Learn By Doing: Turn Your Garage Into Your Perfect Workspace

May 16, 2022 by 32 Comments
Plenty of potential, but a cozy hacking space it is not

To us hackers and makers, the tools of our trade are often as important and interesting as the details of the hacks themselves, but what about the most important tool of all — the very space you use to make your magic happen? That may be your bedroom, a nearby hackerspace, and if you have the resources, you may even own a place of your own, and get to build your perfect workspace.

The latter situation is what [MichD] and partner [Brittany] found themselves in, having moved into their first place. Many couples focus on getting a hot tub in the garden or sorting the nursery, but these two are proper electronics nerds, so they converted a free-standing double wide garage into the nerdhub, learning as they went along, and documenting it in excruciating detail for your viewing pleasure.

Door fitted, framed up, and insulation in place. All ready for plasterboarding.

The building structurally is a single-skinned brick-built box, with a raw concrete floor. Pretty typical stuff for the UK (we’ve seen much worse), but not ideal for spending an extended amount of time in due to our damp, cold climate, at least in winter.

The first order of business was partitioning the front section for bike storage, and screeding the floor. Once the floor was solid, the walls and ceiling joists could be framed up, ready for fitting insulation material and covering with plasterboard.

Electrics were next in order, with the wires clipped to the brickwork, well away from where the plasterboard would be, therefore making it less likely to accidentally drill into a live cable when adding external fixtures.

Since the front part of the room was to be partitioned off, another access door was needed. This involved cutting out the bricks to fit a concrete lintel. With that installed, and the bricks above supported, the area below was cut out to the required shape. A somewhat nerve-wracking experience, if you ask us!

As any self-respecting hacker will tell you — no room build is complete without a decent amount of RGB bling, so the whole room was decked out with APA102 addressable LED strips. Control of these was courtesy of WLED running on an ESP32 module, with LedFX used on a nearby PC to perform music visualisation, just because.

Already got your space worked out, but need a little help with organisation? Not got much space, and need a portable solution? Check this out for (small) size!

Lawn Mower Carburetor Improves Mileage On Old Sedan

May 16, 2022 by 71 Comments

Before the Ford marketing department started slapping Maverick badges on pickup trucks, the name had been attached to compact cars from the 70s instead. These were cheap even by Ford standards, and were built as a desperate attempt to keep up with Japanese imports that were typically higher quality and more efficient than most American cars at the time. Some people called them the poor man’s Mustang. While Ford and the other American car companies struggled to stay relevant during the gas crisis, it turns out that they could have simply slapped a lawn mower carburetor on their old Mavericks to dramatically improve fuel efficiency.

The old Maverick used a 5 L carbureted V8 engine, which is not exactly the pinnacle of efficiency even by 1970s standards. But [ThunderHead289] figured out that with some clever modifications to the carburetor, he could squeeze out some more efficiency. By using a much smaller carburetor, specifically one from a lawn mower, and 3D printing an adapter for it, he was able to increase the fuel efficiency to over 40 mpg (which is higher than even the modern Mavericks) while still achieving a top speed of 75 mph.

While it’s not the fastest car on the block with this modification, it’s still drives well enough to get around. One thing to watch out for if you try this on your own classic car is that some engines use fuel as a sort of coolant for certain engine parts, which can result in certain problems like burned valves. And, if you don’t have a lawnmower around from which to borrow a carb, take a look at this build which 3D prints one from scratch instead.

Thanks to [Jack] for the tip!

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3D Printing Hack Leverages Vase Mode Structurally

May 15, 2022 by 25 Comments

Conceptually, FDM 3D printing is quite a simple process: you define a set of volumes in 3D space, then the slicing software takes a cut through the model at ever-increasing heights, works out where the inner and outer walls are, and then fills in the inside volume sparsely in order to tie the walls together and support the top layers that are added at the end.

But as you will find quite quickly, when models get larger and more complex, printing times can quickly explode. One trick for large models with simple shapes but very low structural needs is to use so-called ‘vase mode’, which traces the outline of the object in a thin, vertical spiral. But this is a weak construction scheme and allows only limited modelling complexity. With that in mind, here’s [Ben Eadie] with a kind-of halfway house technique (video, embedded below) that some might find useful for saving on printing time and material.

This solid shape is mostly cut-through to make supporting ribs between the walls of the shell

The idea is to use vase mode printing, but by manipulating the shell of the model, adding partially cut-through slots around the perimeter, and critically, adding one slot that goes all the way.

First you need a model that has an inner shell that follows the approximate shape of the outer, which you could produce by hollowing out a solid, leaving a little thickness. By making the slot width equal to half the thickness of the nozzle size and stopping the slots the same distance from the outer shell, vase mode can be used to trace the outline of shape, complete with supporting ribs in between the inner and outer walls of the shell.

Because the slot is narrower than the extrudate, the slot walls will merge together into one solid rib, tying the objects’ walls to each other, but critically, still allowing it to be printed in a continuous spiral without any traditional infill. It’s an interesting idea, that could have some merit.

