You Need An Automated Overhead Camera Assistant

April 14, 2021 by 13 Comments

It’s 2021. Everyone and their mother is filming themselves doing stuff, and a lot of it is super cool content. But since most of us have to also work the video capture devices ourselves, it can be difficult to make compelling footage with a single, stationary overhead view, especially when there are a lot of steps involved. A slider rig is a good start, but the ability to move the camera in three dimensions programmatically is really where it’s at.

[KronBjorn]’s excellent automated overhead camera assistant runs on an Arduino Mega and is operated by typing commands in the serial monitor. It can pan ±20° from straight down and moves in three axes on NEMA-17 stepper motors. It moves really smoothly, which you can see in the videos after the break. The plastic-minimal design is interesting and reminds us a bit of an ophthalmoscope phoropter — that’s that main rig at the eye doctor. There’s only one thing that would make this better, and that’s a dedicated macro pad.

If you want to build your own, you’re in luck — there’s quite a lot of detail to this project, including a complete BOM, all the STLs, code, and even assembly videos of the 3D-printed parts and the electronics. Slide past the break to check out a couple of brief demo videos.

Not enough room for a setup like this one? Try the pantograph version.

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Magna Announces Simple Drive Solution For Electric Pickup Trucks

April 14, 2021 by 68 Comments

Thus far, the majority of electric cars on sale have been aimed at commuters, fitting into the sedan and SUV segments of the marketplace. Going forward, there’s a very real need for electrification to touch the whole spectrum of automobiles, and that includes work vehicles like pickup trucks. A company called Magna have recently thrown their hat into the ring in just this space, developing a simple drivetrain that can be readily installed in pickup trucks without major modifications.  Continue reading “Magna Announces Simple Drive Solution For Electric Pickup Trucks” →

Sanity Check Your Engines With This Dynamometer

April 14, 2021 by 2 Comments

As you get ready to pop the hood of your RC car to drop in a motor upgrade, have you ever wondered how much torque you’re getting from these small devices? Sure, we might just look up the motor specs, but why trust the manufacturer with such matters that you could otherwise measure yourself? [JohnnyQ90] did just that, putting together an at home-rig built almost from a stockpile of off-the-shelf parts.

To dig into the details, [JohnnyQ90] has built himself a Prony Brake Dynamometer. These devices are setup with the motor shaft loosely attached to a lever arm that can push down on a force-measuring device like a scale. With our lever attached, we then power up our motor. By gradually increasing the “snugness” of the motor shaft, we introduce sliding friction that “fights” the motor, and the result is that, at equilibrium, the measured torque is the maximum amount possible for the given speed. Keep turning up that friction and we can stall the motor completely, giving us a measurement of our motor’s stall torque.

Arming yourself with a build like this one can give us a way to check the manufacturer’s ratings against our own, or even get ratings for those “mystery motors” that we pulled out the dumpster. And [JohnnyQ90’s] build is a great reminder on how we can leverage a bit of physics and and a handful of home goods to get some meaningful data.

But it turns out that Prony Brake Dynamometers aren’t the only way of measuring motor torque. For a disc-brake inspired, have a look at this final project. And if you’re looking to go bigger, put two motors head-to-head to with [Jeremy Felding’s] larger scale build.

 

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A Lot Of Effort For A Pi Laptop

April 13, 2021 by 7 Comments

Building a Raspberry Pi laptop is not that uncommon. In fact, just a few clicks from any of the major electronics suppliers will have the parts needed for such a project speeding on their way to your house in no time at all. But [joekutz] holds the uncontroversial belief that the value in these parts has somewhat diminishing returns, so he struck out to build his own Pi laptop with a €4 DVD player screen and a whole lot of circuit wizardry to make his parts bin laptop work.

The major hurdle that he needed to overcome was how to power both the display and the Pi with the two small battery banks he had on hand. Getting 5V for the Pi was easy enough, but the display requires 8V so he added one lithium ion battery in series (with its own fuse) in order to reach the required voltage. This does make charging slightly difficult but he also has a unique four-pole break-before-make switch on hand which doesn’t exactly simplify things, but it does make the project function without the risk of short-circuiting any of the batteries he used.

