Wazer: The Waterjet For Your Garage

September 12, 2016 by Sonya Vasquez 75 Comments

Most hobbyists don’t have waterjets in their garage, but they would if they could! A Waterjet (or Water Jet Cutter) is a marvelous tool. Simply mount a high-pressure stream of grit and water on an x-y gantry, and the pressure generates enough erosion to cut through just about any thin material. Unfortunately, claiming your own waterjet will erode away a nice big hole in your pocketbook too. Machines up to this point start at about $75K, not to mention that they’d claim the better part of your workspace in a two-car garage.

Most of us everyday hackers that want to play with the benefits of this tool send their parts out to a professional shop. Consequently, we don’t often hear about everyday hackers using waterjets, or waterjet-cut parts all that often, with one exception. Back in 2014, a crew of students from UPENN built a functional waterjet with a parts-list that could make it affordable for about $5000. Now that same team is back. This time, they’ve spun together not just a one-off, but a fully-featured product called Wazer, which just launched its Kickstarter campaign minutes ago and has already nearly quadrupled the $100k goal. How could it do that? The full package starts at modest $3599-$4499. This is crowd-funding, after all, but a 20x undercutting of price is a powerful motivator.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Electric Bike And A Dashboard

September 7, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Over the last few years, powerful brushless motors have become very cheap, batteries have become very powerful, and the world of quadcopters has brought us very capable electronic speed controls. Sounds like the perfect storm for a bunch of electric bike hacks, right? That’s what [bosko] is doing for his Hackaday Prize Entry. He’s building an e-bike with a big motor and an electronic dashboard, because a simple throttle switch would never do.

There are two parts to [bosko]’s bike, with the front brain box consisting of GPS, an OLED display, analog throttle, and a few wireless modules to connect to the other half of the system under the seat.

The drive section of this e-bike is as simple as it gets. It’s just a big brushless outrunner motor suspended directly above the rear tire, without any other connection. [bosko] has gone with the simplest power transmission system here, and is slightly wearing out the rear tire in the process. It works, though, and a few of the commentors over on Hackaday.io say it reminds them of the French Solex bike. We’re thinking this bike is more of what a riquimbili would be if Hobby King had a Cuban warehouse, but it seems to work well for [bosko] and is a great entry to the Hackaday Prize.

Drones, Clever Hacks, And CG Come Together For Star Wars Fan Film

August 11, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

We weren’t certain if this Star Wars fan film was out kind of thing until we saw the making of video afterwards. They wanted to film a traditional scene in a new way. The idea was to take some really good quadcopter pilots, give them some custom quadcopters, have them re-enact a battle in a scenic location, and then use some movie magic to bring it all together.

The quadcopters themselves are some of those high performance racing quadcopters with 4K video cameras attached. The kind of thing that has the power to weight ratio of a rocket ship. Despite what the video implies, they are unfortunately not TIE Fighter shaped. After a day of flying and a few long hikes to retrieve the expensive devices after inevitable crashes (which, fortunately, provided some nice footage), the next step was compositing.

However, how to trick the viewer into believing they were in a X-Wing quadcopter? A cheap way to do it would be to spend endless hours motion tracking and rendering a cockpit in place. It won’t look quite real. The solution they came up with is kind of dumb and kind-of brilliant. Mount a 3D printed cockpit on a 2×4 with a GoPro. Play the flight footage on a smartphone while holding the contraption. Try to move the cockpit in the same direction as the flight. We’re not certain if it was a requirement to also make whooshing and pew pew laser noises while doing so, but it couldn’t hurt.

In the end it all came together to make a goofy, yet convincingly good fan film. Nice work! Videos after the break.

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A Drone Photosphere Is Worth 4000 Times Pi Words

July 14, 2016 by Al Williams 13 Comments

One of the problems with a cheap drone is getting good video, especially in real time. Cheap hobby quadcopters often have a camera built-in or mounted in a fixed position. That’s great for fun shots, but it makes it hard to get just the right shot, especially as the drone tilts up and down, taking the camera with it. Pricey drones often have a gimbal mount to keep the camera stable, but you are still only looking in one direction.

Some cheap drones now have a VR (virtual reality) mode to feed signal to a headset or a Google Cardboard-like VR setup. That’s hard to fly, though, because you can’t really look around without moving the drone to match. You can mount multiple cameras, but now you’ve added weight and power drain to your drone.

MAGnet Systems wants to change all that with a lightweight spherical camera made to fit on a flying vehicle. The camera is under 2.5 inches square, weighs 62 grams, and draws less than 3 watts at 12 volts. It picks up a sphere that is 360 degrees around the drone’s front and back and 240 degrees centered directly under the drone. That allows a view of 30 degrees above the horizon as well as directly under the drone. There is apparently a different lens that can provide 280 degrees if you need that, although apparently that will add size and weight and be more suitable for use on the ground.

The software (see video below) runs on Windows or Android (they’ve promised an iOS version) and there’s no additional image processing hardware needed. The camera can also drive common VR headsets.

