Search for “bowl feeder” on Hackaday and you’ll get nothing but automated cat and dog feeders. That’s a shame, because as cool as keeping your pets fed is, vibratory bowl feeders are cooler. If you’ve seen even a few episodes of “How It’s Made” you’re likely to have seen these amazing yet simple devices, used to feed and align small parts for automated assembly. They’re mesmerizing to watch, and if you’ve ever wondered how parts like the tiny pins on a header strip are handled, it’s likely a bowl feeder.
[John] at NYC CNC is building a bowl-feeder with Arduino control, and the video below takes us on a tour of the build. Fair warning that the video is heavy on the CNC aspects of milling the collating outfeed ramp, which is to be expected from [John]’s channel. We find CNC fascinating, but if you’re not so inclined, skip ahead to the last three minutes where [John] discusses control. His outfeed ramp has a slot for an optical sensor to count parts. For safety, the Arduino controls the high-draw bowl feeder through an external relay and stops the parts when the required number have been dispensed.
We know, watching someone use a $20,000 CNC milling station might seem overkill for something that could have been 3D printed, but [John] runs a job shop after all and usually takes on big industrial jobs. Or small ones, like these neat color-infill machine badges.
Arriving home to a dark house with an armful of anything is usually an exercise in fumbling confusion until someone manages to turn on a light. [Pavel Gesyuk] has circumvented this problem entirely by building and installing a motion detecting entrance light!
[Gesyuk] is using an Arduino clone by the name of Funduino Mini Pro, a 2-channel, 2-way relay, — he only needed one, but you use what you have on hand — a recycled power supply to convert 220V AC to 5V DC, and an infrared sensor.
The project’s goal — in excess of a lighting solution for an entrance hallway — was the learn the ins and outs of the Arduino and motion sensors. After some initial hurdles familiarizing himself with the Arduino, [Gesyuk] wired everything together on a protoboard and stuck it in a plastic case — loose wires in a high traffic area doesn’t a safe home make.
Are you reading this on a machine running a GNU/Linux distribution? A Windows machine? Or perhaps an Apple OS? It doesn’t really matter, because your computer is probably running MINIX anyway.
There once was a time when microprocessors were relatively straightforward devices, capable of being understood more or less in their entirety by a single engineer without especially God-like skills. They had buses upon which hung peripherals, and for code to run on them, one of those peripherals had better supply it.
A modern high-end processor is a complex multicore marvel of technological achievement, so labyrinthine in fact that unlike those simple devices of old it may need to contain a dedicated extra core whose only job is to manage the rest of the onboard functions. Intel processors have had one for years, it’s called the Management Engine, or ME, and it has its own firmware baked into the chip. It is this firmware, that according to a discovery by [Ronald Minnich], contains a copy of the MINIX operating system.
If you are not the oldest of readers, it’s possible that you may not have heard of MINIX. Or if you have, it might be in connection with the gestation of [Linus Torvalds]’ first Linux kernel. It’s a UNIX-like operating system created in the 1980s as a teaching aid, and for a time it held a significant attraction as the closest you could get to real UNIX on some of the affordable 16-bit desktop and home computers. Amiga owners paid for copies of it on floppy disks, it was even something of an object of desire. It’s still in active development, but it’s fair to say its attraction lies in its simplicity rather than its sophistication.
It’s thus a worry to find it on the Intel ME, because in that position it lies at the most privileged level of access to your computer’s hardware. Your desktop operating system, by contrast, sees the hardware through several layers of abstraction in the name of security, so a simple OS with full networking and full hardware access represents a significant opportunity to anyone with an eye to compromising it. Placing tinfoil hats firmly on your heads as the unmistakable thwop of black helicopters eases into the soundscape you might claim that this is exactly what they want anyway. We would hope that if they wanted to compromise our PCs with a backdoor they’d do it in such a way as to make it a little less easy for The Other Lot. We suspect it’s far more likely that this is a case of the firmware being considered to be an out-of-sight piece of the hardware that nobody would concern themselves with, rather than a potential attack vector that everyone should. It would be nice to think that we’ll see some abrupt updates, but we suspect that won’t happen.
