Portable Solder Paste Station Prevents Smears With Suction

October 30, 2024 by 30 Comments

Applying solder paste to a new custom PCB is always a little nerve-racking. One slip of the hand, and you have a smeared mess to clean up. To make this task a little easier, [Max Scheffler] built the Stencil Fix Portable, a compact self-contained vacuum table to hold your stencil firmly in place and pop it off cleanly every time.

The Stencil Fix V1 used a shop vac for suction, just like another stencil holder we’ve seen. The vacuum can take up precious space, makes the jig a little tricky to move, and bumping the hose can lead to the dreaded smear and colorful language. To get around this [Max] added a brushless drone motor with a 3D printed impeller, with a LiPo battery for power. The speed controller gets its PWM signal from a little RP2040 dev board connected to a potentiometer. [Max] could have used a servo tester, but he found the motor could be a little too responsive and would move the entire unit due to inertia from the impeller. The RP2040 allowed him to add a low pass filter to eliminate the issue. The adjustable speed also means the suction force can be reduced a little for easy alignment of the stencil before locking it down completely.

We love seeing tool projects like these that make future projects a little easier. Fortunately, [Max] made the designs available so you can build your own.

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Homebrew Sferics Receiver Lets You Tune Into Earth Music

October 30, 2024 by 10 Comments

It probably comes as little surprise that our planet is practically buzzing with radio waves. Most of it is of our own making, with cell phones, microwaves, WiFi, and broadcasts up and down the spectrum whizzing around all the time. But our transmissions aren’t the only RF show in town, as the Earth itself is more than capable of generating radio signals of its own, signals which you can explore with a simple sferics receiver like this one.

If you’ve never heard of sferics and other natural radio phenomena, we have a primer to get you started. Briefly, sferics, short for “atmospherics,” are RF signals in the VLF range generated by the millions of lightning discharges that strike the Earth daily. Tuning into them is a pretty simple proposition, as [DX Explorer]’s receiver demonstrates. His circuit, which is based on a design by [K8TND], is just a single JFET surrounded by a few caps and resistors, plus a simple trap to filter out the strong AM broadcast signals in his area. The output of the RF amplifier goes directly into an audio amp, which could be anything you have handy — but you risk breaking [Elliot]’s heart if you don’t use his beloved LM386.

This is definitely a “nothing fancy” build, with the RF section built ugly style on a scrap of PCB and a simple telescopic whip used for an antenna. Tuning into the Earth’s radio signals does take some care, though. Getting far away from power lines is important, to limit AC interference. [DX Explorer] also found how he held the receiver was important; unless he was touching the ground plane of the receiver, the receiver started self-oscillating. But the pips, crackles, and pings came in loud and clear on his rig; check out the video below for the VLF action.

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An International Hackerspace Map

October 29, 2024 by 17 Comments

If you’re looking for a hackerspace while on your travels, there is more than one website which shows them on a map, and even tells you whether or not they are open. This last feature is powered by SpaceAPI, a standard way for hackerspaces to publish information about themselves, including whether or not they are closed.

Given such a trove of data then it’s hardly surprising that [S3lph] would use it to create a gigantic map of central Europe with lights in the appropriate places (German language, Google Translate link) to show the spaces and their status.

The lights are a set of addressable LEDs and the brain is an ESP32, making this an accessible project for most hackers with the time to assemble it. Unsurprisingly then it’s not the first such map we’ve seen, though it’s considerably more ambitious than the last one. Meanwhile if your hackerspace doesn’t have SpaceAPI yet or you’re simply curious about the whole thing, we took a look at it back in 2021.

Thanks [Dave] for the tip.

An exploded view of an electrostatic motor from manufacturer C-Motive. There is a silvery cylinder on the left, two half silver and half golden disks on either side and two thinner gold disks in the center. A square mountin plate is on the right hand side next to one of the silver/gold disks.

Electrostatic Motors Are Making A Comeback

October 29, 2024 by 21 Comments

Electrostatic motors are now common in MEMS applications, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin and spinoff C-Motive Technologies have brought macroscale electrostatic motors back. [via MSN/WSJ]

While the first real application of an electric motor was Ben Franklin’s electrostatically-driven turkey rotisserie, electromagnetic type motors largely supplanted the technology due to the types of materials available to engineers of the time. Newer dielectric fluids and power electronics now allow electrostatic motors to be better at some applications than their electromagnetic peers.

The main advantage of electrostatic motors is their reduced critical materials use. In particular, electrostatic motors don’t require copper windings or any rare earth magnets which are getting more expensive as demand grows for electrically-powered machines. C-Motive is initially targeting direct drive industrial applications, and the “voltage driven nature of an electrostatic machine” means they require less cooling than an electromagnetic motor. They also don’t use much if any power when stalled.

