Tinkercad is famous for having lots of colors in the interface. But once you export an STL, that file is notoriously monochrome. If you are printing with a single color printer, no problems. But if you have a color printer, what do you do? [CHEP] shows some options, including a relatively new one, in the video below.
The simple way is to “paint” the STL inside your slicer. But as [CHEP] shows, that is a pain and also has some undesirable side effects. A better approach is to export each part (or, at least, each part of the same color) into separate STL files, which you can then import together in the slicer. You still have to paint, but you don’t have to select different faces, and the resulting coloring is more what you’d expect.
The build is based around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. If you’re unfamiliar with the Compute Module, it’s basically a Raspberry Pi that has been designed specifically for easy integration into a larger carrier PCB. In this case, the carrier PCB interfaces all the other necessary gear to make this a fully functional computer. The PCB is installed inside a vaguely-rectangular 3D-printed enclosure, with a 5-inch TFT LCD on a sliding mount. Push the screen up, and it reveals a small-format keyboard for text entry. There’s also a hall-effect joystick and a couple of buttons for mouse control to boot. [Rahmanshaber] has designed the computer to run off a couple of different battery packs—you can use a pair of 18650 cells if you like, or switch to lager 21700 cells if you want greater capacity for longer running time.
This week Jonathan talks to Robert Wolff about DevEco! How did this developer group come to be, and what is its purpose? What are the lessons learned about building communities and working with others? Watch to find out!
If you’re blessed with high water pressure at home, you probably love how it helps blast grime from your dishes and provides a pleasant washing experience. However, it can also cause a wonderful mess when that water splashes all over your countertops. [vgmllr] has whipped up a simple solution to this problem by installing an automatic splash guard.
So tidy!
The concept is simple enough—install a pair of flat guards that raise up when the sink is running, in order to stop water getting everywhere. To achieve this, [vgmllr] grabbed an Arduino, and hooked it up to a piezo element, which acts as a water sensor.
The piezo is attached to the bottom of the sink, and effectively acts as a microphone, hooked up to one of the Arduino’s analog-to-digital pins. When water flow is detected, the Arduino commands two servos to raise a pair of 3D printed arms that run up and down the outside of the sink. Each arm is fitted with magnets, which mate with another pair of magnets on the splash shields inside the sink. When the arms go up, the splash shields go up, and when the arms go down, the splash shields go down.
It’s an ingenious design, mostly because the installation is so clean and seamless. By using magnets to move the splash shields, [vgmllr] eliminated any need to drill through the sink, or deal with any pesky seals or potential water leaks. Plus, if the splash shields are getting in the way of something, they can easily be popped off without having to disassemble the entire mechanism.
When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.
Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.
[bogdanthegeek] has a lot of experience with the ARM platform, and their latest escapade into working with cheap ARM chips recovered from disposable vapes involved a realization that it was just plain wrong to debug such recovered silicon with something as expensive as a Pi Pico. No, they needed to build a debugger using the super cheap CH32V003.
What follows is an interesting tour around ARM Debug Access Port (DAP) programmers and creating a practical USB-connected device that actually works with modern toolchains. The first problem to be solved was that of host connectivity. These days, it’s USB or go home, which immediately limits the microcontrollers you can choose. Luckily for [Bogdan], they were aware of the excellent work by [cnlohr] on wedging low-speed USB support onto the RISC-V CH32v003 with the software-only bit-banging rv003usb, which provided a starting point. The next issue was to check for interrupt-driven endpoint support (needed for low-speed USB) in the Mac OS X kernel, which they knew was being dropped at an alarming rate (well, at least for full-speed). Luckily, the CMSIS-DAP standard required support for interrupt-driven USB endpoints, so kernel support was likely intact.
Next, [Bogdan] noticed that the DAPLink project had been ported to the bigger, native-USB WCH chips like the CH32V203, so it was a matter of porting this code to the diminutive CH32V003 using the rv003usb stack for the USB support using [cnlohr]’s ch32fun toolchain. There were a few bumps along the way with a lack of clarity in the DAPLink code, and some inconsistencies (across platforms) with the USB library dependencies of the upstream tool pyOCD, but they did get some tools working on at least Mac OS and some others on Linux. Which was nice.
LED billboards are cyberpunk-dystopian enough for most, but it can get worse. For example, this project by [Concept Crafted Creations] that takes the whole concept and takes it airborn (literally) in the form of a flying POV sphere called “Zippy”.
We love persistence-of-vision (POV) displays, and have featured plenty before, from the very complicated to the fairly simple. The idea is simple: take one or more rings of LEDs and spin them rapidly enough that the persistence-of-vision effect creates a solid image in your visual field. We covered the basics years back. “Zippy” has one ring of addressable LEDs that surrounds the thing that makes it unique: the quadcopter at its core. None of those other projects could fly, after all.
You might imagine a big, spinning ring is going to have a lot of torque to cancel out, and that is true — about 2.3 kgf — and it led to a lot of prototypes crashing early on. After trying to use flaps to direct the downwash of the quadcopter rotors to counter the spin, [Concept Crafted Creations] eventually added two extra props for yaw control, and that seemed to do the trick. We say “quadcopter” because that’s the configuration, but Zippy ended up heavy and needs eight lift motors to fly. PVC pipe and PLA aren’t the lightest build materials, after all. That’s ten props, total, plus another outrunner to spin the POV ring. All those motors, plus the current draw of the LEDs means the flight time might not impress — but Zippy sure does, at last as long as the batteries hold out.
There’s something eye-catching about POV displays, and seeing this one drifting upwards like Kang and Kodos decided to steal the Los Vegas Sphere is even more arresting. That made the crash at the end of the video sad to see, but [Concept Crafted Creations] hasn’t ruled out rebuilding it if his viewers show enough interest. So if you like what you see, head over to YouTube and leave an encouraging comment for him to try, try again. Continue reading “POV Globe Takes To The Skies”→
