Coolest Way To Watch 3D Printing: Lights, Camera, Octolapse!

July 2, 2018 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

Octoprint is a household name for anyone into 3D printing and anyone regularly reading Hackaday. Described by creator Gina Häußge as “the snappy web interface for your 3D printer”, Octoprint allows you to control effectively any desktop 3D printer over the local network or Internet. It even has webcam support so you can watch your printer while it works, meaning you can finally put that video baby monitor back into the crib with Junior.

While the core functionality of Octoprint is fantastic alone, its true power is unlocked through the plugin system and the community that’s sprung up around it. With plugins, Octoprint can do everything from control RGB light strips in your printer’s enclosure to sending status messages via Discord. One particularly popular plugin that has been making the rounds lately is Octolapse by [FormerLurker]. This plugin provides a comprehensive intelligent system for creating time-lapse videos of prints.

What does that mean? Well, instead of simply taking a picture every few seconds like you’d do traditionally, Octolapse actually keeps track of the printer’s motions while its running. It can then take a picture at the opportune moment to create a number of user-selected effects. More importantly, it can even take control of the printer directly; moving the hotend away from the print before taking a picture. The effect is that the print simply “grows” out of the bed.

I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at Octolapse and see just what it takes to create one of those awesome time-lapse videos. It turned out to be somewhat trickier than I anticipated, but the end results are so fantastic I’d say it’s a technique worth mastering.

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Nintendo Switch Gets Internal Trinket Hardmod

July 1, 2018 by Tom Nardi 51 Comments

If you haven’t been following the Nintendo Switch hacking scene, the short version of the story is that a vulnerability was discovered that allows executing code on all versions of the Switch hardware and operating system. In fact, it’s believed that the only way to stop this vulnerability from being exploited is for Nintendo to release a new revision of the hardware. Presumably there are a lot of sad faces in the House of Mario right about now, but it’s good news for us peons who dream of actually controlling the devices we purchase.

To run your own code on Nintendo’s latest and greatest, you must first put it into recovery mode by shorting out two pins in the controller connector, and then use either a computer or a microcontroller connected to the system’s USB port to preform the exploit and execute the binary payload. It’s relatively easy, but something you need to do every time you shut the system down. But if you’re willing to install an Adafruit Trinket M0 inside your Nintendo Switch, you can make things a little easier.

Stemming from work done by [atlas44] and [noemu], the final iteration of this mod was created by [Quantum-cross]. The general idea is to strip down the Trinket M0 board to as small as possible by removing the USB port and a few capacitors, and then install it inside the Switch’s case. By wiring it up to power, the back of the USB-C connector, and the controller connector, the Trinket can interact with all the key components involved in the exploit.

You can even use the Switch’s USB port to update the firmware on the Trinket to load different payloads, though in his walkthrough video after the break, [xboxexpert] mentions eventually this won’t really be necessary as the homebrew software environment on the Switch matures. Indeed, there will almost certainly come a time when performing this exploit on every boot of the system will be made unnecessary, rendering this modification obsolete. But until then, this is a pretty slick way of getting your feet wet in the world of Switch hacking.

It was only six months or so back that we were reading about the first steps towards running arbitrary code on the Nintendo Switch, and just a few months prior to that we saw people experimenting with controlling the system with a microcontroller.

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Handmade Robot Brings Stop Motion To Life

June 29, 2018 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

Stop motion animation is often called a lost art, as doing it (or at least, doing it well) is incredibly difficult and time consuming. Every detail on the screen, no matter how minute, has to be placed by human hands hundreds of times so that it looks smooth when played back at normal speed. The unique look of stop motion is desirable enough that it still does get produced, but it’s far less common than hand drawn or even computer animation.

If you ever wanted to know just how much work goes into producing even a few minutes of stop motion animation, look no farther than the fascinating work of [Special Krio]. He not only documented the incredible attention to detail required to produce high quality animation with this method, but also the creation of his custom robotic character.

Characters in stop motion animation often have multiple interchangeable heads to enable switching between different expressions. But with his robotic character, [Special Krio] only has to worry about the environments, and allow his mechanized star do the “acting”. This saves time, which can be used for things such as making 45 individual resin “drops” to animate pouring a cup of tea (seriously, go look).

To build his character, [Special Krio] first modeled her out of terracotta to get the exact look he wanted. He then used a DIY 3D laser scanner to create a digital model, which in turn he used to help design internal structures and components which he 3D printed on an Ultimaker. The terracotta original was used once again when it was time to make molds for the character’s skin, which was done with RTV rubber. Then it was just the small matter of painting all the details and making her clothes. All told, the few minutes of video after the break took years to produce.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen 3D printing used to create stop motion animation, but the final product here is really in a league of its own.

[Thanks to Antonio for the tip.]

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Keep It Close: A Private Git Server Crash Course

June 27, 2018 by Tom Nardi 65 Comments

At this point, everyone has already heard that Microsoft is buying GitHub. Acquisitions of this scale take time, but most expect everything to be official by 2019. The general opinion online seems to be one of unease, and rightfully so. Even if we ignore Microsoft’s history of shady practices, there’s always an element of unease when somebody new takes over something you love. Sometimes it ends up being beneficial, the beginning of a new and better era. But sometimes…

Let’s not dwell on what might become of GitHub. While GitHub is the most popular web-based interface for Git, it’s not the only one. For example GitLab, a fully open source competitor to GitHub, is reporting record numbers of new repositories being created after word of the Microsoft buyout was confirmed. But even GitLab, while certainly worth checking out in these uncertain times, might be more than you strictly need.

