This RC Fortnite Rocket Is A Victory Royale

October 27, 2018 by 13 Comments

Minecraft is over and Red Dead Redemption II has barely even started yet. The biggest thing on the planet right now is Fortnite, and oh man, is it awesome. It’s the best game ever, and we wish every day was a Battle Royale. But what if Fortnite was real life? That’s exactly what [Giaco] and [David] did when they made an RC Fortnite Foam Rocket. It’s Fortnite, in the real world! If you don’t mind, we’re going to go T-pose in the corner.

The core of this build was done with the Maker Knife, first introduced as a Kickstarter by [Giaco] as an everyday carry utility knife that features ceramic blades. It’s impressive for a box cutter, but what’s even more impressive is that this fantastic tool can be used to make a real-life Fortnite rocket.

This rocket, like so many other RC planes we see these days, was constructed out of foam board, a technique that was popularized by the folks at Flite Test, and uses all the construction techniques you would usually see in a foam board model airplane. The hinges for the control surfaces are chamfered and reinforced with packing tape, servos are just hot glued to the body, and the control horns are just bits of cardboard.

What makes this really impressive is that this Fortnite rocket actually flies. [Giaco] took this plane out with [David] of rcexplorer fame, and even though this ‘plane’ didn’t really have any lifting surfaces, despite indiscernible center of gravity, and the fact that the paint weighed more than the plane itself, this thing can fly. Fairly well, too, until it gets stuck in a tree. There are prices to pay for producing content that’s this attractive to 12-year-olds, I guess.

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The Bolt-On Peristaltic Pump

October 27, 2018 by 8 Comments

With the proliferation of 3D printing in the new millennium, stepper motors are no longer those idle junkbox inhabitants you pulled out of a dot matrix in 1994 and forgot about ever since. NEMA standard parts are readily available and knocking about just about everywhere. Now, you can readily turn a stepper motor into a peristaltic pump with just a few simple 3D printed parts.

The pump consists of a bracket that fits on to a standard NEMA-14 stepper motor frame. A rotor is then fitted to the motor shaft, constructed out of a 3D printed piece fitted with a series of standard roller bearings. These bearings roll against the tubing, pumping the working fluid.

The design uses the bearings to squeeze outwards against the tube’s own elastic resistance. Frictional wear is minimised by ensuring the tube is only pressed on by the bearings themselves, avoiding any contact between the tubing and hard plastic surfaces.

While the design is in its early stages of development, we’d be interested to see a pump performance comparison against other 3D printed peristaltic designs – we’ve seen a few before!

[Thanks to Baldpower for the tip!]

 

Hardware Controllers For Software Effects

October 27, 2018 by 6 Comments

There is an interesting multi-effect available for all you musicians out there. It’s the Turnado from Sugar Bytes. It’s a real-time effects unit that takes advantage of a computer’s horsepower to add reverb and ring mods to whatever audio you feed into it. There’s flanger and a phaser. If you feed a drum loop into your computer, there’s a stutter function which means you too can become a Soundcloud rapper.

Unfortunately, this multi-effect runs on a computer. That means you have to deal with the user interface of a desktop or laptop — GUIs, a mouse, and keyboard. Maybe a touch screen if you’re lucky.

We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and if there’s one thing musicians like it’s a physical interface for all their weird gadgets. That’s what makes the Turnado Hardware MIDI Controller from [Liam Lacey]. It’s a hardware interface for a computer-based software tool.

On board are nine independent joysticks, more than that many encoders, a few buttons, and a display to have everything make sense. All of this is controlled by a Teensy, and it is mostly a plug-and-play solution for controlling Turnado. It’s a great project that makes a great software tool even more useful, and we’re glad to see it make the final cut for the Musical Instrument Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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Rebuilding An Amiga 500 PSU

October 26, 2018 by 23 Comments

One of the challenges of keeping a vintage computer up and running is the limited availability of spare parts. While not everything has hit dire levels of availability (not yet, anyway), it goes without saying that getting a replacement part for a 30+ year old computer is a bit harder than hitting up the local electronics store. So the ability to rebuild original hardware with modern components is an excellent skill to cultivate for anyone looking to keep these pieces of computing history alive in the 21st century.

This is in ample evidence over at [Inkoo Vintage Computing], where repairs and upgrades to vintage computers are performed with a nearly religious veneration. Case in point: this detailed blog post about rebuilding a dead Amiga 500 power supply. After receiving the machine as a donation, it was decided to attempt to diagnose and repair the PSU rather than replace it with a newly manufactured one; as much for the challenge as keeping the contemporary hardware in working order.

What was found upon opening the PSU probably won’t come as a huge surprise to the average Hackaday reader: bad electrolytic capacitors. But these things weren’t just bulged, a few had blown and splattered electrolyte all over the PCB. After removing the bad caps, the board was thoroughly inspected and cleaned with isopropyl alcohol.

[Inkoo Vintage Computing] explains that there’s some variations in capacitor values between different revisions of the Amiga PSU, so it’s best to match what your own hardware had rather than just trying to look it up online. These capacitors in particular were so old and badly damaged that even reading the values off of them was tricky, but in the end, matching parts were ordered and installed. A new fuse was put in, and upon powering up the recapped PSU, the voltages at the connector were checked to be within spec before being plugged into the Amiga itself.

