Humongous 3D Printer Produces Boat And Challenges

December 17, 2019 by 27 Comments

We’ve seen some pretty big polymer 3D printers, but nothing quite as big as the University of Maine’s 3D printer with a 22,000 ft³  (623 m³) build volume. It holds the Guinness World Record for the largest polymer 3D printer, and with that size comes some interesting challenges and advantages.

You might have already seen the video of it printing an entire patrol boat hull in a single piece, and would have noticed how it printed at a 45° angle. Due to the sheer weight and thermal mass of the print bead, it cannot bridge more than an inch, since it’ll just sag. A 45° overhang angle is about all it can manage, but since the layers can be tilted at that angle, it ends up being able to print horizontal roofs with no support. A 10 mm nozzle is used and the extruded line ends up being 12.5 mm in diameter with a 5 mm layer height. The boat mentioned above was printed with carbon ABS, but it can reportedly use almost any thermoplastic. It looks like the extruder is a screw extruder from an injection moulding machine, and is likely fed with pellets, which is a lot more practical than filament at this scale. Check out the video below by [Paul Bussiere] who works in the Advanced Structures & Composites Center at the University. He also does a very interesting interview with his boss, [James M. Anderson].

The 45° layer angle is very similar to how some infinite build volume 3D printers work. For something more within the reach of the average hacker, check out the tool changing Jubilee.
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Modulated Pilot Lights Anchor AR To Real World

December 17, 2019 by 26 Comments

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that wherever you are now, a quick glance around will probably reveal at least one LED. They’re everywhere – we can spot a quick half dozen from our desk, mostly acting as pilot lights and room lighting. In those contexts, LEDs are pretty mundane. But what if a little more flash could be added to the LEDs of the world – literally?

That’s the idea behind LightAnchors, which bills itself as a “spatially-anchored augmented reality interface.” LightAnchors comes from work at [Chris Harrison]’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University which seeks new ways to interface with computers, and leverages the ubiquity of LED point sources and the high-speed cameras on today’s smartphones. LightAnchors are basically beacons of digitally encoded data that a smartphone can sense and decode. The target LED is modulated using amplitude-shift keying and each packet contains a data payload and parity bits along with a pre- and post-amble sequence. Software on the phone uses the camera to isolate the point source, track it, and pull the data out of it, which is used to create an overlay on the scene. The video below shows a number of applications, ranging from displaying guest login credentials through the pilot lights on a router to modulating the headlights of a rideshare vehicle so the next fare can find the right car.

An academic paper (PDF link) goes into greater depth on the protocol, and demo Arduino code for creating LightAnchors is thoughtfully provided. It strikes us that the two main hurdles to adoption of LightAnchors would be convincing device manufacturers to support them, and advertising the fact that what looks like a pilot light might actually be something more, but the idea sure beats fixed markers for AR tracking.

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3D Printed Goggles Let R.O.B. See Into The Bluetooth World

December 16, 2019 by 4 Comments

We admit that a hack enabling a 34-year-old video game peripheral to be controlled by a mobile app wasn’t something we were expecting to see today, but if controlling something with something else isn’t the definition of a classic hack, we don’t know what is. The folks at [Croxel Inc.] worked out a way to control R.O.B. using a phone app to demo out their expertise in building hardware and software prototypes, a service they offer at their website.

R.O.B. was a little robot with movable clamp arms bundled with the 1985 release of the NES, an effort by Nintendo of America to drive sales of the console after the gaming crash of 1983 by making it look less like a video game and more like a toy. The robot receives inputs from light sensors in its head, which would be pointed towards the TV playing one of the only two games released with support for it. [Croxel] used this to their advantage, and in order to control the robot without needing a whole NES, they fabricated a board using a BGM111 Bluetooth Low-Energy module which can receive outside inputs and translate them to the light commands the robot recognizes.

To avoid having to modify the rare toy itself and having to filter out any external light, the hack consists of a 3D printed “goggles” enclosure that fits over R.O.B.’s eyes, covering them entirely. The board is fitted inside it to shine the control light into its eyes, while also flashing “eye” indicators on the outside to give it an additional charming 80s look. The inputs, which are promptly obeyed, are then given by a phone paired to the module using a custom app skinned to look like a classic NES controller.

We’ve seen more intrusive hacks to this little robot here on Hackaday, such as this one which replaces the old sluggish motors entirely with modern servos and even plans to reconstruct it from scratch given the scarcity of the originals. It’s interesting to see the ways in which people are still hacking hardware from 35 years ago, and we’re excited to see what they’ll come up with around the 40 or 50 year marks!

[via Gizmodo, thanks Itay for the tip!]

