Can you run an electric motor for two years on a single lithium coin cell? [IamWe] figured out how to do it, and even though his donut motor doesn’t look like any motor we’ve ever seen before, it’s a pretty solid lesson in low-current design.
The donut motor is really just a brushless DC motor with a sign-pole stator and a multi-pole rotor. The frame of the motor is built from a styrofoam donut, hence the motor’s name. The rotor is a styrofoam sphere with neodymium magnets embedded around its equator. A sharpened bicycle spoke serves as an axle, and clever magnetic bearings provide near-zero friction rotation. The stator coil comes from an old solenoid and is driven by a very simple two-transistor oscillator. [IamWe]’s calculations show that the single CR2032 coin cell should power this motor for over two years. This one looks easy enough to whip up that it might make a nice project for a long winter’s night. Watch it spin in the video below.
There’s no beating the beauty and durability of a high-quality powder-coated part. There’s just something about the look and feel of the finish that goes far beyond mere painting and makes it worth the effort and expense. The typical electrostatic spray powder-coating setup can be expensive, though, and not necessarily suitable for every workpiece.
Enter the fluidized-bed powder coating chamber, perfect for limited runs of small parts, and the brainchild of [Andrew Mayhall]. With a business providing furniture kits based on iron pipe, [Andrew] needed a way to finish flanges and fittings, and powder coating provided the best look. The fluidizer he built is a great alternative to spray coating; it blows air through a bed of fine thermoplastic granules, which causes them to act like a fluid. It’s similar to the fluidized-bed hot tub we recently featured, but on a much smaller scale and with different requirements based on the ultrafine particle size and aggregation properties of the powder. [Andrew] had to add mechanical agitation to achieve a homogeneous fluid bed, and after much experimentation he’s now able to dip preheated parts into the bed and achieve one-step powder coating. The video after the break shows some of the operational details.
Does electrostatic powder-coating sound like more of your thing? No problem – DIY solutions abound, and a homebrew oven to bake your parts may be as close as the nearest file cabinet.
Before cell phones, pagers were the way to communicate on the go. At first, they were almost a status symbol. Eventually, they became the mark of someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t carry a cell phone. However, apparently, there are still some users that clutch their pagers with a death grip, including medical professionals. In an art project called HolyPager, [Brannon Dorsey] intercepted all the pager messages in a city and printed them on a few old-style roll printers. The results were a little surprising. You can check out the video below.
Almost all the pages were medical and many of them had sensitive information. From a technical standpoint, [Brannon’s] page doesn’t shed much light, but an article about the project says that it and other art projects that show the hidden world or radio waves are using our old friend the RTL-SDR dongle.
Pagers use a protocol — POCSAG — that predates our modern (and well-founded) obsession with privacy and security. That isn’t surprising although the idea that private medical data is flying through the air like this is. Decoding POCSAG isn’t hard. GNU Radio, for example, can easily handle the task.
We’ve looked at pager hacking in the past. You can even run your own pager network, but don’t blame us if you get fined.
The torches have a few key issues which [Nick] lists for us, before outlining the necessary repairs. These problems highlight certain design flaws, something one might expect for a hardware product from a new startup. Components inside are easily damaged if the device is dropped, and there is no reverse polarity protection on the battery.
It’s always disappointing to see a product in the marketplace fail to take into account such rudimentary things, but in the meantime, repair is always possible. The guide highlights the basic parts and tools required, which is important, but also goes the extra mile and gives important hints and tips on how to effectively execute the repair in a quick and easy fashion.
Overall, it may not be a hack, but what [Nick] has done both educated on us the mistakes made by a crowdfunded hardware startup and also taught us how to write a useful and thorough repair guide. It’s not just about the parts that need to be replaced, it’s about the best method to replace them. The details and the order of operations always helps – anyone that’s ever attempted a serious automotive repair knows this, for example.
Hey, did you know Hackaday is starting an Open Access, peer-reviewed journal? The Hackaday Journal of What You Don’t Know (HJWYDK) is looking for submissions detailing the tools, techniques, and skills that we don’t know, but should. Want to teach everyone how to make sand think? Write a paper and tell us about it! Send in your submissions here.
