Improving Cheap Laser Engravers For PCB Fabrication

December 22, 2017 by 24 Comments

A few months ago, [Marco] picked up a cheap, cheap, cheap laser engraver from one of the familiar Chinese resellers. It’s a simple affair with aluminum extrusions, a diode laser, and a control board that seems like it was taken from a 3D printer controller designed five years ago. Now, [Marko] is building some upgrades for this engraver and his PCB production skills have gone through the roof.

The laser engraver [Marko] picked up is called the EleksMaker, and lucky for him there are quite a few upgrades available on Thingiverse. He found two 3D printable parts, one that keeps the belt parallel to the aluminum extrusion, and another that provides adjustable x-axis tightness on the belt. With these two mods combined, [Marko] actually has a nice, smooth motion platform that’s more precise and makes better engravings.

These upgrades weren’t all 3D-printable; [Marko] also got his hands on a few Trinamic TMC2130 stepper motor drivers. These stepper drivers are the new hotness in 3D printing and other desktop CNC machines, and looking at the waveform in an oscilloscope, it’s easy to see why. These drivers produce a perfectly smooth waveform via interpreted microstepping, and they’re almost silent in operation. That’s terrible if you want to build a CNC chiptune player, but great if you want smooth engraving on a piece of copper clad board.

This project has come a long way since the last time we took a look at it a few months ago, and the results just keep getting better. [Marko] is making real PCBs with a laser engraver that cost less than $200, and the upgrades he’s already put into it don’t add up to much, either. You can take a look at [Marko]’s progress in the video below.

Thanks [dechemist] for the tip.

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Logic Analyzer Pushes The Limits Of Miniaturization

December 22, 2017 by 9 Comments

Careful not to sneeze while using this diminutive logic analyzer — you could send it flying across the bench.

Undertaken more for the challenge than as a practical bench tool, [Uwe Hermann]’s tiny logic analyzer is an object lesson on getting a usable circuit as small as possible. Sure, some sacrifices had to be made; it’s only an eight-channel instrument without any kind of input protection at all, and lacks niceties like an EEPROM. But that allows it to fit on a mere 11 x 11-mm fleck of PCB. That’s a pretty impressive feat of miniaturization, given that the Cypress microcontroller running the show is in QFN package that takes up 64-mm² all by itself. A micro-USB connector takes up much of the back side of the board and allows the analyzer to talk to sigrok, an open-source signal analysis suite.

Everything about the project is totally open, including the PCB files, so you can build your own if you feel up to the challenge. We’d strongly suggest you check out this primer on logic analyzers first, though, especially since it focuses on the capabilities of the sigrok suite.

Can This Commodore 64 Be Saved?

December 21, 2017 by 29 Comments

If you are a certain age, there’s a fair chance your first computer was a Commodore 64. These machines are antiques now, and [RetroManCave] received one from a friend’s loft in unknown condition. He’s made two out of three videos covering the machine, its history, and its internals. Assisting is Commodore 64 expert [Jan Beta] who apparently owned one way back when. You can see the first two videos, below.

The machine isn’t as old as you might think — it is the “newer” case style (circa 1987). [Jan] gives a great overview of the different motherboards you might encounter if you are lucky enough to come across one of these in a dumpster somewhere.

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Printing Without Supports!

December 21, 2017 by 19 Comments

If print supports have ever caused you grief, know that there’s an alternate printing method in the works. First: get yourself a vat of industrial gel in which to print.

Rapid Liquid Printing(RLP) is being developed in collaboration by Michigan-based company [Steelcase] and [Skylar Tibbits’] Self Assembly Lab at MIT. RLP is touting advantages over traditional 3D printing technology such as reduced print times, a higher quality print, and enabling larger scale prints — all without supports!

Working with rubber, plastic, or foam, the printing material is injected by nozzle into a basin of industrial gel. That gel suspends the print throughout the process without bonding to it and the finished product is simply lifted out of the gel and rinsed off. Shown off at the Design Miami event earlier this month, onlookers could pick up finished lampshades and tote bags after mere minutes.

