Mechanisms: The Lever, It’s Everywhere

April 26, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 28 Comments

Levers are literally all around us. You body uses them to move, pick up a pen to sign your name and you’ll use mechanical advantage to make that ballpoint roll, and that can of soda doesn’t open without a cleverly designed lever.

I got onto this topic quite by accident. I was making an ornithopter and it was having trouble lifting its wings. For the uninitiated, ornithopters are machines which fly by flapping their wings. The problem was that the lever arm was too short. To be honest, as I worked I wasn’t even thinking in terms of levers, and only realized that there was one after I’d fine-tuned its length by trial and error. After that, the presence of a lever was embarrassingly obvious.

I can probably be excused for not seeing a lever right away because it wasn’t the type we most often experience. There are different classes of levers and it’s safe to say that most people aren’t even aware of this. Let’s take a closer look at these super useful, and sometimes hidden mechanisms known as levers.

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Turn Failed Prints Into Office Fun With A Paper Airplane Maker

April 26, 2018 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

If you’re anything like us, you feel slightly guilty when you send a job to a printer only to find that twenty pages have printed wrong. Maybe it’s a typo, maybe it’s the dreaded landscape versus portrait issue. Whatever it is, trees died for your mistake, and there’s nothing you can do about it except to recycle the waste. But first, wipe that guilt away by using this one-stroke paper airplane maker to equip the whole office for an epic air battle.

We have to admit, automated paper handling has always fascinated us. The idea that a printer can reliably (sometimes) feed individual sheets of a stack is a testament to good design, and don’t even get us started about automatic paper folding. [Jerry de Vos]’ paper airplane maker doesn’t drive the sheets through the folder — that’s up to the user. But the laser-cut plywood jig does all the dirty work of creating a paper airplane. The sheet is clipped to an arm that pulls the paper through a series of ramps and slots that force the paper gently into the five folds needed for the classic paper dart. It’s fascinating to watch, and even though everyone seems to be using it very gingerly lest the paper tear, we can see how adding some rollers and motors from a scrapped printer could entirely automate the process. Think of the fun a ream of paper could provide around the office then.

Oh, wait…

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Neural Network Names Nightshades

April 26, 2018 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Neural networks are a core area of the artificial intelligence field. They can be trained on abstract data sets and be put to all manner of useful duties, like driving cars while ignoring road hazards or identifying cats in images. Recently, a biologist approached AI researcher [Janelle Shane] with a problem – could she help him name some tomatoes?

It’s a problem with a simple cause – like most people, [Darren] enjoys experimenting with tomato genetics, and thus requires a steady supply of names to designate the various varities produced in this work. It can be taxing on the feeble human brain, so a silicon-based solution is ideal.

[Janelle] decided to use the char-rnn library built by [Andrej Karpathy] to do the heavy lifting. After training it on a list of over 11,000 existing tomato varieties, the neural network was then asked to strike out on its own.

The results are truly fantastic – whether you’re partial to a Speckled Garfech or you prefer the smooth flavor of the Golden Pow, there’s a tomato to suit your tastes. When the network was retrained with additional content in the form of names of metal bands, the results get even better – it’s only a matter of time before Angels of Saucing reach a supermarket shelf near you.

On the surface, it’s a fun project with whimsical output, but fundamentally it highlights how much can be accomplished these days by standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak. Now, if you need some assistance growing your tomatoes, the machines can help there, too.

Motor Test Bench Talks The Torque

April 25, 2018 by Ben James 6 Comments

Salvaging a beefy motor is one life’s greatest pleasures for a hacker, but, when it comes to using it in a new project, the lack of specs and documentation can be frustrating. [The Post Apocalyptic Inventor] has a seemingly endless stockpile of scavenged motors, and decided to do something about the problem.

Once again applying his talent for junk revival, [TPAI] has spent the last year collecting, reverse-engineering and repairing equipment built in the 1970s, to produce a complete electric motor test setup. Parameters such as stall torque, speed under no load, peak power, and more can all easily be found by use of the restored test equipment. Key operating graphs that would normally only be available in a datasheet can also be produced.

The test setup comprises of a number of magnetic particle brakes, combined power supply and control units, a trio of colossal three-phase dummy loads, and a gorgeously vintage power-factor meter.

