Arachnid Ale Uses Yeast To Make Spider Silk

November 5, 2018 by 21 Comments

Many people who read Hackaday hold the title of “Webmaster” but [The Thought Emporium] is after slightly different credentials with the same title. He aims to modify a strain of yeast to produce spider silk. Charlotte’s Web didn’t go into great detail about the different types of silk that a spider can produce, but the video and screencap after the break give a rundown of how spiders make different types of silk, and that each species of spider makes a unique silk. For this experiment, the desired silk is “beta sheets” which the video explains are hard and strong.

Some of the points mentioned in the video rely on things previously mentioned in other videos, but if you are the type of person excited by genetic modifications or using modified yeast to produce something made by another lifeform, you will probably be just fine. This is one of the most technical videos made by [The Thought Emporium] as he goes into the mechanisms of the modifications he will be making to the yeast. It sounds like a lot of work and the financial benefit of being able to produce spider silk affordably could be great, but in true hacker form, the procedure and results will be made freely available.

For some background into this hacker’s mind, check out how he has hacked his own lactose intolerance and even produced graphene through electrochemical exfoliation.

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Pint-sized Jacob’s Ladder Packs 10,000 Volts In A Pickle Jar

November 5, 2018 by 12 Comments

File this one away for your mad scientist costume next Halloween: [bitluni]’s Pocket Jacob’s Ladder is the perfect high voltage accessory for those folks with five dollars in parts, a 3D printer, and very big pockets.

[bitluni]’s video shows you all the parts you’ll need and guides you through the very simple build process. For parts, you’ll require a cheap and readily-available high-voltage transformer, a battery holder, some silver wire for the conductors, and a few other minor bits like solder and a power switch.

Once the electronics are soldered together, they’re stuffed inside a 3d printed case that [bitluni] designed with FreeCAD. The FreeCAD and STL files are all available on Thingiverse. We’re not sure what type of jar [bitluni] used to enclose the electrodes. If your jar isn’t a match, you’ll have to get familiar with FreeCAD or start from scratch with your favorite CAD package.

Either way, we enjoy the slight nod toward electrical safety and the reuse of household objects for project enclosures.

If you’re interested in a Jacob’s Ladder with significantly higher voltage we’ve got you covered, or we’ve also written about another tiny portable Jacob’s Ladder.

The full video is embedded after the break.

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Living Hinges At The Next Level

November 4, 2018 by 13 Comments

First of all, a living hinge is not a biological entity nor does it move on its own. Think of the top of a Tic Tac container where the lid and the cover are a single piece, and the thin plastic holding them together flexes to allow you to reach the candies disguised as mints. [Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng] at Virginia Tech designed a method of multimaterial programmable additive manufacturing which is fancy-ese for printing with more than one type of material.

The process works under the premise of printing a 3D latticework, similar to the “FILL” function of a consumer printer. Each segment of material is determined by the software and mixed on the spot by the printer and cured before moving onto the next segment. Like building a bridge one beam at a time, if that bridge were meant for tardigrades and many beams were fabricated each minute. Mixing up each segment as needed means that a different recipe results in a different rigidity, so it is possible to make a robotic leg with stiff “bones” and flexible “joints.”

We love printing in different materials, even if it is only one medium at a time. Printing in metal is useful and could be consumer level soon, but you can print in chocolate right now.

Via Phys.org. Thank you again for the tip, [Qes].

Quick And Dirty MIDI Interface With USBASP

November 4, 2018 by 11 Comments

[Robson Couto] recently found himself in need of MIDI interface for a project he was working on, but didn’t want to buy one just to use it once; we’ve all been there. Being the creative fellow that he is, he decided to come up with something that not only used the parts he had on-hand but could be completed in one afternoon. Truly a hacker after our own hearts.

Searching around online, he found documentation for using an ATtiny microcontroller as a MIDI interface using V-USB. He figured it shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt that project to run on one of the many USBASP programmers he had laying around, and got to work updating the code.

Originally written for the ATtiny2313, [Robson] first had to change around the pin configuration so it would work on the ATmega8 in the USBASP, and also updated the USB-V implementation to the latest version. With the code updated, he programmed one of the USBASP adapters with a second one by connecting them together and putting a jumper on the J2 header.

He had the software sorted, but there was still a bit of hardware work to do. To provide isolation for the MIDI device, he put together a small circuit utilizing a 6N137 optoisolator and a couple of passive components on a piece of perf board. It’s not pretty, but it does fit right into the programming connector on the USBASP. He could have fired up his PCB CNC but thought it was a bit overkill for such a simple board.

