Ultra Cheap PCB Wrenches Make Perfect Kit Accessory

Let’s make one thing abundantly clear. We do not, under any circumstances, recommend you replace your existing collection of wrenches with ones made out of PCBs. However, as creator [Ben Nyx] explains, they do make for an extremely cheap and lightweight temporary tool that would be perfect for distributing with DIY kits.

This clever open hardware project was spawned by [Ben]’s desire to pack an M3 wrench in with the kits for an ESP32-based kiln controller he’s developing. He was able to find dirt cheap screwdrivers from the usual import sites, but nobody seemed to stock a similarly affordable wrench. He experimented with 3D printing them, but in the end, found the plastic just wasn’t up to the task. Then he wondered how well a tiny wrench cut from a PCB would fare.

The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is pretty well. We wouldn’t advise you try to crank your lug nuts down with one, but for snugging up a couple nuts that hold down a control board, they work a treat. [Ben] came up with a panelized design in KiCad that allows 18 of the little wrenches to get packed into a 100 x 100 mm PCB suitable for production from popular online board houses. Manufactured from standard 1.6 mm FR4, they come out to approximately 10 cents a pop.

Since [Ben] has been kind enough to release his design under the MIT license, you’re free to spin up some of these wrenches either for your own kits or just to toss in the tool bag for emergencies. We’d love to see somebody adapt the design for additional sizes of nuts, or maybe figure out some way to nest them to sneak out a couple extra wrenches per board.

We’ve seen plenty of folks make cheap tools for themselves in the past, but projects that can produce cheap tools in mass quantities is uniquely exciting for a community like ours.

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Electronic leadscrew

Electronic Lead Screws – Not Just For Threading Anymore

An electronic leadscrew is an increasingly popular project for small and mid-sized lathes. They do away with the need to swap gears in and out to achieve the proper ratio between spindle speed and tool carriage translation, and that makes threading a snap. But well-designed electronic leadscrews, like this one from [Hobby Machinist], offer so much more than just easy threading.

The first thing that struck us about this build was the polished, professional look of it. The enclosure for the Nucleo-64 dev board sports a nice TFT display and an IP65-rated keyboard, as well as a beefy-looking jog wheel. The spindle speed is monitored by a 600 pulses-per-revolution optical encoder, and the lathe’s leadscrew is powered by a closed-loop NEMA 24 stepper. This combination allows for the basic threading operations, but the addition of a powered cross slide opens up a ton more functionality. Internal and external tapers are a few keypresses away, as are boring and turning and radius operations, both on the right and on the left. The video below shows radius-cutting operations combined to turn a sphere.

From [Hobby Machinist]’s to-do list, it looks like filleting and grooving will be added someday, as will a G-code parser and controller to make this into a bolt-on CNC controller. Inspiration for the build is said to have come in part from [Clough42]’s electronic leadscrew project from a few years back. Continue reading “Electronic Lead Screws – Not Just For Threading Anymore”

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Tri-lingual Typewriter

Isn’t it just fantastic when a project finally does what you wanted it to do in the first place? [Simon Merrett] isn’t willing to compromise when it comes to the Aerodox. His original vision for the keyboard was a wireless, ergonomic split that could easily switch between a couple of PCs. Whereas some people are more into making layout after layout, [Simon] keeps pushing forward with this same design, which is sort of a mashup between the ErgoDox and the Redox, which is itself a wireless version of the ErgoDox.

The Aerodox has three nRF51822 modules — one for the halves to communicate, one for the control half to send key presses, and a third on the receiver side. [Simon] was using two AA cells to power each one, and was having trouble with the range back to the PC.

The NRFs want 3.3 V, but will allegedly settle for 2 V when times are hard. [Simon] added a boost converter to give each a solid 3.3 V, and the Aerodox became reliable enough to be [Simon]’s daily driver. But let’s go back to the as-yet-unrealized potential part.

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SGX Deprecation Prevents PC Playback Of 4K Blu-ray Discs

This week Techspot reported that DRM-laden Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs won’t play anymore on computers using the latest Intel Core processors. You may have skimmed right past it, but the table on page 51 of the latest 12th Generation Intel Core Processor data sheet (184 page PDF) informs us that the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) have been deprecated. These extensions are required for DRM processing on these discs, hence the problem. The SGX extensions were introduced with the sixth generation of Intel Core Skylake processors in 2015, the same year as Ultra HD Blu-ray, aka 4K Blu-ray. But there have been numerous vulnerabilities discovered in the intervening years. Not only Intel, but AMD has had similar issues as we wrote about in October.

