Hackaday Links: Sunday, June 9th, 2013

June 9, 2013 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

This week we saw an interesting animated motorcycle tail light over on Reddit. But there wasn’t really enough background to get its own feature.

The NeuroKnitting project captures brainwaves by weaving them into a scarf.

On Semiconductor is showing off an 8x8x8 LED cube which they claim as 12,000 LEDs. We can’t figure out where all those LEDs are used in the design, but maybe you can. Here’s one that we know has 4096 LEDs in its matrix.

[Jeff] used hard drive platters as the disc section of his original Enterprise desk model.

Play around with an SNES controller and Arduino by following [Damon’s] guide.

Hackaday Alum [Jeremy Cook] posted an update of his laser graffiti project. His earlier effort used camera tricks to capture the image but this time around he’s exciting phosphorescent glow material to make a persistent display visible to the human eye.

This server hides in plain sight after being wrapped in a hard cover book binding. Hopefully this won’t cause heat dissipation problems.

[Trumpkin] built his own Nixie tube wristwatch which we think has the potential to be as neat as the one [Woz] wears.

Wireless Unread Email Counter Tells You How Busy You’re Not

June 8, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

counter

One of the marks of how busy you are – or how well your spam filters are set up – is how many unread emails you have in your inbox. [trumpkin] over on Instructables posted a great tutorial for making a wireless counter that displays the number of unread emails in your Gmail account.

[trumpkin] used a tiny and inexpensive 419 MHz transmitter and receiver combo to make this project work. On his desktop, he wired up a USB to UART bridge attached to the transmitter. For the receiver side, an ATMega328 reads the data coming off the receiver and displays the number of unread emails on two seven-segment displays.

The wireless device runs off of two AA batteries and should provide enough power to keep the email monitor running for a long time. More than enough time for your inbox to fill up and for you to become overwhelmed with the work you should be doing.

One Man’s Adventures In Custom Keyboard Development

May 28, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

BlueCube-flat

As a software developer, [suka] spends a lot of time every day in front of a keyboard. He had been trying out different keyboard layouts far less common than even the moderetly obscure Dvorak layout, and after some time decided a custom ergonomic keyboard was what he wanted. His progress of designing his own custom ergonomic keyboard is a fascinating read, made even cooler by the fact these are real, professional-quality keyboards with mechanical switches and custom enclosures.

After starting off with a few USB numpads, [suka] dove in to the world of Cherry switches by crafting his own wing-style keyboard. [suka] works for one of the larger manufacturers of laser-sintering machines, so he was able to create the enclosures for his keybaord – as well as the key caps – fairly easily. The technology behind laser sintering allowed [suka] to create some strange bowl and trough-shaped keyboards before settling on his daily driver, seen above.

The Blue Cube, as [suka] calls it, includes an integrated stand, an integrated IBM trackpoint mouse, and is powered by a Teensy microcontroller. [suka]’s keyboards might not be heafty enough for melee combat like the venerable IBM Model M, but it’s exactly what [suka] wants, and that’s just fine by us.

3D Printing Some Sweet Music

April 21, 2013 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

3d-printer-music

If you don’t mind ending up with oddly shaped 3D printed parts you can get your printer to sing to you. The exhibit shown above is doing just that. The Lulzbot is being driven specifically to produce a certain frequency of sound with its stepper motors. The results of a few different songs are what’s hanging on the wall to the right. You can hear it printing Bizet’s Carmen in the clip after the break.

[Rickard Dahlstrand] hacked together a Python script capable of parsing a MIDI file and outputting a G-code equivalent that will produce the frequencies and durations necessary to hear the audio on a stepper motor. As we mentioned, he uses a Lulzbot but the script appears to include setting for Cupcake, Thingomatic, Shapercube, and Ultimaker. The parser script as well as the example G-code files for a library of classical music can be downloaded from his repository.

Now if you’re looking for some other crazy CNC music ideas you can’t beat this wineglass music hack.

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Mood Lamp/notifier Uses Neat Modular PCB Design

April 20, 2013 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

mood-lamp-with-modular-electronics

Not only does this mood lamp which [J. Sutton] built look great, but we love the modular design he adopted when building the circuit boards.

If you’re building something that is going to sit on your desk for some time it just has to look good. We think that he achieved that, using a small block of oak as the base, and a cloudy white cube of unknown origin as a diffuser. Notice that the different colors are not mixed. There’s a baffle inside the diffuser that keeps them separate as early testing showed any combination of intensities was resulting in nearly the same shade of color.

The part we really like is the modular design of his circuit boards. The project is based around a Teensy++ 2.0 board. He first built a PCB baseboard which feature two SIL sockets to accept the legs of the Teensy. There is a third SIL socket which accepts some long legs from the LED host board, letting it perch on top of the Teensy.

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H-bot Style 3D Printer Moves Bed For Z-axis

April 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

Check out this 3D printer (translated) which [Arkadiusz Śpiewak] has been working on. When sending in the tip about his project he made the important distinction that it isn’t finished, but he has reached that critical threshold where he has printed items with it.

He decided to go with a design that is sometimes referred to as an H-bot. If you’re completely unfamiliar with it, you may find this H-bot design article helpful. The gist of it is that this technique makes it so that the motors used to move the extruder along the X and Y axes are themselves stationary. One large timing (toothed) belt makes a circuit around the top of this cube in the shape of the letter H. This is a bit easier to see in [Arkadiusz’s] rendered image found after the jump along with video of an early print test.

The Z axis uses two motors mounted along the bottom of the cube. These raise and lower the bead, instead of moving the extruder itself. All-in the printer should have a maximum object size of 30x30x30 centimeters. It’s being driven by a Smoothieboard, which was mentioned quite a bit when we were discussing using the RA driver board with a 3D printer.

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Android Controlled Minecraft Ores

March 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Ryan] has a friend with a birthday coming up, and being inspired by ever 12-year-olds favorite game, he decided to make a Minecraft ore block with RGB LEDs. The block can change from diamonds to emeralds via commands send from an Android phone.

After a few false starts, [Ryan] eventually had his ore cube laser cut at Acess Space, a hackerspace-ish group in Sheffield. The box was constructed out of 3mm MDF, while the windows were laser cut out of frosted acrylic, while the stone pattern on the cube is one giant custom-made sticker.

With the tedious part of the build out of the way, [Ryan] set to work on the electronics. He used a PIC attached to a few very large RGB LEDs, and a Bluetooth module that allows him to connect his phone to an ore block. Dialing in the right colors took some work, but eventually, [Ryan] had an Android-controlled Minecraft ore block, able to transmutate between gold, iron, diamond, emerald, lapis, and redstone.

You can check out a video of [Ryan]’s ore block in action after the break.

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