How Fast Can You Spin A LEGO Wheel By Hand?

March 10, 2022 by 7 Comments

It’s not a question you ask yourself every day, but it’s one that the [Brick Experiment Channel] set out to answer: how fast can you spin a LEGO wheel by hand? In their typical way, they set about building an increasingly complex contraption to optimize for the very specific case of maximum RPM.

The build starts with a LEGO wheel fitted to an axle, supported in two LEGO Technic beams. A white flash mark is also attached onto a part of the axle for measuring the rotational speed with a photo-tachometer. A first attempt gets as fast as 1,700 RPM. Upgrades come thick and fast , and with a three-stage compound geartrain, the handcranked wheel reaches 6,300 RPM.  Adding a further stage introduces the problem that the plastic Technic axle begins to twist under the torque input by the hand.

Taking a new approach of pulling on a string to turn the wheel, the first attempt nets 8,300 RPM. Gearing pushes this further to 12,900 revs, but adding more gears again leads to the problem of axles bending under the strain. A bidirectional rope pull design helps, though, and the system reaches 13,100 RPM.

Some of the parts have been damaged thus far, but a rebuild with fresh parts that are nicely lubricated provides a huge boost. The now-slippery shafts run smoother and the wheel hits a blistering 19,300 RPM as the mechanism disassembles itself.

It’s a less complex pursuit than some earlier works from [Brick Experiment Channel], like the impressive pole climbing designs we’ve seen previously. However, it’s a video that shows the power of iterative design and the gains possible from that process.
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Two clothespin hacks mentioned in the article, side-by-side.

Need To Probe Circuits? Remember About Clothespins!

February 27, 2022 by 9 Comments

After browsing Thingiverse for some printable PCB probe designs, [Henry York] looked around and found a wooden clothespin on his desk. After some collaboration between his 3D printer and his CNC, Henry graced us with a nifty helper tool design that many of us might want to make in a pinch – a small, cheap and easy to make PCB probe, for circuits where soldering and headers are out of the question. Small magnets are glued to the clothespin, holding it flush to a magnetizable work surface (aka a toaster tray), and the probing itself is done by an extruder cleaning needle end. 3D printer and Edge.Cuts files are shared with us – thanks to Henry’s helpfulness, it should be easy to repeat if ever needed!

[Tyler Rosonke] (@zonksec) was programming a batch of badges and needed a reliable way to attach to a 6-pin ISP header – without actually soldering to the badges before they’re handed out to participants! A clothespin materialized nearby yet again – most likely, channeled from a different dimension by the spirit of numerous acrylic-cast pogopin-toothed clip-on tools we scroll by on Aliexpress. With a small perfboard piece and a bunch of pogopins jumping out of their respective drawers, it became no longer necessary to hold a bundle of male-ended pin header wires at a weird angle while nervously looking at the avrdude progress bar. This ended up saving a whole lot of time, something that’s always best spent on adding insidious bugs to the badge firmware (as well as, perhaps, easter eggs).

We’d love to hear about all the small hacks and improvements that you, hackers in our audience, invent. Whether it’s reusing a SOIC flashing clip for ISP programming or printing yourself an octopus-like contraption with needle probes, you should share it with us!

screenshow showing the supposed AllSpice interface. It resembles the GitHub interface, and shows a pull request open to add some ESD protection to a device.

AllSpice Building A Hardware Development Ecosystem For Companies

February 27, 2022 by 7 Comments

In our “hardware development gets serious” news, we’ve recently learned about AllSpice, a startup building hardware development collaboration infrastructure for companies. Hardware developers are great at building hardware tools for themselves, but perhaps not always so when it comes to software, and AllSpice aims to fill that gap at the “hardware company” level. Nowadays, what commonly happens is that software development tools and integrations are repurposed for hardware needs, and the results aren’t always as stellar as they get in the software world. In other words, AllSpice is learning from the positive outcomes of software industry and building a platform that takes the best parts from these tools, aiming to get to similarly positive outcomes in areas where currently hardware team experiences are lacking.

What AllSpice is building seems to be an umbrella platform designed to augment, integrate and hook into a slew of different already-developed platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Jira (and some other ones), and add much-needed features that large-scale hardware developers can’t afford to maintain and develop themselves. “Design review by screenshot” isn’t unheard of in hardware circles, and likely a thing that everyone of us with hardware collaboration experience has partaken in. On a company scale, there’s a myriad of hardware-related problems like that to solve and polish over.

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Drift Trike Puts A New Spin On Things With Ice Wheels

February 25, 2022 by 6 Comments

A drift trike is a small sturdy tricycle with a powered front wheel and rear wheels with low friction so that you can drift. They’re fun but there are tons of them. Nowadays, if you want to make your own drift trike that stands out, you have to put your own spin on it. And in terms of extra spin, what better way to do it,than to use ice for the wheels. [Sam Barker] started by breaking down an old used BMX bike. A front-wheel hub motor wasn’t available so he had to make some modifications to use his rear-wheel one as a front wheel. After tweaking the seat to put more weight on the front wheel for better traction, it was time to get started on wheels.

