Roomba-Riding Beer Butlers Will Serve Us All

April 21, 2018 by 7 Comments

[Josh] isn’t one to refuse a challenge, especially when robots are involved. The latest dare from friends and family? Build a beer robot that can bring beverages at everyone’s beck and call.

The build consists of two main parts: the refrigerated cooler and the butler part, which comes courtesy of a Roomba Discovery from a fellow roboticist. [Josh] is basing the design on double-walled and insulated restaurant coolers. He built the refrigerated beverage hold from two stainless steel trash cans, sized an inch or so apart in diameter, and filled the gap with expanding foam insulation. He then cut away several inches from the bottom of the liner can to make room for the cooling unit, reinstalled the drip tray, and made a [airflow-allowing platform] by drilling a bunch of holes in an antimicrobial plastic cutting board.

At first, he tried a Peltier unit from an electric Igloo cooler, but that doesn’t work as well as [Josh] hoped, so he’s redesigning the can to use a mini fridge compressor. This meant making custom evaporator and condenser coils from copper tubing to match the compressor’s load spec. Go through [Josh]’s build logs over on IO and you’ll get a free mini-course on expanding foam and refrigeration.

[Josh] is currently working on some different butler modes for this robot. These run the gamut from simply sitting nearby with cold beverages and opening with the wave of a hand to doing voice-triggered beverage butler-ing at everyone’s beck and call. We applaud his efforts thus far and will be following this one with great thirst interest to see how he handles navigation and voice control.

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Tracktorino Shields You From Poor Interfaces

April 21, 2018 by 8 Comments

On-screen controls in a digital audio workstation expand the power of a DJ or musician, but they are not intuitive for everyone. The tactility of buttons, knobs, sliders and real-world controls feels nothing like using a mouse, trackpad, or even a touchscreen. Unfortunately, devices meant to put control into a DJs hands can be unavailable due to location or cost. [Gustavo Silveira] took charge of the situation so he could help other DJs and musicians take control of their workstations with a customized MIDI interface for Traktor DJ software.

MIDI is a widely used serial protocol which has evolved from a DIN connector to USB, and now it is also wireless. This means that the Traktorino is not locked to Traktor despite the namesake. On the Hackaday.io page, there’s even a list of other workstations it will work with, but since many workstations, all the good ones anyway, accept MIDI hardware like this, the real list is a lot longer.

The custom circuit board is actually a shield. Using an Arduino UNO, the current poster child of the Arduino world, opens up the accessibility for many people who don’t know specialized software. A vector drawing for a lasercut enclosure is also included. This means that even the labeling on the buttons are not locked into English language.

Here’s another project which combined laser cutting and MIDI to make some very clever buttons or turn your DIN MIDI connector into USB.

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Building A POV Display On A PC Fan

April 21, 2018 by 18 Comments

We’ve covered plenty of persistence of vision (POV) displays before, but this one from [Vadim] is rather fun: it’s built on top of a PC fan. He’s participating in a robot building competition soon and wanted to have a POV display. So, why not kill two birds with one stone and build the display onto a fan that could also be used for ventilation?

The display is a stand-alone module that includes a battery, Neopixels, Arduino and an NRF240L01 radio that receives the images to be displayed. That might seem like overkill, but putting the whole thing on a platform that rotates does get around the common issue of powering and sending signals to a rotating display: there is no need for slip connections.

[Vadim] goes into a good level of detail on how he built the display, including the problems he had diagnosing a faulty LED chip, and why it is important to test at each stage as it is easier to debug when the display isn’t whizzing around at high speed.

It’s a bit of a rough build that uses more protoboard than might be necessary, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn’t fly off during the competition.

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Nerf Blaster Goes Next-level With Propane Power

April 21, 2018 by 14 Comments

There are no shortage of Nerf gun mods out there. From simply upgrading springs to removing air restrictors, the temptation of one-upping your opponents in a Nerf war speaks to many!

Not content with such lowly modifications [Peter Sripol] decided that his blaster needed to see some propane action.