Would you like a refresher on how to make static electricity or a deeper dive on how these motors work?

Lies, Big Lies And LED Lightbulb Lifespan Promises

October 29, 2024 by 109 Comments
Checking the voltages on a dead LED lightbulb. Best done by a professional, obviously. (Credit: The Doubtful Technician, YouTube)
Checking the voltages on a dead LED lightbulb. Best done by a professional, obviously. (Credit: The Doubtful Technician, YouTube)

We have probably all seen the marketing blurbs on packaging and elsewhere promoting the amazing lifespan of LED lighting solutions. Theoretically you should be able to install a LED bulb in a fixture that used to hold that incandescent lightbulb which had to be replaced annually and have it last a decade or longer. Yet we seem to replace these LED bulbs much more often than that, with them suffering a range of issues. To get to the root cause of this, [The Doubtful Technician] decided to perform an autopsy on a couple of dead lightbulbs which he got from a variety of sources and brands.

One lamp is an Amazon-bought one from a seller who seems to have vanished, but was promised over 3 years of constant use. Other than the fun of blinding of oneself while testing, this one was easy to diagnose, with a dodgy solder joint on a resistor in a MELF package. The next one from Lowes was very dim, and required popping open with some gentle force, which revealed as likely culprit a shorted SMD resistor. Finally a more substantial (i.e. heavier) bulb was tested which had survived about 7 years in the basement until it and its siblings began to suddenly die. Some might consider this the normal lifespan, but what really failed in them?

The electronics in this last bulb were the most impressive, with a full switch mode power supply (SMPS) that appears to have suffered a failure. Ultimately the pattern with these three bulbs was that while the LEDs themselves were still fine, it were things like the soldering joints and singular components on the LED driver PCB that had failed. Without an easy way to repair these issues, and with merely opening the average LED lightbulb being rather destructive, this seems like another area where what should be easy repairs are in fact not, and more e-waste is created.

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Custom Fan Controller For Otherwise Fanless PCs

October 29, 2024 by 6 Comments

Most of us using desktop computers, and plenty of us on laptops, have some sort of fan or pump installed in our computer to remove heat and keep our machines running at the most optimum temperature. That’s generally a good thing for performance, but comes with a noise pollution cost. It’s possible to build fanless computers, though, which are passively cooled by using larger heat sinks with greater thermal mass, or by building more efficient computers, or both. But sometimes even fanless designs can benefit from some forced air, so [Sasa] built this system for cooling fanless systems with fans.

The main advantage of a system like this is that the fans on an otherwise fanless system remain off when not absolutely necessary, keeping ambient noise levels to a minimum. [Sasa] does have a few computers with fans, and this system helps there as well. Each fan module is WiFi-enabled, allowing for control of each fan on the system to be set up and controlled from a web page. It also can control 5V and 12V fans automatically with no user input, and can run from any USB power source, so it’s not necessary to find a USB-PD-compatible source just to run a small fan.

Like his previous project, this version is built to easily integrate with scripting and other third-party software, making it fairly straightforward to configure in a home automation setup or with any other system that is monitoring a temperature. It doesn’t have to be limited to a computer, either; [Sasa] runs one inside a server cabinet that monitors the ambient temperature in the cabinet, but it could be put to use anywhere else a fan is needed. Perhaps even a hydroponic setup.

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Another Commodore Portable We Never (Quite) Received

October 29, 2024 by 7 Comments

The story of Commodore computers is one of some truly great machines for their time, and of the truly woeful marketing that arguably spelled their doom. But there’s another Commodore computing story, that of the machines we never received, many of which came close enough to production  that they might have made it.

[Old VCR] has the story of one of these, and it’s a portable. It’s not a C64 like the luggable which did emerge, neither is it the legendary LCD portable prototype in the possession of our Hackaday colleague [Bil Herd]. Instead it’s a palmtop branded under licence from Toshiba, and since it’s a rare device even its home country of Japan the article gives us perhaps the only one we’ll ever see with either badge.

The Commodore HHC-4 was announced at Winter CES 1983, and since it was never seen again it’s aroused some curiosity among enthusiasts. The article goes to some lengths to cross-reference the visible features and deduce that it’s in fact a Toshiba Pasopia Mini, a typical palmtop computer of the era with not much in the way of processing power, a small alphanumeric display, and a calculator-style QWERTY keyboard. We’re treated to a teardown of a Toshiba unit and its dock, revealing some uncertainty about which processor architecture lurks in those Toshiba custom chips.

Looking at the magazine reviews and adverts it seems as though Commodore may have had some machines with their branding on even if they never sold them, so there exists the tantalizing possibility of one still lurking forgotten in the possession of a former staffer. We can hope.

If Commodore history interests you, you really should read [Bil]’s autobiographical account of the company in the 1980s.