This problem only applies to 4K Blu-ray discs with DRM. Presumably any 4K discs without DRM will still play, and of course you can still play the DRM discs on older Intel processors. Do you have a collection of DRM 4K Blu-ray discs, and if so, do you play them via your computer or a stand-alone player?

KiCAD 6.0: What Made It And What Didn’t

I’ve been following the development of KiCAD for a number of years now, and using it as my main electronics CAD package daily for a the last six years or thereabouts, so the release of KiCAD 6.0 is quite exciting to an electronics nerd like me. The release date had been pushed out a bit, as this is such a huge update, and has taken a little longer than anticipated. But, it was finally tagged and pushed out to distribution on Christmas day, with some much deserved fanfare in the usual places.

So now is a good time to look at which features are new in KiCAD 6.0 — actually 6.0.1 is the current release at time of writing due to some bugfixes — and which features originally planned for 6.0 are now being postponed to the 7.0 roadmap and beyond. Continue reading “KiCAD 6.0: What Made It And What Didn’t”

The threeboard simulator running

Threeboard: Short On Keys, Long On Documentation

As peripherals go, few are hacked on more than keyboards. The layouts, the shapes, the sizes, materials, and even the question of what a keyboard is are all on the table for tinkering. In that vein, [TaylorConor] released his simplified keyboard called the threeboard on GitHub, having only three keys and replicating a full keyboard.

We’ve covered keyboards built with chording in mind, wrapped around coffee cups, and keyboards with joysticks for added speed. So why cover this one? What makes it different? The execution is superb and is a great example to look at next time you’re making a project you want to show off. The keyboard is just three mechanical switches, two 8-bit binary displays (16 LEDs total), three status LEDs, and three LEDs showing the current layer (four layers). The detailed user’s manual explains it all. There is a reliable Atmega32U4 microcontroller and two EEPROM chips at its heart.

Where this project shows off is the testing. It has unit tests, simulated integration tests, and simulated property tests. Since all the code is in C++, unit testing is relatively straightforward. The integration and property tests are via a simulator. Rather than recompiling the code with some new flags, he uses the simavr AVR simulator, which means it simulates the same binary file that gets flashed onto the microcontroller. This approach means the design is tested and debugged via GDB. It’s an incredible technique we’d love to see more of in hobby projects. Marketing speak might call this a “digital twin” but the idea is that you have a virtual version that’s easier to work on and has a tighter iteration loop while being as close as possible to the physical version.

[TaylorConor’s] goal was to create a from-scratch microcontroller project with easy-to-read code, fantastic documentation, and best practices. We think he nailed it. So feel free to run the simulator or jump right into building one for yourself. All the hardware is under a CERN-OHL-P license, and the firmware is under GPLv3.

I2C To The Max With ATtiny

The Arduino is a powerful platform for interfacing with the real world, but it isn’t without limits. One of those hard limits, even for the Arduino MEGA, is a finite number of pins that the microcontroller can use to interface with the real world. If you’re looking to extend the platform’s reach in one of your own projects, though, there are a couple of options available. This project from [Bill] shows us one of those options by using the ATtiny85 to offload some of an Arduino’s tasks using I2C.

I2C has been around since the early 80s as a way for microcontrollers to communicate with each other using a minimum of hardware. All that is needed is to connect the I2C pins of the microcontrollers and provide each with power. This project uses an Arduino as the controller and an arbitrary number of smaller ATtiny85 microcontrollers as targets. Communicating with the smaller device allows the Arduino to focus on more processor-intensive tasks while giving the simpler tasks to the ATtiny. It also greatly simplifies wiring for projects that may be distributed across a distance. [Bill] also standardizes the build with a custom development board for the ATtiny that can also double as a shield for the Arduino, allowing him to easily expand and modify his projects without too much extra soldering.

Using I2C might not be the most novel of innovations, but making it easy to use is certainly a valuable tool to add to the toolbox when limited on GPIO or by other physical constraints. To that end, [Bill] also includes code for an example project that simplifies the setup of one of these devices on the software end as well. If you’re looking for some examples for what to do with I2C, take a look at this thermometer that communicates with I2C or this project which uses multiple sensors daisy-chained together.

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