[Robson] notes that he hasn’t implemented MIDI output with his adapter, but that the code and the chip are perfectly capable of it if you need it for your project. Finding the schematic to hook up to the programmer’s TX pin is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you don’t have a USBASP in the parts bin, we’ve seen a very similar trick done with an Arduino clone in the past.

Weather Station Is A Tutorial In Low Power Design

November 4, 2018 by 15 Comments

Building your own weather station is a fun project in itself, but building it to be self-sufficient and off-grid adds another set of challenges to the mix. You’ll need a battery and a solar panel to power the station, which means adding at least a regulator and charge controller to your build. If the panel and battery are small, you’ll also need to make some power-saving tweaks to the code as well. (Google Translate from Italian) The tricks that [Danilo Larizza] uses in his build are useful for more than just weather stations though, they’ll be perfect for anyone trying to optimize their off-grid projects for battery and solar panel size.

When it comes to power conservation, the low-hanging fruit is plucked first. [Danilo] set the measurement intervals to as long as possible and put the microcontroller (a NodeMCU) to sleep in between. Removing the power from the sensors when the microcontroller was asleep was another easy step, but the device was still crashing overnight. Then he turned to a hardware solution and added a more efficient battery charger to the setup, which saved even more power. This is all the more impressive because the station communicates via WiFi which is notoriously difficult to run in low-power applications.

Besides the low power optimizations, the weather station itself is interesting for its relative simplicity. It could be built with things most of us have knocking around. Best of all, [Danilo] published the source code on his site, so most of the hard work has been done already. If you’re thinking he seems a little familiar, it’s because we’ve featured some of his projects before, like his cheap WiFi extender antenna and his homemade hybrid tube amplifier.

Redesigning The Musical Keyboard With Light-Up Buttons

November 4, 2018 by 13 Comments

A piano’s keyboard doesn’t make sense. If you want to want to play an F major chord, just hit an F, an A, and a C — all white keys, all in a row. If you want to play a B major chord, you hit B, a D#, and an F#. One white key, then two black ones. The piano keyboard is not isomorphic, meaning chords of the same quality have different shapes. For their entry into the Hackaday Prize, [CSCircuits] and their crew are working on a keyboard that makes chords intuitive. It’s called the Kord Kontroller, and it’s a device that would also look good hooked up to Ableton.

The layout of the Kord Kontroller puts all the scale degrees arranged in the circle of fifths in the top of the keyboard. To play 90% of western music, you’ll hit one button for a I chord, move one button to the left for a IV chord, and two buttons to the right for a V chord. Chord quality is determined by the bottom of the keyboard, with buttons for flat thirds, fourths, ninths, elevenths and fourteenths replacing or augmenting notes in the chords you want to play. Since this is effectively a MIDI controller, there are buttons to change octaves and modes.

As far as hardware goes, this keyboard is constructed out of Adafruit Trellis modules that are a 4×4 grid of silicone buttons and LEDs that can be connected together and put on a single I2C bus. The enclosure wraps these buttons up into a single 3D printed grid of button holes, and with a bit of work and hot glue, everything looks as it should.

It’s an interesting musical device, and was named as a finalist in the Musical Instrument Challenge. You can check out a demo video with a jam sesh below.

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Stepper Motor Mods Improve CNC Flat Coil Winder

November 4, 2018 by 56 Comments

Finding just the right off-the-shelf part to complete a project is a satisfying experience – buy it, bolt it on, get on with business. Things don’t always work out so easily, though, which often requires the even more satisfying experience of modifying an existing part to do the job. Modifying a stepper motor by drilling a hole down its shaft probably qualifies for the satisfying mod of the year award.

That’s what [Russ] did to make needed improvements to his CNC flat-coil winder, which uses a modified delta-style 3D-printer to roll fine magnet wire out onto adhesive paper to form beautiful coils of various sizes and shapes. [Russ] has been tweaking his design since we featured it and coming up with better and better coils. While experimenting, the passive roller at the business end proved to be a liability. The problem was that the contact point lagged behind the center axis of the delta, leading to problems with the G-code. [Russ] figured that a new tool with the contact point at the dead center would help. The downside would be having to actively swivel the tool in concert with the X- and Y-axis movements. The video below shows his mods, which include disassembling the NEMA-17 stepper and drilling out the shaft to pass the coil wire. [Russ] also spent some time reversing the rotor in the frame and provided a small preload spring to keep the coil roller in contact with the paper.

A real-time coil winding session starts at the 21:18 mark, and we’ve got to admit it’s oddly soothing to watch. We’re not sure exactly what [Russ] intends to do with these coils, and by his own admission, neither is he. But it’s still pretty cool to see, and the stepper motor mods are a neat trick to keep in mind.

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