks of sanding, filling and sanding again due to the excellent precision of a jigsaw.

Once that was all done, he created the backing plate out of MDF to provide structural support and mounting locations for the LEDs. Bit of spray paint later and a simple circuit with the Arduino and it’s both done, and awesome.

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