Rather than using straight ice, he settled on using a composite. Inspired by Pykrete, he swapped the wood pulp for cotton fibers. After weighing out different percentages of fiber to water, he had a half dozen or so different samples to test. What he found was that anything about 2% was quite strong to the point where smacking it with a hammer didn’t do much. Happy with the results, he 3D printed a mold to hold the ice as it hardens. [Sam] pulled it out a little too early only to have the some of the unfrozen middle leak out. He refilled the mold and got a second wheel going. After waiting for it to fully freeze, he had one and a half wheels and it was time to go for a spin. We appreciate the furze-esk music during the drifting as he is a clear inspiration throughout all of this. We love seeing the tire skids on the pavement, knowing they’ll evaporate soon.

It’s telling that wheels lasted longer than the frame. He admits he just got his MIG welder, so perhaps next time with more practice his tacks will be a little stronger. [Sam] has a love for making electronic vehicles as he’s made a monowheel, a bicycle, and now a tricycle. Perhaps some sort of giant four-wheeled inline skate is next? Other drift trikes don’t go the route of reducing friction but instead focus on delivering so much torque to the wheels that they can’t help but slip. Video after the break.

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Spin Some Spudgers From Secondhand Silverware

February 12, 2022 by 20 Comments

Even though it’s not the right tool for the job, we’ve all used a flat head screwdriver for other purposes. Admit it — you’ve pried open a thing or two with that one in the toolbox that’s all dirty and dinged up anyway. But oftentimes, screwdrivers just aren’t thin enough. What you need is a spudger, which for some reason, seem to only come in plastic. Blame our disposable times.

In a relevant break from building electronics, [lonesoulsurfer] took the time to craft a set of spudgers and such from secondhand silverware. These are all made from spoons and butter knives sourced from a thrift store. For the spoons, [lonesoulsurfer] removed the heads with an angle grinder, shaped them on a belt sander, and thinned them out until they were spudger-slim. After doing the same with the handle end, [lonesoulsurfer] polished up the new tools on the wheel with some compound.

Not all of these are spudgers — some are destined to scrape, and others for lifting badges and decals. But they all live in harmony in a handy carrying case. Check out the build video after the break.

On the other hand, sometimes a disposable tool is all you really need.

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A pinout diagram of the new Pi 4, showing all the alternate interfaces available.

Did You Know That The Raspberry Pi 4 Has More SPI, I2C, UART Ports?

February 1, 2022 by 35 Comments

We’ve gotten used to the GPIO-available functions of Raspberry Pi computers remaining largely the same over the years, which is why it might have flown a little bit under the radar: the Raspberry Pi 4 has six SPI controllers, six I2C controllers, and six UARTs – all on its 40-pin header. You can’t make use of all of these at once, but with up to four different connections wired to a single pin you can carve out a pretty powerful combination of peripherals for your next robotics, automation or cat herding project.

The datasheet for these peripherals is pleasant to go through, with all the register maps nicely laid out – even if you don’t plan to work with the register mappings yourself, the maintainers of your preferred hardware enablement libraries will have an easier time! And, of course, these peripherals are present on the Compute Module 4, too. It might feel like such a deluge of interfaces is excessive, however, it lets you achieve some pretty cool stuff that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Having multiple I2C interfaces helps deal with various I2C-specific problems, such as address conflicts, throughput issues, and mixing devices that support different maximum speeds, which means you no longer need fancy mux chips to run five low-resolution Melexis thermal camera sensors at once. (Oh, and the I2C clock stretching bug has been fixed!) SPI interfaces are used for devices with high bandwidth, and with a few separate SPI ports, you could run multiple relatively high-resolution displays at once, No-Nixie Nixie clock style.

As for UARTs, the Raspberry Pi’s one-and-a-half UART interface has long been an issue in robotics and home automation applications. With a slew of devices like radio receivers/transmitters, LIDARs and resilient RS485 multi-drop interfaces available in UART form, it’s nice that you no longer have to sacrifice Bluetooth or a debug console to get some fancy sensors wired up to your robot’s brain. You can enable up to six UARTs. Continue reading “Did You Know That The Raspberry Pi 4 Has More SPI, I2C, UART Ports?” →

A wooden device with an LED display and speakers

The Inspirer Keeps Your Mood Up With Inspirational Quotes And Soothing Music

December 19, 2021 by 2 Comments

While some people enjoy the cold weather and long, dark nights in the Northern Hemisphere these days, others may find it hard to keep a positive mindset all through the winter. [Michael Wessel] decided he needed to do something about that and came up with The Inspirer, a desktop display that shows inspirational quotes and plays soothing music.

The design is deliberately bare-bones: a strip of wood, standing upright thanks to two metal brackets, onto which a bunch of components have been screwed, glued and taped. The actual display consists of a row of 14-segment LED modules that can show basic alphanumeric characters; these displays emit white light, but [Michael] added a red color filter in front to give them a more “retro” look.

This device is fully off-grid, so no Internet connection issues will disrupt your flow. A huge database of quotes and a selection of music tracks are stored on a pair of micro SD cards; an MP3 player module handles the music while an Arduino picks a quote, drives the display, and reads the buttons. You can select quotes based on a certain theme: examples include friendship, gardening, money, and love. But if you’re open to anything, you can just set it to “random” and get something from any of the 120 categories.

[Michael]’s simple and straightforward design should hopefully prove inspirational to many hardware enthusiasts. But if you’re looking for something more advanced, we featured a neat pomodoro timer that displays quotes a few weeks ago. Of course, this being Hackaday, we’ve also seen a clock based on literary quotes.

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