Fallout Inspired Display Is Ready For The Apocalypse

May 18, 2019 by 9 Comments

We’ve seen more projects based on books, TV shows, movies, and video games than we could ever hope to count. Hackers and makers derive inspiration from what they see around them, and it turns out there’s considerable overlap between the folks who sit in their labs building stuff all day and the ones who spend their free time playing games or watching movies. Big surprise, right? But among them, few can match the influence of the Fallout franchise.

As the latest entry in a long line of incredible Fallout-inspired builds, we present the Octoglow VFD by [Michał Słomkowski]. While this build isn’t trying to replicate anything directly from the games, it captures all the hallmarks that make up the game’s distinctive post-apocalyptic chic : antiquated vintage components, exposed internals, and above all, a dirty, industrial look. It’s supposed to look like somebody built the stuff out of parts they found in the trash, primarily because that’s exactly what they would’ve needed to do.

So what is it? Well, that’s a little hard to nail down. Frankly we’d say it’s a little more like art than anything, but it does have some useful functions. Currently it shows the time, date, weather information, and various RSS feeds on its dual vacuum fluorescent displays. There’s also a real-life Geiger-Müller counter onboard, because what says Fallout more than a little radiation?

The build itself is absolutely fascinating, and [Michał] leaves no stone unturned in his comprehensive write-up. Every module of the Octoglow has its own page on his site, and each one is bristling with hardware details, schematics, and firmware documentation. Reading along you’ll run into all sorts of interesting side notes: like how he reverse engineered a wireless temperature sensor with his sound card, or devised his own ten-pin bus to interconnect all the modules.

If the Octoglow doesn’t quite scratch that Vault-Tec itch, there’s plenty more where that came from. How about this replica of the wall terminals from Fallout 4, or this radiation monitor perfect for roaming the wastelands? Don’t forget to bring along this 3D printed Thirst Zapper for protection.

Microscope-Inspired Toolchanger Spins Multicolor 3D Prints

May 15, 2019 by 15 Comments

The 3D printing community is simply stirring with excitement over toolchanging printers, but these machines are still the exception rather than the norm. Here’s an exceptional exception: [Paul Paukstelis] built a five-color printer with a novel head-changing solution.

[Paul’s] 3D printer is a hat-tip to anyone who’s spent time in the wetlab. For starters, the printer is born from the remains of a former liquid handling system, a mighty surplus score. When it comes to headchanging, [Paul] combined some honest inspiration from E3D’s toolchanging videos with some design features borrowed from the microscope in his lab. The result is that the printer’s five-tool head-changer mechanically behaves very similarly to the nose piece in a compound light microscope.

Because the printer evolved from old lab equipment, [Paul] dubs his printer into a lineage that he calls the “Reclaimed Rapid-Prototyper,” or the RecRap. Best of all, he’s kindly posted up the CAD files on the Thingiverse such that you too can take a deep look into this head-changing solution.

We love seeing these tools get a second life, and we think there’s plenty of potential for new offspring in this lineage of discarded lab equipment.

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Star Wars Electrostaff Effect, Done With Spinning LEDs

May 4, 2019 by 11 Comments

[Bithead] wanted to make a prop replica of an Electrostaff from Star Wars, but wasn’t sure how best to create the “crackling arcs of energy” effect at the business ends. After a few false starts, he decided to leverage the persistence of vision effect by spinning LEDs in more than one axis to create helical arcs of light and it seems that this method has some potential.

Many multi-axis persistence of vision devices use a component called a slip ring in order to maintain electrical connections across rotating parts, but [Bithead] had a simpler plan: 3D print a frame and give each axis its own battery. No centralized power source means a quicker prototype without any specialized parts, and therefore a faster proof of concept to test the idea.

[Bithead] already has improvements planned for a new version, but you can see the current prototype in action in the short video embedded after the break.

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Use A 3D Printer To Electrospin Textiles

April 27, 2019 by 12 Comments

We are all used to desktop 3D printers that extrude molten plastic in layers to build up finished items. A pair of researchers at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, [Michael Rivera] and [Scott Hudson], have added another capability to their printer: electrospinning of textiles.

Electrospinning is a technique in which an extruded material is accelerated from the extruder by an electrostatic charge to form an extremely thin fibre. By applying a many-kilovolt charge between the extruder and the bed, they can create a fibre and lay it down into a mesh from a height to create a felt-like fabric. The same extruder can also produce conventional solid prints, allowing the creation of composite fabric and solid items. They demonstrate a variety of prints including a folding mobile phone stand, a woven lamp, and an interactive wooly sheep, which along with others can be seen in the video below the break.

