Colossal Hydraulic Hulkbuster Is Classic Colin Furze

May 3, 2018 by 14 Comments

[Colin Furze] is back at it – once again shrugging off the confines of feasibility and laughing in the face of sanity, all whilst sporting the signature tie with unrivalled style.

Teaming up with [James Bruton], the result of their collective talent this time is a hydraulic hulkbuster suit, at a frankly ridiculous scale. This is the third and final episode of the build process, with the first two covering the legs and body. 

To demonstrate the strength of his latest toy, [Colin] tapes himself to the arm of his creation and promptly gets swung into a wall. We still don’t entirely understand how [Colin] survives his antics, but we’re very glad he does.

The steel frame is a masterclass in welding and fabrication, providing support for three hydraulic pumps, the accompanying rams, some seriously hefty bearings (think 1 m diameter), and one Colin. As if a giant moving steel behemoth wasn’t enough, each arm houses a weapon: a flamethrower and a power-fist. All parts are sourced from eBay.

The control electronics and 3D-printed skin are pretty nifty too – you can see [James]’s first video here.

We’re hard pressed to pick our favourite Furze projects, but we have to mention the flamethrower guitar and hoverbike.

Continue reading “Colossal Hydraulic Hulkbuster Is Classic Colin Furze” →

Robot Radar Module

May 3, 2018 by 25 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ted Yapo] is building a Robot Radar Module breakout board. His design uses the A111 60 GHz pulsed coherent radar (PCR) sensor from Acconeer AB (New Part alert!) .

The A111 is a low power, high precision sensor ideal for use in object detection or gesture sensing applications. The BGA package is tiny – 5.5 mm x 5.2 mm, but it does not appear very difficult for a hacker to assemble. The sensor includes an integrated baseband, RF front-end and Antenna in Package so you don’t have to mess with RF layout headaches. Acconeer claims the sensor performance is not affected with interference from noise, dust, color and direct or indirect light. Sensing range is about 2 m with a +/- 2 mm accuracy. And at just under $10 a pop for 10 units or more, it would make a nice addition to augment the sensor package on a Robot.

To get started, [Ted] is keeping his design simple and small – the break out board measures just 32 mm x 32 mm. The radar sensor itself doesn’t require any parts other than a crystal and its loading capacitors. A LDO takes care of the 1.8 V required by the A111. Three 74LVC2T45 chips translate the SPI digital interface from 1.8 V to external logic levels between 1.8 V to 5 V. The three level translation chips could possible be replaced by a single six or eight channel translator – such as one from the TXB series from TI. For his first PCB iteration, [Ted] is expecting to run in to some layout or performance issues, so if you have any feedback to give him on his design, check out his hardware repository on Github.

Acconeer provides a Getting Started guide for their Evaluation Kits, which includes a detailed Raspberry-Pi / Raspbian installation and an accompanying video (embedded after the break) targeted at hackers. We are eagerly looking forward to the progress that [Ted] makes with this sensor breakout. Combined with LiDAR ToF sensor breakout boards, such as the MappyDot, it would be a great addition to your robot’s sensing capabilities.

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Circuit VR: Sink Or Swim With Current Sources

May 3, 2018 by 22 Comments

If you got your start in electronics sometime after 1980 your first project might well have been to light up an LED. Microcontroller projects often light up an LED, too, and a blinking LED is something of the “hello world” program for embedded systems. If you tried lighting up your LED with a 9 V battery directly — not that you’d admit to it — you found it would light up. Once, anyway. The excess current blows up the LED which is why you need a current-limiting resistor. However, those current limiting resistors are really a poor excuse for a current source or sink. In many applications, you need a real current source and luckily, they aren’t hard to create.

As always with Circuit VR, we’ll be using LT Spice to examine the circuits. If you need a quick tutorial, start here and come back after that. If you use Linux, don’t be dismayed. I run LT Spice under WINE and it works great. You can find all the Spice files on GitHub.

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San Francisco: Let’s Learn To Build Some Robots!

May 3, 2018 by 1 Comment

Hone your skills at basic robot building. You’re invited to join Hackaday for a Beginner Robotics Workshop on Saturday, May 12.

For this workshop we’re pairing up with FIRST robotics mentors and students from the Bay Area. FIRST is an international high school robotics competition and you won’t believe what these teams can do. The workshop will start with an overview of the three major parts that go into a robot project: mechanical design, electronic design, and programming. From there, choose one of the three you want to focus on for the afternoon and let the hands-on fun begin as we break out into small groups to tackle some robotics problems!

