The Mystery Of Automatic Lubricators Is Revealed

June 30, 2022 by 14 Comments

Industrial machines have all kinds of moving parts that require regular lubrication in order to prevent wear and damage. Historically, these would require regular visits from maintenance personnel to keep them greased up and slippery. Automatic lubricators eliminate that job by regularly dosing machines with fresh grease, and [Big Clive] decided to see what makes them tick.

The device can be set to deliver a full load of grease over a period of 1-12 months.

The simplest models merely use a spring to slowly force grease out over time. Changing the spring changes the rate at which grease is dispensed. Chemical versions exist too. A chemical pill is selected and inserted into a chamber with liquid, which releases gas over time. As gas is released, it creates pressure which forces a plunger down, dispensing grease over time.

Perhaps the fanciest versions are the electronic models, however, which have a dial on the back for selecting the rate of grease delivery. Turning the dial changes a resistance that is connected across two zinc-air cells which are sealed. Apparently, when current is forced through these cells and they’re excluded from oxygen, the cells liberate hydrogen gas, according to a patent [Big Clive] found. This then forces down the plunger, dispensing the grease. Turning the dial changes the resistance, changing the rate at which grease is dispensed.

The quest for labor saving in industry has produced multiple designs of automated lubricator, all of which are fantastically simple and optimised for purpose. It shows just how much can be achieved with a few components and some creative thinking, where one’s first impulse might be to reach for a timer or microcontroller to do the job.

Lubrication is incredibly important – don’t forget it when building your CNC machines! Video after the break.

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ESP32 Camera Slider Build Keeps Things In Perspective

June 30, 2022 by 2 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of camera slider builds here at Hackaday, and for good reason: having one really lets you take your project documentation, especially videos, to the next level. It’s one of those force multiplier builds — after you’ve completed it, it can help you make all your future projects just that much better. But we’re also no strangers to seeing these projects become overly complex, which can often make it difficult for others to replicate.

But that’s not the case here. The motorized camera slider that [Sasa Karanovic] recently sent our way does exactly what you’d expect, and little else. That’s not meant as a dig — sometimes the best approach is to keep it simple. Unless you’re a professional photographer or videographer, it’s unlikely you need a complicated motion rig. This design is perfect for the hacker or maker who wants to spruce up their project videos, but doesn’t want to spend months fiddling with the design. Continue reading “ESP32 Camera Slider Build Keeps Things In Perspective” →

Adding Voluminous Joy To A DIY Turbojet With A DIY Afterburner

June 30, 2022 by 10 Comments

You don’t happen to own and operate your own turbojet engine, do you? If you do, have you ever had the urge to “kick the tires and light the fires”? Kicking tires simply requires adding tires to your engine cart, but what about lighting the fires? In the video below the break, [Tech Ingredients] explains that we will require some specialized hardware called a re-heater — also known as an afterburner.

[Tech Ingredients] does a deep dive into the engineering behind turbojets, and explains how the very thing that keeps the turbines from melting also allows an afterburner to work. Also explained is why it can also be called a re-heater, and why there are limitations on the efficiency.

Moving on to the demonstration, two different homebrewed afterburners are put to use. The second iteration does exactly what you’d think it should do, and is a mighty impressive sight. We can only imagine what his neighbors think of all the noise! The first iteration was less successful, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful, and we’ll let you view the video below to see what else an afterburner can do. We’ll give you a hint: Worlds Biggest Fog Machine.

Does the thought of thrust turn your turbines? You might enjoy this motor-jet contraption that looks almost as fun as the real thing, but 3D printable!

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It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives.

June 30, 2022 by 38 Comments

There are some tings that should be possible, so just have to be tried. [Action Retro] has a great video showing just such an escapade, the creation of a large RAID 0 array using a pile of USB floppy drives. Yes, taking one of the smallest and most unreliable pieces of data storage media and combining a load of them together such that all the data is lost if just one of them fails.

Surprisingly the process of creation is quicker and simplier than we expected, with a slightly long-in-the-tooth version of Mac OS X making short work of the process. Starting with 30 USB floppies and a pair of large USB hubs, he whittled the pile down to 13 drives that would play nicely and RAID together. The sight of so many drives all lighting up together as the precious megabytes are filled with data is probably not one seen outside the realm of floppy duplication machines, which brings back bad memories for those of us in the consumer software business in years past.

