Wooden Keyboard With Scrabble Tiles Goes The Extra Mile

August 3, 2021 by 18 Comments

[Steve M. Potter] loves and respects a good, solid keyboard as much as we do and wanted to build an heirloom-level battleship to grace their home office. Well, you couldn’t ask for a better donor keeb. [Steve] used a Unicomp, the modern Model M. The cases on them are nowhere near as nice as a real model M, but hey, where else are you going to find a keyboard with new buckling spring switches? You’re not. (If anyone has a line on new buckling spring switches by themselves, please let us know.)

Although it has those wonderful buckling spring switches, this body is made of solid cherry. After dialing in the general shape of the case, [Steve] carefully routed out all the key cluster holes using a plunge router. This appears to have been the easy part, because making the keycaps looks terribly tedious.

The alphas a number row are all made from 3/4″ maple dowel rod cut down into cylinder nuggets and topped with Scrabble tiles. The F keys and modifiers are cut out of square poplar rod with bird’s eye maple veneer for a unique look. We particularly like the colored F keys — they look like candy or whisky stones, and just happen to be in resistor color code order. But our favorite part has to be the Caps Lock light. We’ll never understand why in situ lock lights went out of fashion.

Like the look of this keyboard but don’t have this much time to invest? Macropads look good in wood, too.

3D Printer Automated Bed Swapping System Loads From A Magazine

August 3, 2021 by 10 Comments

FDM 3D printing has gone beyond prototyping and is being used as a production tool by many companies. However, conventional printers still require an operation to pop the finished part of the bed and start a new print. [Thomas Sandladerer] wanted a way to swap beds without human intervention, so he built an automatic print surface changing system.

The most obvious solution to this problem may appear to be belt printers like the Creality CR-30, but these come with some trade-offs. Bed adhesion can be a problem, and the lack of a rigid print surface causes some parts to come out warped. [Thomas] wanted to be able to use PEI-coated steel beds to avoid these issues. His solution is a system that pulls beds from a “magazine” and pushed out the old bed after a part is finished. It still uses a magnetic heatbed, which lowers out of the way before changing print surfaces. Each print surface is fitted inside a 3D printed frame which rests on the tool changer frame and keeps it in place as the heatbed drops down. The bed frames are printed using ASA, can handle 90 C without problems. The pusher mechanism and the heatbed lowering system are driven by stepper motors which connect to the spare motor outputs on the printer’s control board. The printer in question is a Voron 2.4, which is perfect for this application thanks to its high print speed.

This tool-changing system is only the first prototype, but it still worked very well. [Thomas] plans to make key improvements like a larger print bed and reduced height. This system might be a good fit for small and large print farms. We’ve seen another bed-clearing system that doesn’t require extra build surfaces, but instead scrapes off the completed part.

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3D Printing May Disprove Lord Kelvin

August 3, 2021 by 28 Comments

If you think 3D printing is only good for benchies, key chains, and printer parts, you might enjoy the paper by two physicists from Wesleyan University and the University of Gothenburg. Lord Kelvin — also known as William Thomson — hypothesized a shape known as an isotropic helicoid. As its name implies, the shape would look the same from any angle. Kelvin predicted that such a shape would spin as it sank in a liquid. Turns out, 3D printing proves it wrong. (The actual paywalled paper is available.)

It might seem strange that scientists are only now getting around to disproving a 150-year old hypothesis. However, the paper’s authors think Kelvin may have built the structures — he provided precise instructions — and simply dropped it when it proved incorrect.

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Gladys West Modelled The Earth So That We Can Have GPS

August 3, 2021 by 19 Comments

The name Gladys West is probably unfamiliar, but she was part of creating something you probably use often enough: GPS. You wouldn’t think a child who grew up on a sharecropping farm would wind up as an influential mathematician, but perhaps watching her father work very hard for very little and her mother working for a tobacco company made her realize that she wanted more for herself. Early on, she decided that education was the way out. She made it all the way to the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

While she was there she changed the world with — no kidding — mathematics. While she didn’t single-handedly invent satellite navigation, her work was critical to the systems we take for granted today.

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Reminder: Bring-A-Hack Is This Thursday August 5th

August 3, 2021 by No comments

Hey you! What have you been working on lately? No, wait, don’t tell us just yet! Save the juicy details for the summer edition of Bring-A-Hack. It’s going down in just two days — that’s Thursday, August 5th at 1:00 PM Pacific Daylight time (4pm EDT | 9pm BST/CET). Go register right now!

Historically, Hackaday has attended (or hosted) Bring-a-Hack events as a social activity along with live conference. You grab something off your bench and it gives you a thing to talk about as you see friends old and new. This virtual Bring-a-Hack walks in those footprints — anyone who wants to present their to the group can just type ‘I would like to present’ in the Crowdcast chat once the event gets under way. We also plan to have breakout rooms for more interaction.

If you were too shy to show off one of your projects at the last one of these back in April, now is your chance! Are you building something for the Hackaday Prize? What have you done to make working from home more tolerable? Whatever you’re into, we want to see it, so come and show it off to the hacker elite from around the world. And just because they’re elite, it doesn’t mean they’re elitist: it doesn’t matter what level your project is on. What matters is that you’re passionate about it, and that you probably learned something along the way — something you can share with the community that will bring you many virtual pats on the back.

So go and get registered, shine up those hacks, and we’ll see you there!

Tool Generates Interactive PCB Diagrams From KiCAD

August 3, 2021 by 21 Comments

Nearly everyone likes nice pinout diagrams, but the more pins and functions are involved, the more cluttered and less useful the diagram becomes. To address this, [Jan Mrázek] created Pinion, a tool to help generate interactive diagrams from KiCad design files.

The result is an interactive diagram that can be viewed in any web browser. Hovering over a pin or pad highlights those signals with a callout for the name, and clicking makes it stay highlighted for easier reference. Further information can be as detailed or as brief as needed.

Interestingly, Pinion isn’t a web service that relies on any kind of backend. The diagrams are static HTML and JavaScript only, easily included in web pages or embedded in GitHub documentation.

If you think Pinion looks a bit familiar, you’re probably remembering that we covered [Jan]’s much earlier PcbDraw tool, which turned KiCad board files into SVG renderings but had no ability to add labels or interactivity. Pinion is an evolution of that earlier idea, and its diagrams are able to act as both documentation and interactive reference, with no reliance on any kind of external service.

Interested? Pinion has a full tutorial and demo and a growing library of parts, so check it out.

Murata To Deliver Solid State Batteries To Market In The Fall

August 3, 2021 by 43 Comments

Solid state batteries have long been promised to us as the solution to our energy storage needs. Theoretically capable of greater storage densities than existing lithium-ion and lithium-polymer cells, while being far safer to boot, they would offer a huge performance boost in all manner of applications.

For those of us dreaming of a 1,000-mile range electric car or a 14-kilowatt power drill, the simple fact remains that the technology just isn’t quite there yet. However, Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has just announced that it plans to ship solid state batteries in the fall, which from a glance at the calendar is just weeks away.

It’s exciting news, and we’re sure you’re dying to know – just what are they planning to ship, and how capable are the batteries? Let’s dive in.

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