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Hackaday Links July 10, 2016

July 10, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 44 Comments

Several years ago, Iran used GPS spoofing to ‘land’ an RQ-170 Sentinel drone operated by the US military. Why is this interesting now? Because this week Pokemon GO was released. It’s a mobile, augmented-reality game that forces you to walk around your neighborhood to catch Pokemon. Apparently you can capture a Mewtwo if you make it to Area 51, Groudon near any volcano, and Deoxys is aboard the International Space Station. In the next week or two, someone will figure out how to spoof the GPS location on a phone to catch rare and legendary Pokemon. This will happen.

The FR4 Machine Shield is a CNC kit made from a PCB. Yes, the entire machine can be constructed using a panel from a board house. It’s now a Kickstarter. Like other desktop PCB milling machines, the FR4 uses hobby brushless motors (think quadcopters) for the spindle, and features tab and slot construction. It’s a pretty neat little tool we checked out a little while ago

There’s a lot going on during the first weekend in August. We’re going to DEF CON, I’m trying to rope a few writers into going to the Vintage Computer Festival West, and Electromagnetic Field Camp is happening in the UK. Hackaday will have a contingent at EMF Camp, so be sure to tell us if you’re going and we’ll bring some stickers

If you ride a bicycle, you have a hand pump somewhere around. Those hand pumps get pretty tiring. Here’s a much better solution. It’s a pneumatic air pump. It will inflate your bike tire with the power of compressed air. But that’s not all… this device will also inflate basketballs, soccer balls, and footballs, all with a simple and easy to use air compressor.

The Hackaday logo was one of the first things on Thingiverse, but surprisingly there aren’t many jolly wrenchers plastered onto 3D prints. To fix this glaring oversight by everyone, [Tom] whipped up the Hackaday logo in OpenSCAD.

[Blecky] is building a local positioning system for his entry into this year’s Hackaday Prize. Now it’s a Kickstarter. As a new feature, a pair of these boards can also do motion detection

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Local Positioning System

June 26, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

Use of the global positioning system is all around us. From the satnav in your car to quadcopters hovering above a point, there are hundreds of ways we use the Global Positioning System every day. There are a few drawbacks to GPS: it takes a while to acquire a signal, GPS doesn’t work well indoors, and because nodes on the Internet of Things will be cheap, they probably won’t have a GPS receiver.

These facts open up the door for a new kind of positioning system. A local positioning system that uses hardware devices already have, but is still able to determine a location within a few feet. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Blecky] is building the SubPos Ranger, a local positioning system based on 802.15.4 radios that still allows a device to determine its own location.

The SubPos Ranger is based on [Blecky]’s entry for the 2015 Hackaday Prize, SubPos that used WiFi, RSSI, and trilateration to determine a receiver’s position in reference to three or more base stations. It works remarkably well, even in places where GPS doesn’t, like parking garages and basements.

The SubPos Ranger is an extension of the WiFi-only SubPos, based on 802.15.4, and offers longer range and lower power than the WiFi-only SubPos system. It’s still capable of determining where a receiver is to within a few feet, making this the ideal solution for devices that need to know where are without relying on GPS.

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FR4 Machine Shield Is A CNC Milling Machine From FR4 PCB

June 4, 2016 by Moritz Walter 21 Comments

The people behind the PocketNC heard you like CNC PCB mills, so they milled you a PCB mill out of PCB. They announced their surprising new open source hardware product, a pocket sized 3-axis CNC machine entirely made out of FR4 PCB material, aptly named “FR4 Machine Shield”, at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire.

UPDATE: The FR4 Machine Shield is now on Kickstarter

We know the concept from quadcopters, little robots, and generally things that are small enough to make use of their PCBs as a structural component. But an entire CNC machine, soldered together from a few dozen PCBs certainly takes it to the next level.

There is no doubt that 2mm thick fiber reinforced epoxy can be surprisingly rigid, although the Achilles heel of this method might be the solder joints. However, it looks like all load bearing, mechanical connections of the machine are supported by tightly interlocking ~~“dovetail”~~ finger-joints, which may help protecting all the solder connections from the strain hardening effects of continuous stress and spindle vibrations.

As you might expect, most of the wiring is embedded into the FR4 frame construction, and to squeeze the maximum value out of the PCB material, the motor driver boards interface via card edge connectors with the (currently Arduino based) controller board. In addition to the milling head, which features a brushless DC motor and a tool coupler, the team wants to develop heads for circuit printing, microscopy, pneumatic pick and place, hot air reflow, and 3D printing.

With all those cost-driven design choices, from the one-step manufacturing process of the frame and wiring to the dismissal of screws and nuts from the frame assembly, the “FR4 Machine Shield” could indeed become one of the cheapest CNC machine kits on the market. The team targets an introduction price of $400 during a Kickstarter campaign in June 2016. Can they deliver? [Gerrit] checked Pocket NC out at the Faire and ended up raving about how they run their business.

Enjoy their teaser video below!

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