The World’s Brightest Laser Pointer?

December 6, 2022 by Al Williams 37 Comments

The videos from [styropyro] are always amusing and informative. However, ironically for him, he is alarmed that many green laser pointers are more powerful than they are supposed to be. Sure, you often want a powerful laser, but if you think a laser is safe and it isn’t, you could… well… put an eye out. See the video below to see what [styropyro] claims is the brightest laser pointer in the world.

The key is a possibly gray market very large green laser array. It appears to have at least 24 lasers and some pretty serious lenses. He tested the array first with a power supply and it looked like something out of a bad science fiction movie, even at reduced power.

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A Simon toy with a robot that slaps little hands against it

Silicone-Slapping Servos Solve Simon Says

December 6, 2022 by Robin Kearey 7 Comments

Most modern computer games have a clearly-defined end, but many classics like Pac-man and Duck Hunt can go on indefinitely, limited only by technical constraints such as memory size. One would think that the classic electronic memory game Simon should fall into that category too, but with most humans struggling even to reach level 20 it’s hard to be sure. [Michael Schubart] was determined to find out if there was in fact an end to the latest incarnation of Simon and built a robot to help him in his quest.

The Simon Air, as the newest version is known, uses motion sensors to detect hand movements, enabling no-touch gameplay. [Michael] therefore made a system with servo-actuated silicone hands that slap the motion sensors. The tone sequence generated by the game is detected by light-dependent resistors that sense which of the segments lights up; a Raspberry Pi keeps track of the sequence and replays it by driving the servos.

We won’t spoil the ending, but [Michael] did find an answer to his question. An earlier version of the game was already examined with the help of an Arduino, although it apparently wasn’t fast enough to drive the game to its limits. If you think Simon can be improved you can always roll your own, whether from scratch or by hacking an existing toy.

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All About USB-C: Introduction For Hackers

December 6, 2022 by Arya Voronova 53 Comments

We’ve now had at least five years of USB-C ports in our devices. It’s a standard that many manufacturers and hackers can get behind. Initially, there was plenty of confusion about what we’d actually encounter out there, and manufacturer-induced aberrations have put some people off. However, USB-C is here to stay, and I’d like to show you how USB-C actually gets used out there, what you can expect out of it as a power user, and what you can get out of it as a hobbyist.

Modern devices have a set of common needs – they need a power input, or a power output, sometimes both, typically a USB2 connection, and often some higher-speed connectivity like a display output/input or USB 3. USB-C is an interface that aims to be able to take care of all of those. Everything aforementioned is optional, which is a blessing and a curse, but you can quickly learn to distinguish what to expect out of a device based on how it looks; if ever in doubt, I’d like to show you how to check.

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Rocket Mounted 3D Printed Camera Wheel Tries, Succeeds, And Also Fails

December 6, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 29 Comments

[Joe] at BPS.space has a thing for rockets, and his latest quest is to build a rocket that will cross the Kármán Line and launch into the Final Frontier. And being the owner of a YouTube channel, he wants to have excellent on-board video that he can share. The trouble? Spinning. A spinning rocket is a stable rocket, especially as altitude increases. So how would [Joe] get stable video from a rocket spinning at several hundred degrees per second? That’s the question being addressed in the video below the break.

Rather than use processing power to stabilize video digitally, [Joe] decided to take a different approach: Cancelling out the spin with a motor, essentially making a camera-wielding reaction wheel that would stay oriented in one direction, no matter how fast the rocket itself is spinning.

Did it work? Yes… and no. The design was intended to be a proof of concept, and in that sense there was a lot of success and some excellent video was taken. But as with many proof of concept prototypes, the spinning camera module has a lot of room for improvement. [Joe] goes into some details about the changes he’ll be making for revision 2, including a different motor and some software improvements. We certainly look forward to seeing the progress!

To get a better idea of the problem that [Joe] is trying to solve, check out this 360 degree rocket cam that we featured a few years ago.