The project also makes use of an interesting custom circuit which provides low voltage protection for that one lonely lithium battery as well. All in all it’s a master course in using some quality circuit-building skills and electrical theory to make do with on-hand parts (and some 3D printing) rather than simply buying one’s way out of a problem. And the end result is something that’s great for anything from watching movies to playing some retro games.

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Treatment Triggers Teeth To Thrive

April 13, 2021 by 38 Comments

We humans like to think we’re pretty advanced, but we can’t regrow missing teeth in adulthood like sharks, alligators, and crocodiles. Once those pearly whites are gone, they’re gone for good, and we don’t even have a way to regenerate the protective enamel. However, this may not always be the case, because scientists at Kyoto University and University of Fukui in Japan have discovered a monoclonal antibody treatment that triggers tooth regeneration in laboratory mice.

Image by Katsu Takahashi/Kyoto University via Medical Express

Monoclonal antibodies are lab-fabbed molecules that act as substitute antibodies to enhance the body’s natural defenses against diseases like cancer and arthritis. These antibodies are also used to develop vaccines and treat COVID-19. In the case of cancer, monoclonal antibodies bind to antigens on cancer cells, effectively flagging them for removal, but they also do much more, such as deliver chemo and radioimmunotherapies.

By blocking the gene USAG-1, the scientists saw an increase in Bone Morphogenic Protein (BMP), which is a molecule that dictates the number of teeth a given creature will have in the first place. Because of this increase in BMP, the mice were able to regrow teeth. This proposition was a challenging one — BMP affects other aspects of development, and the early attempts did more harm than good by causing birth defects. The good news is that the treatment also worked in ferrets, whose teeth are much closer to human dentition than mice. Before moving on to human trials, the scientists will test it out on pigs and dogs. If you were given a second shot at a set of teeth, would you treat them better than the first, or even worse because you can just grow new ones again?

Speaking of pigs, it seems that pig-to-human organ transplants are on track for 2021.

Garage Door Controller Gets The IoT Treatment

April 13, 2021 by 23 Comments

[TheStaticTurtle] built a custom controller for automating his garage doors. He wanted to retain the original physical button and RF remote control interfaces while adding a more modern wireless control accessible from his internet connected devices. Upgrading an old system is often a convoluted process of trial and error, and he had to discard a couple of prototype versions which didn’t pan out as planned. But luckily, the third time was the charm.

The original door-closer logic was pretty straightforward. Press a button and the door moves. If it’s not going in the desired direction, press the button once again to stop the motor, and then press it a third time to reverse direction. With help from the user manual diagrams and a bit of reverse-engineering, he was able to get a handle on how to plan out his add-on controller to interface with the old system.

There are many micro-controller options available these days when you want to add IoT to a project, but [TheStaticTurtle] decided to use the old faithful ESP8266 as the brains of his new controller. For his add-on board to work, he needed to detect the direction in which the motor was turning, and detect the limit switches when the door reached end of travel in either direction. Finally, he needed a relay contact in parallel with the activation button to send commands remotely.

To sense if the motor was moving in the “open” or “close” direction, he used a pair of back-to-back opto-couplers in parallel with the motor terminals. He connected another pair of opto-couplers across the two end-limit switches which indicated when the door was fully open or closed, and shut off the motor supply. Finally, a GPIO from the ESP8266 actuates a relay to send the door open and close commands. The boards were designed in EasyEDA and with a quick turnaround from China, he was able to assemble, test and debug his boards pretty quickly.

The code was written using the Arduino IDE and connects the ESP8266 to the MQTT server running on his home automation computer. The end result is a nice dashboard with three icons for open, close and stop, accessible from all the devices connected to his home network. A 3D printed enclosure attaches outside the original control box to keep things tidy. Using hot melt glue as light pipes for the status LED’s is a pretty nifty hack. If you are interested in taking a deeper look at the project, [TheStaticTurtle] has posted all resources on his Github repository.