Let’s be realistic. Most of the software projects hackers work on don’t need even half the features that GitHub/GitLab offer. Whether you’ve simply got a private project you want to maintain revisions of, or you’re working with a small group collaboratively in a hackerspace setting, you don’t need anything that isn’t already provided by the core Git software.

Let’s take a look at how quickly and easily you can setup a private Git server for you and your colleagues without having to worry about Microsoft (or anyone else) having their fingers around your code.

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Conquering The Earth With Cron

June 25, 2018 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

The GOES-R series of Earth observation satellites are the latest and greatest NASA has to offer. As you might expect, part of the GOES-R job description is imaging Earth at high-resolution, but they also feature real-time lighting monitoring as well as enhanced solar flare and space weather capabilities. Four of these brand new birds will be helping us keep an eye on our planet’s condition into the 2030s. Not a bad way to spend around 11 billion bucks.

To encourage innovation, NASA is making the images collected by the GOES-R satellites available to the public through a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform. [Ben Nitkin] decided to play around with this data, and came up with an interactive website that let’s you visualize the Earth from the perspective of GOES-R. But don’t let those slick visuals fool you, the site is powered by a couple cron jobs and some static HTML. Just as Sir Tim Berners-Lee intended it.

But it’s not quite as easy as scheduling a wget command; the images GOES-R collects are separated into different wavelengths and need to be combined to create a false-color image. A cron job fires off every five minutes which downloads and merges the raw GOES-R images, and then another cron job starts a Python script that creates WebM time-lapse videos out of the images using ffmpeg. All of the Python scripts and the crontab file are available on GitHub.

Finally, with the images merged and the videos created, the static HTML website is served out to the world courtesy of a quick and dirty Python web server. The site could be served via something more conventional, but [Ben] likes to keep overhead as low as possible.

If you want to take the more direct route, we’ve covered plenty of projects focused on pulling down images from weather satellites; from using old-school “rabbit ears” to decoding the latest Russian Meteor-M N2 downlink.

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Lost In Space Gets 3D Printing Right

June 25, 2018 by Tom Nardi 100 Comments

When it has become so common for movies and television to hyper-sensationalize engineering, and to just plain get things wrong, here’s a breath of fresh air. There’s a Sci-Fi show out right now that wove 3D printing into the story line in a way that is correct, unforced, and a fitting complement to that fictional world.

With the amount of original content Netflix is pumping out anymore, you may have missed the fact that they’ve recently released a reboot of the classic Lost in Space series from the 1960’s. Sorry LeBlanc fans, this new take on the space traveling Robinson family pretends the 1998 movie never happened, as have most people. It follows the family from their days on Earth until they get properly lost in space as the title would indicate, and is probably most notable for the exceptional art direction and special effects work that’s closer to Interstellar than the campy effects of yesteryear.

But fear not, Dear Reader. This is not a review of the show. To that end, I’ll come right out and say that Lost in Space is overall a rather mediocre show. It’s certainly gorgeous, but the story lines and dialog are like something out of a fan film. It’s overly drawn out, and in the end doesn’t progress the overarching story nearly as much as you’d expect. The robot is pretty sick, though.

No, this article is not about the show as a whole. It’s about one very specific element of the show that was so well done I’m still thinking about it a month later: its use of 3D printing. In Lost in Space, the 3D printer aboard the Jupiter 2 is almost a character itself. Nearly every member of the main cast has some kind of interaction with it, and it’s directly involved in several major plot developments during the season’s rather brisk ten episode run.

I’ve never seen a show or movie that not only featured 3D printing as such a major theme, but that also did it so well. It’s perhaps the most realistic portrayal of 3D printing to date, but it’s also a plausible depiction of what 3D printing could look like in the relatively near future. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’d be exceptionally interested to hear if anyone can point out anything better.

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Circuit Bent Keyboard Is Pretty In Pink

June 24, 2018 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

If you’re anything like us, more than a few of your projects were borne out of the fact that you had some crusty bit of gear that was badly in need of a second lease on life. Whether it was a hand-me-down or pulled out of the garbage, we’ve all at one time or another had some piece of hardware in our hands that might not be worth anything in its current form, but would make an awesome excuse for warming up the soldering iron.

That’s what happened when [joekutz] got his hands on this exceptionally juvenile keyboard toy. In its original state, it was so janky it couldn’t even reliably detect two keys being pressed at the same time; sort of a problem for a keyboard. So he decided to pull it apart and use it as a circuit bending playground. Thanks in part to how much free space was inside of the case, he was able to pack in a number of interesting modifications which he’s kindly detailed on Hackaday.io.

[joekutz] started by adding a headphone jack to the device, as well as a switch to disable the keyboard’s speaker. That allows not only listening to digital jams in private, but makes it possible to capture high-quality audio when connected to the computer. He then started poking around the PCB with a resistor and listening for changes. When the pitch of the keyboard changed, he soldered a potentiometer into its place and now had a way to adjust it on the fly.

Of particular note is the clever physical reverb he came up with. A microphone and speaker are connected to each other with a spring made out of an old guitar string. Audio from the keyboard’s PCB is played on the speaker and a TDA2022 low-voltage amplifier boosts the signal from the microphone. The end result is a very cool ethereal metallic effect.

If you’re looking for a slightly larger DIY reverb, we’ve covered a few builds in the past which should give you some inspiration. You might want to check the dumpster behind the abandoned local Toys R’ Us for some donor keyboards while you’re at it.

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