[Peter] completely stripped out the existing firing mechanism before creating a new combustion chamber from some soldered copper pipe. He added a propane tank and valve on some 3D-printed mounts, and replaced the barrel to produce some intense firepower.

To ignite the fuel inside the combustion chamber, some taser circuitry creates the voltage needed to jump the spark gap inside whilst an added switch behind the trigger kicks off the whole process. After experimenting with different ignition methods, [Peter] eventually found that positioning the spark in the center of the chamber provided the best solution for efficient combustion and non-deafening volume.

Though highly dependant on the amount of gas in the chamber during combustion, the speed of the dart was able to reach a maximum of 220 fps – that’s a whopping 150mph!

Next follows the obligatory sequence for all souped-up Nerf guns:  slow motion annihilation of various food items and beverage containers. To obtain some extra punch, some custom Nerf darts were 3D-printed, including one with a fearsome nail spear-head.

We strongly advise against taking up [Peter] on any offer of Nerf based warfare, but you can check out his insane plane adventures or last winter’s air sled.

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Fast LED Matrix Graphics For The ESP32

April 21, 2018 by 18 Comments

Many of you will have experimented with driving displays from your microcontroller projects, and for most people that will mean pretty simple status information for which you’d use standard libraries and not care much about their performance. If however any of you have had the need for quickly-updating graphics such as video or game content, you may have found that simpler software solutions aren’t fast enough. If you are an ESP32 user then, [Louis Beaudoin] may have some good news for you, because he has ported the SmartMatrix library to that platform. We’ve seen his demo in action, and the results as can be seen in the video below the break are certainly impressive.

In case you are wondering what the SmartMatrix library is, it’s an LED matrix library for the Teensy. [Louis]’s port can be found on GitHub, and as he was explaining to us over a beer at our Cambridge bring-a-hack, it takes extensive advantage of the ESP32’s DMA capabilities. Making microcontrollers talk with any sort of speed to a display is evidently a hot topic at the moment, [Radomir Dopieralski]’s talk at our Dublin Unconference a few weeks ago addressed the same topic.

We have to admit a soft spot for LED panels here at Hackaday, and given the ESP32’s power we look forward to writing up the expected projects that will come our way using this library.

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Home Made 5-Axis CNC Head Is A Project To Watch

April 20, 2018 by 52 Comments

[Reiner Schmidt] was tired of renting an expensive 5-axis CNC head for projects, so he decided to build his own. It’s still a work in progress, but he’s made remarkable progress so far. The project is called Bridge Boy, and it is designed to use a cheap DC rotary mill to cut soft materials like plastic, wood and the like. Most of it is 3D printed, and he has released the Autodesk 360 plans that would allow you to start building your own. His initial version uses an Arduino with stepper drivers, and is designed to fit onto the end of a 60mm arm of a standard 3-axis CNC,  so technically it’s a 3+2 axis CNC. With the appropriate software, it should be able to work as a full 5-axis machine, though, and it should be possible to integrate it with a CNC that has a 5-axis driver board without too much effort.

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Zippo Keeps Your Bits Safe

April 20, 2018 by 29 Comments

[Laura Kampf] found a new use for an old Zippo lighter by turning it into a carrier for her screwdriver bits. There are several multitools out there which can accept standard screwdriver bits. The problem is carrying those bits around. Leaving a few bits in your pocket is a recipe for pocket holes and missing bits.

[Laura’s] solution uses her old Zippo lighter. All she needs is the case, the lighter element itself can be saved for another project. A block of aluminum is cut and sanded down to a friction fit. Laura uses a band saw and bench sander for this. The aluminum block is then drilled out to fit four bits. Small neodymium magnets are taped into the holes with double-sided tape. These magnets retain the bits, ensuring none will fall out when the lighter is opened.

This is a great quick project and an excellent way to carry four bits. We’re curious if the second set of holes (and a shorter bar) could expand this carrier to 8 bits – 4 on top and 4 on the bottom. [Laura] noticed this too, but decided to keep the build simple with 4 bits.

We love Every Day Carry (EDC) projects like this – in fact, a few years back we had our own EDC contest featuring the Adafruit Trinket. Check out the awards announcement post for some awesome pocket projects!

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