Motors are coupled via a piece of rubber to a magnetic particle brake. The rubber contains six magnets spaced around its edge, which, combined with a hall sensor, are used to calculate the motor’s rotational speed. When power is applied to the coil inside the brake, the now magnetised internal powder causes friction between the rotor and the stator, proportional to the current through the coil. In addition to this, the brake can also measure the torque that’s being applied to the motor shaft, which allows the control units to regulate the brake either by speed or torque. An Arduino slurps data from these control units, allowing characteristics to be easily graphed.

If you’re looking for more dynamometer action, last year we featured this neatly designed unit – made by some Cornell students with an impressive level of documentation.

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Microsoft Secures IoT From The Microcontroller Up

April 25, 2018 by Drew Risinger 48 Comments

Frustrated by the glut of unsecured IoT devices? So are Microsoft. And they’re using custom Linux and hardware to do something about it.

Microsoft have announced a new ecosystem for secure IoT devices called “Azure Sphere.” This system is threefold: Hardware, Software, and Cloud. The hardware component is a Microsoft-certified microcontroller which contains Microsoft Pluton, a hardware security subsystem. The first Microsoft-certified Azure Sphere chip will be the MediaTek MT3620, launching this year. The software layer is a custom Linux-based Operating System (OS) that is more capable than the average Real-Time OS (RTOS) common to low-powered IoT devices. Yes, that’s right. Microsoft is shipping a product with Linux built-in by default (as opposed to Windows Subsystem for Linux). Finally, the cloud layer is billed as a “turnkey” solution, which makes cloud-based functions such as updating, failure reporting, and authentication simpler.

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Roll Up Your Sleeve, Watch A Video With This Smart Watch Forearm Projector

April 25, 2018 by Dan Maloney 35 Comments

We’re all slowly getting used to the idea of wearable technology, fabulous flops like the creepy Google Glass notwithstanding. But the big problem with tiny tech is in finding the real estate for user interfaces. Sure, we can make it tiny, but human fingers aren’t getting any smaller, and eyeballs can only resolve so much fine detail.

So how do we make wearables more usable? According to Carnegie-Mellon researcher [Chris Harrison], one way is to turn the wearer into the display and the input device (PDF link). More specifically, his LumiWatch projects a touch-responsive display onto the forearm of the wearer. The video below is pretty slick with some obvious CGI “artist’s rendition” displays up front. But even the somewhat limited displays shown later in the video are pretty impressive. The watch can claim up to 40-cm² of the user’s forearm for display, even at the shallow projection angle offered by a watch bezel only slightly above the arm — quite a feat given the irregular surface of the skin. It accomplishes this with a “pico-projector” consisting of red, blue, and green lasers and a pair of MEMS mirrors. The projector can adjust the linearity and brightness of the display to provide a consistent image across the uneven surface. An array of 10 time-of-flight sensors takes care of watching the display area for touch input gestures. It’s a fascinating project with a lot of potential, but we wonder how the variability of the human body might confound the display. Not to mention the need for short sleeves year round.

Need some basics on the micro-electrical mechanic systems (MEMS) behind the pico-projector in this watch? We’ve got a great primer on these microscopic machines.

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Video Quick-Bit: Numitrons And Infinite Build Volumes

April 25, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Majenta Strongheart takes a look at a couple of cool entries from the first round of the 2018 Hackaday Prize:

This is an infinite 3D printer. The Workhorse 3D is the way we’re going to democratize 3D printing. The Workhorse 3D printer does this by adding a conveyor belt to the bed of a 3D printer, allowing for rapid manufacturing, not just prototyping. [Swaleh Owais] created the Workhorse 3D printer to automatically start a print, manufacture an object, then remove that print from the print bed just to start the cycle all over again.

Check out this Numitron Hexadecimal Display Module from [Yann Guidon]. [Yann] is building an entire computer, from scratch, and he needs a way to display the status of various bits on a bus. The simplest way to do this is with a few buffer chips and some LEDs, but that’s far too easy for [Yann]. He decided to use Numitron tubes to count bits on a bus, from 0 to F. Instead of microcontrollers, he’s using relays and diode steering to turn those segments of the Numitron on and off.

Browse all of the entries here. Right now, we’re in the Robotics Module Challenge part of the Hackaday Prize, where twenty incredible projects will win one thousand dollars and move on to the final part of the Hackaday Prize where one lucky winner will win fifty thousand dollars for building awesome hardware. If that’s not incredible, I don’t know what is.