We see more than our fair share of nixie clocks here at Hackaday, and it’s nice to encounter one that packs some clever features. [VGC] designed his nixie tube clock to use minimal energy to operate: it needs only 5V via USB to work, and draws a mere 200 mA. Nixies require Soviet-approved 180v to trigger, so [VGC] used dynamic indication and a step-up voltage converter to run them, with a 74141 nixie decoder doing the heavy lifting.
The brains of the project is an ESP8266, which connects to his house’s WiFi automatically. The clock simply dials into an NTP server and sets its own time, so no RTC is needed. It also can communicate with the cloud via Telegram, allowing the clock to send alerts to [VGC]’s devices. The ESP’s firmware may likewise be updated over WiFi. The 3D-printed case and flashing second indicators are nice touches on top of the clock functionality.
The mechanical and electronic parts of a 3D printer are critical for success, but so is the slicing software. Slic3r and Cura are arguably the most popular, and how they command your printer has a lot to do with the results you can get. There are lots of other slicers out there both free and paid, but it is hard to really dig into each one of them to see if they are really better than whatever you are using today. If you are interested in the performance of IceSL — a free slicer for Windows and Linux — [DIY3DTECH] has a video review that can help you decide if you want to try it. You can see the video below.
IceSL has several modules and can actually do OpenSCAD-like modeling in Lua so you could — in theory — do everything in this one tool. The review, though, focuses only on the slicing aspect. In addition to the desktop client versions, you can use some features online (although on our Linux machine it didn’t work with the latest Chrome beta even with no add ons; Firefox worked great, though).
Never underestimate the power of an incompressible fluid at high pressure. Properly constrained and with a full understanding of the forces involved, hydraulic pressure can be harnessed to do some interesting things in the home shop, like hydroforming stainless steel into custom motorcycle parts.
From the look of [Clarence Elias]’s video below, it seems like he has a 100% custom motorcycle build going on in his shop. That means making every part, including the reflectors for the lights. While he certainly could have used a traditional approach, like beating sheet stainless with a planishing hammer or subjecting it to the dreaded English wheel, [Clarence] built a simple yet sturdy hydroforming die for the job. A thick steel ring clamps the sheet stainless to a basal platen with an inlet from the forming fluid, which is ordinary grease. [Clarence] goes through the math and the numbers are impressive — a 1,500-psi grease gun can be mighty persuasive under such circumstances. The result is a perfectly formed dish with no tool marks, in need of only a little polishing to be put into service.
For the last eight months, Hackaday has been running the greatest hardware competition on Earth. The Hackaday Prize is a challenge to Build Something That Matters, make an impact, and create the hardware that will transform the world. These projects range from reliable utensils for the disabled, a way to clean drinking water for rural villages, refreshable Braille displays, and even a few high voltage Tesla coil hats. The Hackaday Prize is the preeminent hardware hackathon with a goal of making the world a better place, and this weekend we’re going to see the fruits of everyone’s labor.
Over the last few weeks, our fantastic team of judges have been combing over the finalists in the Hackaday Prize. We’ve put together this video roundup with judges discussing the top ten finishers:
These ten projects are the best the Hackaday Prize has to offer, and one of these projects will walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000 USD. The second, third, fourth, and fifth place winners will take away $20,000, $15,000, $10,000 and $5,000, respectively. The top ten projects in the Hackaday Prize are, in no particular order:
The Hackaday Prize isn’t just about finding the best projects. We’re also looking for the best products. For that, the Hackaday Prize includes a Best Product award. This promises to awaken the hardware entrepreneurs to build a manufacturable thing that will shake up an industry. Here’s an overview of the five top finishers in the Best Product Category:
From a field of the twenty best product finalists entered into the Hackaday Prize our fantastic panel of judges have winnowed these down to five incredible finalists. They are, in no particular order:
The winner of the Best Product competition will walk away with $30,000 USD and an opportunity to interview for a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab. Here, the hackers behind the Best Product will have a materials budget, mentoring, and access to some world-class tools that will enable them to turn their prototype into a real product.
These are the best projects and products the 2017 Hackaday Prize has to offer, and we couldn’t ask for more. Watch live as the Hackaday Prize is awarded tomorrow at 6:30pm Pacific. It’s going to be a blast, and a few lucky projects will take away a pile of prize money and the respect of their peers. It really doesn’t get better than that.
