Author: Zoe Skyforest

3645 Articles

Build A Strandbeest Replica Of Your Very Own

December 3, 2023 by 1 Comment

[Theo Jansen] is famous for his giant walking Strandbeest creations. They’re elegant, impressive, and powered by nature, and their walking mechanism is a thing of beauty. If you’ve ever wanted to build your own, [Antonio Garcia] has just the guide to get you started on the smaller scale.

Unlike so many other builds today, this one features some good old fashioned craft techniques. The build uses popsicle sticks for the legs, what appear to be toothpicks for the joints, and a cardboard box for the main body. A small brushed DC motor is used for propulsion to keep things easy, which runs off a few AA batteries. It’s a gearmotor, which gives it plenty of torque to propel the walking mechanism without undue strain.

It may not be powered by nature, and it may not be taller than most humans, but it’s still got an appealing gait and it still inspires us with its design. If you want to learn more, go ahead and take a gander at [Theo Jansen’s] own designs and see what you can pick up. Video after the break.

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Adding Cellular Connectivity To The Hackaday Supercon Badge

December 2, 2023 by 1 Comment

Did you manage to make it down to Hackaday Supercon 2023? Maybe you did, and maybe you had a great time hacking away on the badge. [Dan] and ex-Hackaday alumnus [Mike Szczys] certainly did, with the guys from Golioth adding cellular connectivity to the hardware and developing a community art project.

The badge was hooked up over I2C to a Golioth Aludel Mini, which is a prototyping platform featuring a Sparkfun nRF9160 cellular modem. A custom Micropython implementation was compiled for the badge so that the badge could act as an I2C peripheral to be queried by the Aludel Mini. The sketch app on the badge was tweaked to allow the small pictures it created to be be uploaded to a cloud site called Badgecase, programmed in Rust. Amusingly, it turns out the sketch app uses a rectangular workspace, though you only see a circular section of it on the Supercon badge’s awesomely round display.

Much of the hack is happening off-board from the badge itself, but it’s a neat piece of work that shows how easy cellular connectivity is to implement these days. We’ve seen some other great feats with the Vectorscope badge, and it looked great if you happened to 3D print a case for it, too. Video after the break.

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Build Yourself A Screw Propelled Robot To Tackle The Dirt

December 2, 2023 by 11 Comments

Wheels and tracks are common choices for robot propulsion, but they’re not the only game in town. You can do some nifty things with long extruded screws , and they work pretty well in soft terrain. [gokux] set about building a small robot using this propulsion method using 3D printed parts.

The build uses a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 as the brains of the operation. This provides wireless connectivity for remote control, as well as a way to get a low-latency video feed out of the robot from the OV2640 camera. The ESP32 controls a pair of brushed DC gearmotors via a DRV8833 motor driver. Each drives one of the two screws on the robot. By driving the two screws separately, the robot has simple skid steering. Two 18650 lithium-ion cells provide power for the robot, and are charged via a TP4056 battery charger module.

If you want to build a small robot that can handle soft terrain well, screw drives could be just the solution you’re looking for. They’re usually a bit slow, though, especially for human-scale conveyances, so don’t write off wheels or tracks if you don’t have to. And, of course, when your build is done, don’t forget to put it online and tell us all about it!

Generating Motion Via Nitinol Wires

December 2, 2023 by 13 Comments

Generally, when we’re looking to build something that moves we reach for motors, servos, or steppers — which ultimately are all just variations on the same concept. But there are other methods of locomotion available. As [Jamie Matthews] demonstrates, Nitinol wires can be another way to help get things moving.

Nitinol is a type of metal wire made of nickel and titanium that is also known as “memory wire”, because it can remember its former shape and transition back to it with a temperature change. [Jamie] uses this property to create a simple hand that is actuated by pieces of wire sourced from Amazon. This is actually a neat way to go, as it goes some way to mimicking how our own hands are moved by our tendons.

[Jamie] does a great job of explaining how to get started with Nitinol and how it works in a practical sense. We’ve seen it put to some wacky uses before, too, such as the basis for an airless tire.

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Print Your Own Brain Lamp From MRI Data

December 1, 2023 by 12 Comments

MRIs generally fall somewhere on the scale from boring to stressful depending on why you’re having one and how claustrophobic you get. Regardless, they’re a wonderful diagnostic tool and they’ve saved thousands if not millions of lives over the years. In a fun use of the technology, [mandalaFractals] has shown us how to make a 3D-printed brain lamp using an MRI scan of the head.

The build starts with an off-the-shelf lamp base and a smart LED bulb as the light source, though you could swap those out as desired for something like a microcontroller, a USB power supply, and addressable LEDs if you were so inclined. The software package Slicer is then used to take an MRI brain scan and turn it into something that you can actually 3D print. It’ll take some cleaning up to remove artifacts and hollow it out, but it’s straightforward enough to get a decent brain model out of the data. Alternatively, you can use someone else’s if you don’t have your own scan. Then, all you have to do is print it in a couple of halves, and pop it on the lamp base, and you’re done!

It’s a pretty neat build. Who wouldn’t love telling their friends that their new brain lamp was an accurate representation of their own grey noodles, after all? It could be a fun gift next time Halloween rolls around, too!

Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own MRI hacks that you’ve been cooking up, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Robot Pianist Runs On Arduino Nano

December 1, 2023 by 7 Comments

The piano has been around for a long time now. Not long after its invention, humans started contemplating how they could avoid playing it by getting a machine to do the job instead. [vicenzobit] is the latest to take on this task, building a “Robot Pianista” that uses a simple mechanism to play a tune under electronic command (Spanish language, Google Translate link).

An Arduino Nano is the heart of the build, paired with a shield that lets it run a number of servo motors. The servos, one per key, are each assembled into a 3D-printed bracket with a cam-driven rod assembly. When the servo turns, the cam turns, and pushes down a rod that presses the piano key.

The build is limited in the sense that you can only play as many keys as you have servo channels, but nonetheless, it does the job. With eight servos, it’s able to play a decent rendition of Ode to Joy at a steady tempo, and that’s an excellent start.

We’ve featured some great mechanized instruments before, too. Video after the break.

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Wine Is For Windows And Darling Is For MacOS

December 1, 2023 by 44 Comments

Wine has become a highly optimized and useful piece of software for those that live in Linux, but occasionally need to walk on the Windows side. In case you’d wondered, there’s a similar tool for when you need to run a MacOS program in your Linux environment. Enter Darling, the translation layer you’ve needed all along.

Just as Wine is not an emulator, nor is Darling. As a translation layer, it duplicates functions of the MacOS operating system that programs need to operate but within Linux. It’s fast, because it’s effectively running the MacOS software directly. Initially, Darling was mostly only capable of running MacOS apps at the console level. However, there is rudimentary support for running graphical applications that are based on the Cocoa framework.

Hilariously, if you’re into weird recursive situations, you can go deeper and run Darling within Windows Subsystem for Linux, itself running within Windows. Why? Well, you’re probably bored or just trying to for the sake of it. Regardless, we don’t judge. If you’ve got your own nifty translation or virtual machine hacks in the works, don’t hesitate to let us know!