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Gift Idea From 1969: A Kitchen Computer

December 6, 2022 by Al Williams 51 Comments

The end of the year is often a time for people to exchange presents and — of course — the rich want to buy each other the best presents. The Neiman Marcus company was famous for having a catalog of gift ideas. Many were what you’d consider normal gifts, but there were usually extreme ones, like a tank trunk filled with 100,000 gallons of cologne. One year, the strange gift was an authentic Chinese junk complete with sails and teak decks. They apparently sold three at $11,500 (in 1962 money, no less). Over the top? In 1969, they featured a kitchen computer.

Wait a minute! In 1969, computers were the purview of big companies, universities, and NASA, right? Well, not really. By that time, some industrial minicomputers were not millions of dollars but were still many thousands of dollars. The price in the catalog for the kitchen computer was $10,600. That’s about $86,000 in today’s money. The actual machine was a Honeywell 316, based on one of the computers that helped run the early Internet.

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Clever Design Technique Makes Flexible PCB Fit For A Queen

December 6, 2022 by Robin Kearey 11 Comments

Printed circuit boards can be square, round, octagonal, or whatever shape you desire. But there’s little choice when it comes to the third dimension: most PCBs are flat and rigid. Sure, you can make flexible PCBs like the kapton-backed ones you find inside electronic gadgets, but those are complicated to work with. As it turns out however, you can also make flexible boards using regular PCB material: check out [Rehana Al-Soltane]’s Flexible Crown PCB, a project she did as part of [Neil Gershenfeld]’s “How To Make (Almost) Anything” class at MIT.

The basic idea is to create flexures in the PCB by milling out several long slots with thin pieces connecting the two sides. [Rehana] got this idea from [Quentin Bolsée]’s flexible capacitive sensor project and applied it to make a crown-shaped PCB with sparkly LEDs. The crown can bend through 180 degrees and can actually be worn as a head ornament, with pin headers to clamp it down on the wearer’s hair.

[Rehana] used a tool called svg-pcb to design the board. This is an open source toolkit that lets you design PCBs by describing them in code, rather than drawing shapes by hand. Although this might look a bit odd if you’re used to working with traditional PCB design software, it’s ideal for making repetitive structures like the flexures in the crown: simply write a for loop and let the tool generate a perfect array of identical slots.

Fabricating the Flexible Crown posed a few difficulties of its own, because the PCB began to flex and wiggle itself loose before the milling process was finished. As it turned out, the trick was to cut all the slots on the interior first and only mill the board’s outline as the very last step.

Adding flexures to a PCB like this looks like a promising technique and we’ll keep an eye on further developments in this field. There are other ways of making bendy boards though: researchers at the University of Maryland used a laser engraver to make foldable PCBs. Our 2019 Flexible PCB Contest also yielded several impressive implementations.

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Homebrew 3D Printer Goop Promises Better Bed Adhesion

December 6, 2022 by Al Williams 43 Comments

Back when 3D printers were pretty new, most of us had glass beds with or without painter’s tape. To make plastic stick, you’d either use a glue stick or hair spray. Many people have moved on to various other build surfaces that don’t require help, but some people still use something to make the bed sticky and there are quite a few products on the market that claim to be better than normal glue or hairspray. [Jonas] wanted to try it, but instead of buying a commercial product, he found a recipe online for “3D printer goop” and made it himself.

You need four ingredients: distilled water and isopropyl alcohol are easy to find. The other two chemicals: PVP and PVA powder, are not too hard to source and aren’t terribly dangerous to handle. The recipe was actually from [MakerBogans] who documents this recipe as “Super Goop” and has another formula for “Normal Goop.” You’ll probably have to buy the chemicals in huge quantities compared to the tiny amounts you really need.

We assume the shots of the 3D printer printing its first layer is showing how effective the glue is. This looks like a very simple thing to mix up and keep in a sprayer. If you have some friends, you could probably do a group buy of the chemicals and it would cost nearly nothing for the small amounts of chemicals you need.

If you don’t want to order exotic chemicals, you might not need them. We used to make “goop” by dissolving ABS in acetone, but hairspray usually did the trick.

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