The MSP430 line of microcontrollers are super cool, low power, and cheap. Occasionally, TI pumps out a few MSP430 dev boards and sells them for the rock-bottom price of $4.30. Here ya go, fam. This one is loaded up with the MSP430FR2433.
lol, Bitcoin this week.
Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace and one of the first hackerspaces in the US, is now looking for a new place. Why, you may ask? Because San Francisco real estate. The current price per square foot is triple what their current lease provides. While we hope Noisebridge will find a new home, we’re really looking forward to the hipster restaurant that’s only open for brunch that will take its place.
The coolest soundcards, filled with DOS blips and bloops, were based on the OPL2 and OPL3 sound chips. If you want one of these things, you’re probably going to be digging up an old ISA SoundBlaster soundcard. The OPL2LPT is the classic sound card for computers that don’t have an easily-accessible ISA bus, like those cool vintage laptops. The 8-Bit Guy recently took a look at this at this neat piece of hardware, and apart from requiring a driver to work with any OPL2-compatible game, this thing actually works.
NVIDIA just did something amazing. They created a piece of hardware that everyone wants but isn’t used to turn electricity into heat and Bitcoin. This fantastic device, that is completely original and not at all derivative, is sold in the NVIDIA company store for under five dollars. Actually, the green logo silk/art on this PCB ruler is kinda cool, and I’d like to know how they did that. Also, and completely unrelated: does anyone want ten pounds of Digikey PCB rulers?
When it’s time to put together the annual Christmas card, most families take a few pictures of the kids, slap on a generic greeting, and call it a day. It used to be fairly common for the whole family to get dressed up and pose for a special Christmas picture, but who has the time anymore? It’s not like we have hours and hours to slave over a unique and memorable gift we can mail out to a dozen (or more) people.
As it turns out, getting sound into CAD software isn’t exactly straightforward. To start, he made a recording of his daughter saying the words “Happy Christmas From the Wolsey Family” with Audacity, and then took a screenshot of the resulting waveform. This screenshot was then brought into Adobe Illustrator and exported to SVG, which Fusion 360 (and most other CAD packages) is able to import.
Now that the wave was in Fusion 360 he could scale it to a reasonable size, and use the revolve function to bring it into three dimensions. Cutting that object in half down the length then gave [Chris] a shape which should, theoretically, be printable on his FDM printers. But unfortunately, it wasn’t so easy. His personal Anet A8 had a tough time printing it, and the Prusa i3 MK2 at work didn’t fare much better. In the end, he had to make the leap to SLA, getting the shape printed on a Form 2 via 3D Hubs.
With the finalized shape in hand, [Chris] just need to put them into production. Printing them all via 3D Hubs wasn’t really an option, so he decided to make a mold and cast them in resin. He printed up a mold box, and after fiddling around with the mix a bit, was able to settle on a resin which allowed him to de-mold the shapes just 30 minutes after pouring.
Finally, he made frames for each cast waveform, and printed up a little label explaining just what the recipient was looking at; even going as far as showing which word corresponded to which section of the shape.
This is a fantastically executed and documented project, and while it’s too late to whip up your own version this year, we have no doubt they’ll be a few people “borrowing” this idea next time the holidays roll around.
Here at Hackaday, we find Christmas time very exciting because it means an influx of holiday-themed hacks that really help us get into the festive mood. [Andrew’s] programmable Christmas tree hosted at HackMyXmas is certainly one of our favorites. The project consists of a 500 RGB LEDs wrapped around a typical Christmas tree and controlled by a Teensy. However, not settling for the typical, simple and cyclical pattern for the LEDs, [Andrew] decided the tree had to be programmable of course! So, a single board computer (a C.H.I.P) running Linux was used to provide a Wifi connection and a web server to easily program the tree.
This is where things get very interesting. The C.H.I.P board hosts a comprehensive website that conveniently gives you the option to program the LEDs using either, Scratch like draggable blocks (using Googles Blockly) or even pure JavaScript. Once the perfect pattern is conceived, you can test run it on the online simulator or even send it off straight to the Tree, watching it blink in all its glory on the provided live stream.
We applaud [Andrew] mammoth effort for invoking programming in such a fun way! You can check out the live stream of [Andrew]’s Christmas tree below.