Lego Machine Uses Machine Learning To Sort Itself Out

December 16, 2019 by 8 Comments

In our opinion, the primary evidence of a properly lived childhood is an enormous box of every conceivable Lego piece, from simple bricks to girders and gears, all with a small town’s worth of minifigs swimming through it. It takes years of birthdays and Christmases to accumulate a Lego collection best measured by the pound, but like anything worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

But what to do with such a collection? Digging through it to find Just the Right Piece™ can be frustrating, and bringing order to the chaos with manual sorting is just so impractical. How about putting some of those bricks to work with a machine-vision Lego sorter built from Lego?

[Daniel West]’s approach is hardly new – we’ve even featured brick-built Lego sorters before – but we’re impressed by its architecture. First, the mechanical system is amazing. It uses a series of conveyors to transport bricks from a hopper, winnowing the stream down as it goes. The final step is a vibratory feeder that places one piece on a conveyor at a time. Those pass under a camera attached to a Raspberry Pi, where OpenCV does background subtraction from the video stream, applies bounding boxes to the parts, and runs the images through a convolutional neural network (CNN) that’s been trained on a database of every Lego part. Servo-controlled gates then direct the parts into one of 18 bins. See it in action in the video below.

We must admit that we’re not sure what the sorting criteria are, as some bins seem nearly as chaotic as the input mix. Still, we appreciate the fine engineering, and award extra style points for all the Lego goodness.

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Busy Box Beats Baby’s Boredom

December 16, 2019 by 12 Comments

We would love to be a fly on the wall Christmas morning to see [Wilksyonreddit]’s kid tear the paper off of this adult-level busy box. Can you imagine the unbridled glee? It should certainly make the arduous six-month build worth the trouble. Here’s hoping the walls are sturdy, because we predict they will be bounced off of.

This gift that keeps on giving has an Arduino MEGA clone inside and a couple of shift registers to deal with all those buttons and switches. In addition to all the buttons, switches, and the number pad, there are two 3D-printed touch sensor pads that can detect little fingers up to four inches away. Although he’s already built a few games and activities for it, [Wilksy] posted this in r/duino looking for more ideas. There’s a lot to work with here on baby’s first nuclear missile launch console, both input- and output-wise. We humbly suggest 4D Simon, though we must admit to fantasizing about MIDI controllers.

Hidden inside this Christmas present is an Easter egg we think you’ll appreciate. Enter the right code, and the box becomes a treasure trove of Back to the Future sound effects and audio clips. Video’s after the break, McFly.

This box would make a great Kerbal Space Program controller, too, like this one.

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How To Design A Low Cost Probe-Oscilloscope

December 16, 2019 by 22 Comments

[Mark Omo] sends in his write up on the design of what should hopefully be a sub-$100 oscilloscope in a probe. 

Many problems in engineering can be solved simply by throwing money at the them. It’s really when you start to apply constraints that the real innovation happens. The Probe-Scope Team’s vision is of a USB oscilloscope with 60MHz bandwidth and 25Msps. The cool twist is that by adding another probe to a free USB port on your computer you’re essentially adding a channel. By the time you get to four you’re at the same price as a normal oscilloscope but with an arguably more flexible set-up.

The project is also open source. When compared to popular oscilloscopes such as a Rigol it has pretty comparable performance considering how many components each channel on a discount scope usually share due to clever switching circuitry.

The probe is based around an Analog Devices ADC whose data is handled by a tag team of a Lattice FPGA and a 32bit PIC micro controller. You can see all the code and design files on their github. Their write-up contains a very thorough explanation of the circuitry. We hope they keep the project momentum going!

Kelly Heaton’s Artwork Blurs The Line Between Traditional And Electronic

December 16, 2019 by 7 Comments

Digital electronics are all well and good, but it’s hard to ignore the organic, living qualities of the analog realm. It’s these circuits that Kelly Heaton spends her time with, building artistic creations that meld the fine arts with classic analog hardware to speak to the relationship between electronics and nature. During her talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, Kelly shared the story of her journey toward what she calls Electronic Naturalism, and what the future might bring.

The Pool of Reflection Loop was one of Kelly’s early electronic installation pieces.

Kelly got her start like many in the maker scene. Hers was a journey that began by taking things apart, with the original Furby being a particular inspiration. After understanding the makeup of the device, she began to experiment, leading to the creation of the Reflection Loop sculpture in 2001, with the engineering assistance of Steven Grey. Featuring 400 reprogrammed Furbys, the device was just the beginning of Kelly’s artistic experimentation. With an interest in electronics that mimicked life, Kelly then moved on to the Tickle Me Elmo. Live Pelt (2003) put 64 of the shaking Muppets into a wearable coat, that no doubt became unnerving to wear for extended periods.

Analog electronics parallel living organisms while programmable logic merely simulates life.

—Forrest Mims

Wanting to create art with a strong relationship to organic processes, Kelly focused on working with discrete components and analog circuitry. Basic building blocks such as the astable multivibrator became key tools that were used in different combinations to produce the desired effects. Through chaining several oscillators together, along with analog sequencers, circuits could be created that mimicked the sound of crickets in a backyard, or a Carolina wren singing in a tree.

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