The mechanical group will explore robot building using OnShape CAD software. The electronic group will work hands-on with Arduino-based prototyping and breakout boards. The programming group will utilize the Arduino IDE. Workshops will wrap up with a group discussion of how these three concepts are integrated in a single robotics effort.

Right now the Robotics Module Challenge of the 2018 Hackaday Prize is in full swing. We’re excited to see more roboticists in the world and are happy to bring you a workshop that is both technical and accessible. Come build some ‘bots and take home some new knowledge to pour into your project, and your Hackaday Prize entries!

The HackadayPrize2018 is Sponsored by:

Smooth PLA Through The Fire And Flames

May 3, 2018 by 17 Comments

3D printing makes it easy to produce complex geometries, but the fused deposition methods generally create parts with poor surface finish, largely due to the layers being highly visible in the finished part. There are a wide variety of ways to deal with this, often involving sanding parts after production, or the use of fillers and paints. [XerotoLabs] has another solution. (YouTube, video below the break.)

To smooth the parts, a butane torch is pressed into service. The flame temperature is kept fairly low, and the torch is used almost like a brush to evenly apply heat to the surface of the part. As the PLA reaches its melting temperature, surface tension helps to smooth the part out. This is very similar to flame polishing which is commonly used in the fabrication of acrylic plastics.

It is a technique that requires some finesse – too much heat or focus on a single area, and you’re liable to end up with a molten plastic blob instead of a nice shiny finished part. Precautions must also be taken to avoid burning yourself or your workshop to the ground. But it’s a useful tool to have in your kit when you’re producing PLA parts that you want to look their best.

We’ve seen other techniques for smoothing PLA, too – the solvent method is particularly interesting. Continue reading “Smooth PLA Through The Fire And Flames” →

3D Printering: Which Raspberry Pi Is Best At Slicing In Octoprint?

May 3, 2018 by 22 Comments

OctoPrint is arguably the ultimate tool for remote 3D printer control and monitoring. Whether you simply want a way to send G-Code to your printer without it being physically connected to your computer or you want to be able to monitor a print from your phone while at work, OctoPrint is what you’re looking for. The core software itself is fantastic, and the community that has sprung up around the development of OctoPrint plugins has done an incredible job expanding the basic functionality into some very impressive new territory.

RAMBo 3D controller with Pi Zero Integration

But all that is on the software side; you still need to run OctoPrint on something. Technically speaking, OctoPrint could run on more or less anything you have lying around the workshop. It’s cross platform and doesn’t need anything more exotic than a free USB port to connect to the printer, and people have run it on everything from disused Windows desktops to cheap Android smartphones. But for many, the true “home” of OctoPrint is the Raspberry Pi.

As I’ve covered previously, the Raspberry Pi does make an exceptional platform for OctoPrint. Given the small size and low energy requirements of the Pi, it’s easy to integrate into your printer. The new Prusa i3 MK3 even includes a header right on the control board where you can plug in a Raspberry Pi Zero.

But while the Raspberry Pi is more than capable of controlling a 3D printer in real-time, there has always been some debate about its suitability for slicing STL files. Even on a desktop computer, it can sometimes be a time consuming chore to take an STL file and process it down to the raw G-Code file that will command the printer’s movements.

In an effort to quantify the slicing performance on the Raspberry Pi, I thought it would be interesting to do a head-to-head slicing comparison between the Pi Zero, the ever popular Pi 3, and the newest Pi 3 B+.

Continue reading “3D Printering: Which Raspberry Pi Is Best At Slicing In Octoprint?” →

More Details On That First Home-Made Lithographically Produced IC

May 3, 2018 by 19 Comments

A few days ago we brought you news of [Sam Zeloof]’s amazing achievement, of creating the first home-made lithographically produced integrated circuit. It was a modest enough design in a simple pair of differential amplifiers and all we had to go on was a Twitter announcement, but it promised a more complete write-up to follow. We’re pleased to note that the write-up has arrived, and we can have a look at some of the details of just how he managed to produce an IC in his garage. He’s even given it a part number, the Zeloof Z1.

For ease of manufacture he’s opted for a PMOS process, and he is using four masks which he lists as the active/doped area, gate oxide, contact window, and top metal. He takes us through 66 different processes that he performs over the twelve hours of a full production run, with comprehensive descriptions that make for a fascinating run-down of semiconductor manufacture for those of us who will never build a chip of our own but are still interested to learn how it is done. The chip’s oblong dimensions are dictated by the constraints of an off-the-shelf Kyocera ceramic chip carrier, though without a wire bonding machine he’s unable to do any more than test it with probes.

You can read our reporting of his first announcement, but don’t go away thinking that will be all. We’re certain [Sam] will be back with more devices, and can’t wait to see the Z2.