Hair Enthusiasts Rejoice! Synthetic Follicles Are Now 3D-Printable

November 1, 2015 by 14 Comments

If you’ve been performing painstaking hair-plug procedures on your 3D-printed troll dolls, then prepare to have your world rocked! [Chris Harrison, Gierad Laput, and Xiang “Anthony” Chen] at Carnegie Mellon University have just released a paper outlining a technique they’ve developed for 3D printing fur and hair. Will the figurine section of Thingiverse ever be the same?

The technique takes advantage of a 3D printing effect that most hobbyists actively try to avoid: stringing. Stringing is what happens when the hot end of a 3D printer moves from one point to another quickly while leaking a small amount of molten filament. This results in a thin strand of plastic between the two points, and is generally perceived as a bad thing, because it negatively affects the surface quality of the print.

brush_highresTo avoid this particular phenomenon, 3D printing slicers generally have options like retraction and wiping. But, instead of trying to stop the stringing, [Chris Harrison, Gierad Laput, and Xiang “Anthony” Chen] decided to embrace it. Through extensive experimentation, they figured out how to introduce stringing in a controlled manner. Instead of random strings here and there, they’re able to create strings exactly where they want them, and at specific lengths and thicknesses.

Examples of what this can be used for are shown in their video below, and include adding hair to figurines or bristles to brushes. Of course, once this technique becomes readily available to the masses, the 3D printing community is bound to find unexpected uses for it. 

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Portable Musical Stairs

December 13, 2013 by 8 Comments

musical stairs

[Amir] recently finished a pretty cool project — Portable Musical Stairs! He designed and built it so it could be temporarily installed in schools for musical therapy sessions with autistic children — a fun activity for all ages!

The system utilizes lasers and photo sensors that come with a built in digital output with a sensitivity potentiometer, which makes it super easy for the Arduino Leonardo to interpret. The reason they are using 2 by 4’s for the system is because of the width of the stairs. At 1.75m across, a laser misaligned by only 1 degree results in it being about 3cm off!

On the software end of things, the Arduino acts as a HID input to the computer to create the sounds. [Amir] has put together a free sound sampler on his website makeysoundy.com, and we must say, it’s pretty fun! You can assign notes to different keys, which makes it super easy to make a similar project to this!

Stick around after the break to see the stairs in action!

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A Pair Of N64 Portables

December 13, 2012 by 8 Comments

portables

Casemodding has moved far beyond the old portabalized Ataris and NESes of only a few years ago. Now, the new hotness is more modern consoles including the GameCube, Dreamcast, and the venerable N64. Two N64 case mods rolled into our tip line over the past few days, and we can’t think of a better display of case fabrication and console modification than these two.

First up is [Travis]’s N64 handheld. The case was constructed out of a sheet of ABS plastic with Bondo used to make everything sleek and smooth. There’s a 7″ display in this handheld as well as two LiIon batteries able to provide up to three hours of play time. The fit and finish on this build is spectacular, a testament to [Travis]’ patience and Bondo skills.

Next up is a very very tiny build claiming to be the smallest N64 portable. It’s the work of [bud] and is barely larger than an N64 cartridge. Inside is a 3.5 inch screen and enough LiPos to provide about 2 hours of gaming time. Unlike other (larger) builds, [bud] put the cartridge slot on the outside of the case allowing the cartridge to stick out at a 90 degree angle.

Both very awesome builds that really show off what can be done with a lot of sanding and body filler. You can check out the videos for each casemod after the break.

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Quadcopter Pair Plays Table Tennis Without The Table

March 29, 2011 by 22 Comments

This pair of quad-rotor helicopters does a better job of keeping a ping-pong ball in the air than we could. The two flying drones are performing inside of the flying machine arena, a 1000 cubic meter indoor space surrounded by nets with a foam-padded floor. This makes for a prototype-friendly space, protecting the copters from hard landings and the experimenters from the maiming that might accompany a runaway robot.

This project is headed by researcher [Raffaello D’Andrea]. Previously, we’ve seen his work on a distributed flight array. This time around he’s not working with configurable modules, but completely separate units. Don’t miss the video after the break to see several iterations used to keep a ball in the air. Each bot has the head of a tennis racket mounted at its center. Throw a ball at them and they’ll to what they can to prevent it touching the ground.

While we’re on the topic, we caught a story on NPR about hobby drones. Sounds like their growing popularity has caught the attention of the non-hacker community and restrictions might be on the way. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and make your own flyer while it’s still the wild-west of personal drones.

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Portable Air Conditioner

July 10, 2008 by 16 Comments


The dog days of Summer are looming just over the horizon like a hot sticky wave of impending doom, but you don’t have to take it lying down. Building a portable air conditioner is cheap easy, and we daresay refreshing.

You’ll need the following materials: a condenser, heater core, or radiator, a styrofoam cooler, a submersible water pump, a few case fans, some adapters to power the works, and a few other materials. The pump circulates cold water through the condenser as the fan pushes air through it and the rest of the box.

We’ve never been huge fans of swamp coolers like this one since they offer no true refrigeration cycle. What’s more, they pump a good deal of humidity into the air, which makes the heat worse in the long run, or creates a vicious cycle of cooling and humidifying. Still, when the heat is scrambling our brains, it’s hard to say no to any relief, however ephemeral.

Swapping Vinyl For Cardboard With This ESP32 Turntable

June 30, 2024 by 11 Comments

Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

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Camera And Lens Repair Hack Chat

May 27, 2024 by 13 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 29 at noon Pacific for the Camera and Lens Repair Hack Chat with Anthony Kouttron!

Unlike the normies, most of us are pretty comfortable looking under the hood of just about anything electronic or mechanical. Whether it’s to effect a repair, make a modification, or just to take a look around, voiding warranties is what we do. A lot of us have hard limits, though, and will shy away from certain types of equipment. High voltages and radiation come to mind, as well as machines with lots of spinny bits that can devour your hands in a trice. One mustn’t be foolhardy, after all.

But one place that we’ve always feared to tread for some reason is camera equipment. Perhaps it has to do with all those impossibly tiny screws with subtly different lengths and the knowledge that putting the wrong screw in the wrong hole could have disastrous results. Or maybe it’s just the general fear that messing around with the insides of lenses could knock something slightly off-kilter and ruin the optics.

join-hack-chatWe’re certainly glad that Anthony Kouttron doesn’t share this trepidation. We recently featured a lens repair that he accomplished that was packed with tips and tricks for optical repairs. It turns out that Anthony has been repairing cameras for leisure since 2010, and has serviced both consumer and high-end cinema equipment — so he’s seen his fair share of broken camera bits. We’ve asked him to drop by the Hack Chat, so if you’ve been hesitant to dive into optical fixes, now might be your chance to learn about the dos and don’ts of camera and lens repair.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 29 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.