Material testing is important in big industry, where manufacturers must be able to trust the properties of the raw materials they’re using. The rest of us generally take a supplier’s word for it that they’re giving us what we’ve paid for. However, you could always take on material testing yourself with the Universal Tensile Testing Machine from [Xieshi Zhang].
Unlike a six-figure industrial machine, this build is much more affordable, costing on the order of $300 to build. It uses an Arduino to read a tensile strain gauge, and is capable of applying up to a kilonewton of force. To achieve this, it uses a NEMA 17 stepper motor driving a lead screw to apply tensile strain or compression to the specimen under test. The test fixture is assembled from 3D-printed components, and built on top of a piece of aluminium extrusion.
Fundamentally, it’s a smaller version of a machine most engineering undergraduates will see in a materials lab experiment. It could be highly useful for anyone wanting to experiment with 3D printed structures; it would be more than capable of testing various filaments and infill types for their tensile and compression performance. Video after the break.
Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: Universal Tensile Testing Machine”
The robot face is introduced to us with a soundtrack befitting Stranger Things, or maybe Luke Million. The build was inspired by The Doorman, a creepy art piece with animatronic eyes. [Jens’] build started with a 3D model of a 3D mask, with the eyes and mouth modified to have rectangular cutouts for LED displays. The displays are run by a Raspberry Pi Pico, which generates a variety of eye and mouth animations. It uses a camera for face tracking, so the robot’s evil eyes seem to follow the viewer as they move around. In good form, the face has a simple switch—from good to evil, happy to angry. Or, as [Jens] designates the modes: “Fren” and “Not Fren.”