The full paper can be downloaded as a PDF, and makes for very interesting reading. The voltages involved mean that your Prusa clone may not have this capability any time soon, but we look forward to the moment when desktop electrospinning is a feature on affordable 3D printers.

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Farming Items With RasPi-Modified Joycons

April 2, 2019 by 6 Comments

The Pokémon games have delighted legions of Nintendo gamers over the years, and show no signs of slowing down any time soon. Despite its popularity, there are certain aspects of the games that are unarguably about simply grinding your way to success. For [Mori Bellamy], this simply wouldn’t do – yet their thirst for gold bottlecaps was insatiable. What to do? Automate it, of course.

The first step was to hack the Joycons from the Nintendo Switch. A DG333A analog switch IC was hooked up to the buttons inside, and controlled by the GPIO pins of a Raspberry PI. The joystick was then controlled with an MCP4725 DAC, allowing the system to fully emulate control inputs to the console.

With the console now under control by the Raspberry Pi, the next step was to add intelligence. Google’s Tesseract OCR platform was combined with a helping of Python code. This allows the script to read dialog boxes from the game, and use this data to determine which buttons to press to farm items.

[Mori] has provided the code on GitHub for others to use, noting that it should be generalizable to other games with a little work. Fundamentally, the underlying hardware could readily be repurposed to other controllers, too. There’s plenty of other ways to automate the drudgery of gaming, even if you have to use a touch screen. Video after the break.

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Magnetic Bearings Might Keep This Motor Spinning For Millennia

March 25, 2019 by 43 Comments

We see our share of pitches for perpetual motion machines in the Hackaday tips line, and we generally ignore them and move along. And while this magnetic levitation motor does not break the laws of thermodynamics, it can be considered a perpetual motion machine, at least for certain values of perpetuity.

The motor that [lasersaber] presents in the video below is unconventional, to say the least. It’s not a motor that can do any useful work, spinning at a stately pace beneath its bell-jar enclosure as it does. The design is an extension of [lasersaber]’s “EZ-Spin” motor, which we’ve featured before, and has the same basic layout – a ring of coils wired in series forms the stator, while a disc bearing permanent magnets forms the rotor. The coils, scavenged from those dancing flowerpot solar ornaments, are briefly energized by the rotor passing over a reed switch, giving the rotor a little boost.

The difference here is that rather than low-friction sapphire bearings, this motor uses zero-friction magnetic levitation using pyrolyzed graphite discs. The diamagnetic material hovers above a rare-earth ring magnet, supporting a slender vertical shaft that holds the rotor and another magnetic bearing at the top. It’s fussy to adjust, but once it’s stable, the only friction in the system should be the drag caused by air in the bell jar. [lasersaber]’s current measurements of the motor running at slow speed are hard to believe – 150 nanoamps – leading to an equally jaw-dropping calculated run-time on a single AA battery of 89 millennia.

[lasersaber] is the first to admit that he’s not confident with his measurements, but it seems clear that his motor will likely outlive any chemical battery used to power it. Whatever the numbers are, we like the styling of the thing, and the magnetic bearings are cool too.

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Grabbing The Thread: Spinlocks Vs Mutexes

March 24, 2019 by 31 Comments

Getting into the weeds of operating systems is daunting work. Especially when the operating system involved is a fully featured modern PC operating system with millions of lines of code all working together to integrate hardware and software seamlessly. One such operating system “weed” is figuring out how to handle simultaneous tasks when the processor can only really handle one thing at time. For that, you’ll be looking at the difference between spinlocks and mutexes.

Both of these are methods of making sure that the processor completes a task sufficiently before moving on to the next task. Modern computers are so fast (even ignoring multiple cores) that it seems as if they are doing many things at once. In order to maintain this illusion, tasks need ways of locking the processor to that specific task for a certain amount of time. Of course the queue for performing the next task can get complicated as there are often many tasks waiting to use processor time. Spinlocks are a simple way of holding the processor and mutexes are a slightly more complicated way, but which one is the most efficient use of system resources isn’t that straightforward.

If you’ve ever been interested in operating system details, this one goes deep into the intricacies of features most of us have never even considered the existence of. It’s definitely worth a read, though, and is very well written by someone who is clearly an expert. If you want an operating system challenge, you can build your own operating system as well.