There are other ways to stiffen up thing printed parts, such as using surface textures, But if you’re fine with the thin shell, but want to have a little fun with it, you can hack the g-code to make some really interesting shapes.

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Light Whiskers From Soap Bubbles Is Real Science

May 15, 2022 by 8 Comments

You might think that anything to do with a soap bubble is for kids. But it turns out that observing light scattering through a soap bubble produces unexpected results that may lead to insights into concepts as complex as space-time curvature. That’s what [stoppi] says in his latest experiment — generating “light whiskers” using a laser and a soap bubble. You can watch the video, below, but fair warning: if videos with only music annoy you, you might want to mute your speakers before you watch. On the other hand, it almost seems like a laser light show set to music.

The setup is simple and follows a 2020 Israeli-American research paper’s methodology. A relatively strong laser pointer couples to a fiber-optic cable through a focusing lens. The other end of the fiber delivers the light to the soap bubble, where it separates into strands that exhibit something called branched flow.

Our physics knowledge isn’t deep enough to explain what’s going on here. However, if you have an interest in reproducing this experiment, it doesn’t look like it takes anything exotic. The original paper has a lot to say on the topic and if that’s too heavy for you, there’s always the Sunday supplement version.

If there is ever a practical application for this, we’ll see an uptick in the design of bubble machines. Oddly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen lasers married with bubbles.

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Hackaday Links: May 15, 2022

May 15, 2022 by 7 Comments

It may be blurry and blotchy, but it’s ours. The first images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy were revealed this week, and they caused quite a stir. You may recall the first images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy from a couple of years ago: spectacular images that captured exactly what all the theories said a black hole should look like, or more precisely, what the accretion disk and event horizon should look like, since black holes themselves aren’t much to look at. That black hole, dubbed M87*, is over 55 million light-years away, but is so huge and so active that it was relatively easy to image. The black hole at the center of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is comparatively tiny — its event horizon would fit inside the orbit of Mercury — a much closer at only 26,000 light-years or so. But, our black hole is much less active and obscured by dust, so imaging it was far more difficult. It’s a stunning technical achievement, and the images are certainly worth checking out.

Another one from the “Why didn’t I think of that?” files — contactless haptic feedback using the mouth is now a thing. This comes from the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie-Mellon and is intended to provide an alternative to what ends up being about the only practical haptic device for VR and AR applications — vibrations from off-balance motors. Instead, this uses an array of ultrasonic transducers positioned on a VR visor and directed at the user’s mouth. By properly driving the array, pressure waves can be directed at the lips, teeth, and tongue of the wearer, providing feedback for in-world events. The mock game demonstrated in the video below is a little creepy — not sure how many people enjoyed the feeling of cobwebs brushing against the face or the splatter of spider guts in the mouth. Still, it’s a pretty cool idea, and we’d like to see how far it can go.

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Computer Thing Might Be Garbage

May 15, 2022 by 9 Comments

[Tech Time Traveller] has a lot of voices in his head this week, and most of them are worried about his wife’s reaction to him buying other people’s garbage. We don’t blame him, though. He bought it from an estate sale and it was billed as a TV typewriter. The device looked completely homebrewed from somewhere around the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It contains a mess of components obviously hand-built in a combination of neat construction and messy wiring.

[Tech] videos most of his tests and exploration to get the thing working and tested. Given its age and construction, it worked surprisingly well, although it did take a little work to get it back to complete function. In fact, he bought the device three years ago and is finally getting around to finishing the project and putting together the video.

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Vicious Little Desktop Shredder Pulverizes Plastic Waste

May 15, 2022 by 21 Comments

We’ve all likely seen video of the enormous industrial shredders that eat engine blocks for lunch and spit out a stream of fine metal chips. The raw power of these metal-munching monsters is truly fearsome, and they appear to be the inspiration for SHREDII, the miniature plastic shredder for at-home recycling of plastic waste.

The fact that SHREDII isn’t all that large doesn’t make it any less dangerous, at least to things smaller and softer than engine blocks, like say fingers. The core of the shredder is a hexagonal axle carrying multiple laser-cut, sheet steel blades. The rotating blades are spaced out along the axle so they nest between a bed of stationary blades; rotating the common axle produces the shearing and cutting action needed to shred plastic.

On version one of the shredder, each blade had two hooked teeth, and the whole cutting head was made from relatively thick steel. When driven by a NEMA 34 stepper — an admittedly odd choice but it’s what they could get quickly — through a 50:1 planetary gearbox, the shredder certainly did the business. The shreds were a little too chunky, though, so version two used thinner steel for the blades and gave the rotary blades more teeth. The difference was substantial — much finer shreds that were suitable for INJEKTO, their homebrew direct-feed injection molding machine.

There’s a lot to be said for closing the loop on plastics used in desktop manufacturing processes, and the team of SHREDII and INJEKTO stands to help the home gamer effectively reuse plastic waste. And while that’s all to the good, let’s face it — the oddly satisfying experience of watching a shredder like this chew through plastic like it isn’t even there is plenty of reason to build something like this.

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