Would you do this? Probably, but should you do it? Of course not, but then again he’s done it so the rest of us don’t have to. Here in 2022 maybe there are better uses for a brace of floppy drives. Continue reading “It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives.” →

A Math Based Personality For Games

June 30, 2022 by 18 Comments

We make no apologies for being hardware focused here at Hackaday, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t occasionally impressed by a particularly inspired feat of bit wrangling. For example, [t3ssel8r] has taken a break from his game to discuss his procedural animation system and the beautiful math behind it.

Sometimes, rather than having specific keyframes, games will instead use procedural animation. This means that the position is determined on the fly rather than a predetermined set of positions. Developers can use the combination of IK or FK (inverse or forward kinematics) to solve for rotation and positions of the joints that will place the end at a specific position. Particularly with crawling multi-limb things, it’s pretty easy to put a limb on the ground and keep it there until it’s too far away, pick a new spot, and move it there. It’s simple code to write and looks convincing. It can handle complex terrain and situations with different limb positions.

However, it doesn’t offer the chance to inject some life or personality into the movement as keyframes do. [t3ssel8r] goes through the equations and reasoning behind his semi-implicit Euler solver-based system. There are some fantastic explanations in the video, but the short version is that he has three parameters to control the system’s frequency, dampening, and initial response. This allows him to tweak the behavior in a somewhat intuitive manner. One problem is stability; if the timesteps get too large, the position quickly explodes outwards. Using eigenvalues (who ever thought you’d use those) to determine the minimum timestep allows the system to remain stable and take multiple smaller steps when needed or just bound the change temporarily.

If you’re looking for more animation, this blender plugin renders your PCB traces in a new light.

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Performing Magic With A Little High-Tech Help

June 30, 2022 by 13 Comments

Doing magic with cards involves a lot of precise dexterity to know which card is where. For plenty of tricks, this is often knowledge and control of a single card or a small number of cards. But knowing the exact position of every single card in the deck could certainly be helpful, so the Nettle Magic Project was created to allow magicians to easily identify the location of cards in the deck.

The system works through the use of computer vision to identify a series of marks on the short edge of a stack of cards. The marks can be printed in IR- or UV-sensitive ink to make them virtually invisible, but for demonstration these use regular black ink. Each card has landmarks printed on either side of a set of bit markers which identify the cards. A computer is able to quickly read the marks and identify each card in order while the deck is still stacked, aiding the magician in whichever trick they need to perform.

The software only runs on various Apple devices right now, including iPhones and iPads, but the software is readily available fore experimentation if you are a magician looking to try something like this out. Honestly, we don’t see too many builds focusing on magic, sleight-of-hand or otherwise, and we had to go back over a decade to find a couple of custom magical builds from a magician named [Mario].

Thanks to [Tim] for the tip!

Raspberry Pi Pico W Adds Wireless

June 30, 2022 by 63 Comments

News just in from the folks at Raspberry Pi: the newest version of their Pico has WiFi and is called, obviously, the Pico W. We were going to get our hands on a sample unit and kick its tires, but it’s stuck in customs. Boo! So until it shows up, here’s what we can glean from the press releases and documentation.

The Pico is, of course, the Raspberry Pi microcontroller dev board based on their RP2040 microcontroller. This in turn has two Cortex M0+ cores and a good chunk of onboard RAM, which has made it a popular target for MicroPython. They had some extra real estate on the PCB, so they’ve added an Infineon CYW43439 WiFi chip, and voila: Pico W.

As of now, the WiFi is supported in both the C SDK and the pre-baked MicroPython image. It looks trivially easy to get it working, and it’s based on the time-tested lwIP stack, a classic in the embedded world. The CYW43439 is also Bluetooth capable, but there’s no firmware support for that yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up soon.

The price? $6 for the whole shooting match. You can view this two ways: a small $2 premium over the old Pico, or a price increase of 50%. How you see things probably depends on your order quantity. Either way, it’s firmly in the ESP32 module price range, so you’ve got some comparison shopping to do if your project needs a microcontroller and WiFi. And in these days of silicon shortages, it’s nice to have a couple of options.