As a test, the Amiga 500 was loaded up with some demos to really get the system load up. After an hour, the PSU’s transformer was up to 78°C and the capacitors topped out at 60°C. As these parts are rated for 100°C (up from 85°C for the original parts), everything seemed to be within tolerances and the PSU was deemed safe for extended use.

This sort of repair isn’t exactly rare with hardware this old, and we’ve seen similar work done on a vintage Apple power supply in the past. If you’re less concerned with historical accuracy, [Inkoo Vintage Computing] has also shown off adapting an ATX PSU for use with the Amiga.

Failing At Making Ferrofluid

October 26, 2018 by 17 Comments

[NileRed] admits that while ferrofluid has practical uses, he simply wanted to play with it and didn’t want to pay the high prices he found in Canada. A lot of the instructions he found were not for making a true ferrofluid. He set out to create the real thing, but he wasn’t entirely successful. You can see the results — which aren’t bad at all — in the video below.

We’ve always said you learn more from failure than success. The process of creating ferrofluid involves two key steps: creating coated nanoparticles of magnetite and removing particles that are too large or improperly coated. After the first not entirely satisfactory attempt, [NileRed] tried to purify the material using solvents and magnets to create better-quality particles. Even the “bad” material, though, looked fun to play with along with a powerful magnet.

You’ll see that the material is clearly magnetic, it just doesn’t spike like normal ferrofluid. [NileRed] had commercial ferrofluid for testing and found that if he diluted it enough, it behaved like his homemade fluid. So while not conclusive, it seems like he diluted the batch too much.

We hope to see a better batch from him soon. The base material he used for the first patch was homemade — he covers that in a different video. However, for the second batch, he is going to start with commercial ferric chloride — what we know as PCB etchant.

Even though the experiment was not entirely successful, we enjoyed seeing the process and watching the performance of both the homemade batch and the commercial ferrofluid. He’s getting a lot of advice and speculation in the video comments, and it is very possible a Hackaday reader might be able to help, too.

We’ve seen other reports of unsuccessful ferrofluid production. If you need a practical reason to make or buy some, how about a clock?

Ghost Rider Costume Is Smoking Hot

October 26, 2018 by 20 Comments

It’s that spooky time of year once again, with pumpkins and cobwebs as far as the eye can see. This year, [Mikeasaurus] has put together something really special – a Ghost Rider costume with some amazing effects.

The costume starts with the skull mask, which started with a model from Thingiverse. Conveniently, the model was already set up to be 3D printed in separate pieces. [Mike] further modified the design by cutting out the middle to make it wearable. The mask was printed in low resolution and then assembled. [Mike] didn’t worry too much about making things perfect early on, as the final finish involved plenty of sanding and putty to get the surface just right. To complete the spooky look, the skull got a lick of ivory paint and a distressed finish with some diluted black acrylic.

With the visual components complete, [Mike] turned his attention to the effects. Light is courtesy of a series of self-blinking LEDs, fitted inside the mask to give the eye sockets a menacing orange glow. However, the pièce de résistance is the smoke effect, courtesy of a powerful e-cigarette device and an aquarium pump. At 225W, and filled with vegetable glycerine, this combination produces thick clouds of smoke which emanate from the back of the wearer’s jacket and within the skull itself. Truly stunning.

[Mike] reports that the costume is scary enough that he has been banned from answering the door as Ghost Rider. We think it’s bound to be a hit, regardless. For another epic mask build, check out the Borderlands Psycho. Video after the break. Continue reading “Ghost Rider Costume Is Smoking Hot” →

Kinetic Sculpture Achieves Balance Through Machine Learning

October 26, 2018 by 9 Comments

We all know how important it is to achieve balance in life, or at least so the self-help industry tells us. How exactly to achieve balance is generally left as an exercise to the individual, however, with varying results. But what about our machines? Will there come a day when artificial intelligences and their robotic bodies become so stressed that they too will search for an elusive and ill-defined sense of balance?

We kid, but only a little; who knows what the future field of machine psychology will discover? Until then, this kinetic sculpture that achieves literal balance might hold lessons for human and machine alike. Dubbed In Medio Stat Virtus, or “In the middle stands virtue,” [Astrid Kraniger]’s kinetic sculpture explores how a simple system can find a stable equilibrium with machine learning. The task seems easy: keep a ball centered on a track suspended by two cables. The length of the cables is varied by stepper motors, while the position of the ball is detected by the difference in weight between the two cables using load cells scavenged from luggage scales. The motors raise and lower each side to even out the forces on each, eventually achieving balance.

The twist here is that rather than a simple PID loop or another control algorithm, [Astrid] chose to apply machine learning to the problem using the Q-Behave library. The system detects when the difference between the two weights is decreasing and “rewards” the algorithm so that it learns what is required of it. The result is a system that gently settles into equilibrium. Check out the video below; it’s strangely soothing.

We’ve seen self-balancing systems before, from ball-balancing Stewart platforms to Segway-like two-wheel balancers. One wonders if machine learning could be applied to these systems as well.

Continue reading “Kinetic Sculpture Achieves Balance Through Machine Learning” →