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Exporting Eagle Libraries To FOSS Tools

December 21, 2017 by 39 Comments

Since Autodesk’s acquisition, Eagle has been making waves in the community. The de facto standard for Open Hardware PCB design is now getting push-and-shove routing, a button that flips the board over to the back (genius!), integration with Fusion360, automated 3D renderings of components, and a bunch of other neat tools. However, Eagle is not without its warts, and there is a desire to port those innumerable Eagle board layouts and libraries to other PCB design packages. This tool does just that.

The tool is an extension of pcb-rnd, a FOSS tool for circuit board editing, and this update massively extends support for Eagle boards and libraries. As an example, [VK5HSE] loaded up an Eagle .brd file of a transceiver, selected a pin header, and exported that component to a KiCad library. It worked the first time. For another experiment, the ever popular TV-B-Gone .brd file was exported directly to pcb-rnd. This is a mostly complete solution for Eagle to KiCad, Eagle to Autotrax, and Eagle to gEDA PCB, with a few minimal caveats relating to copper pours and silkscreen — nothing that can’t be dealt with if you’re not mindlessly using the tool.

While it must be noted that most Open Hardware projects fit inside a 80 cm2 board area, and can therefore be opened and modified with the free-to-use version of Autodesk’s Eagle, this is a very capable tool to turn Eagle boards and libraries into designs that can be built with FOSS tools.

Thanks [Erich] for the tip.

Building A Supersized Game Boy Advance

December 21, 2017 by 5 Comments

Unless you really look closely at the image above, you might not realize you aren’t looking at a normal Game Boy Advance; which is sort of the point. Even though it retains the looks of the iconic Nintendo handheld, this version built by [Akira] is supersized for adult hands. How big is it? To give you an idea, that screen is 5 inches, compared to the 2.9 inch screen the original sported.

Unlike most of the portable gaming hacks we’ve covered recently, this big-boy GBA isn’t powered by a Raspberry Pi. Internally it’s packing a genuine GBA motherboard, which has been wired into a portable screen originally intended for the PlayStation.

Though that may be understating things a bit, as getting the round PCB of the original screen into the rectangular shape of the GBA meant it had to be cut down and the traces recreated with jumper wires. The original CCFL backlight of the screen had to go in the name of battery life, and in its place is the backlight system pulled from a Nintendo DSi XL.

But where did [Akira] get a giant GBA case to begin with? No, it isn’t 3D printed. It’s actually a hard carrying case that was sold for the GBA. The carrying case obviously didn’t have a cartridge slot or openings for buttons, so those sections were grafted from a donor GBA case. So despite the system overall being so much bigger than the original, the D-Pad, face buttons, and cartridge slot on the back are at normal GBA scale.

The GBA XL is really a labor of love; browsing through the build log you can see that [Akira] actually started the project back in 2014, but it kept getting shelved until more research could be done on how to pack all the desired features into the final device.

While this may be the most historically accurate attempt at making a bigger Game Boy, it certainly isn’t the first. There seems to be a fascination with turning the quintessential pocket game system into something that’s quite the opposite.

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Bringing A Christmas Lights Show Inside

December 21, 2017 by 15 Comments

Instructables user [Osprey22] has been building towards this Christmas for years. Why? This year, he has brought an impressive musical Christmas light display inside, and at a fraction of the cost too!

An box at the tree’s base hides the power supply and the controller boards — a Raspberry Pi and a SanDevices e682 Pixel controller for the 400 WS2811 RGB LEDs — with an added router to connect them to the main network. The Pi is running Falcon Pi Player and a projector somewhere in the region of $100 complements the light show.

As far as mapping out the LEDs, Xlights is the program of choice, locating the LEDs in space with the help of a cell phone video recording. [Osprey22] had to write a quick program in C to fix the LED overlaps in the grid. (A spreadsheet would work just as well, here). Oh, and the gifts at the bottom of the tree double as a projector screen!

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