Hackaday Prize Entry: RepRap Helios

May 7, 2017 by 30 Comments

Did you know that most of the current advances in desktop consumer 3D printing can be traced back to a rather unknown project started in 2005? This little-known RepRap project was dedicated to building Open Source hardware that was self-replicating by design. Before the great mindless consumerization of 3D printing began, the RepRap project was the greatest hope for Open Source hardware, and a sea change in what manufacturing could be.

While the RepRap project still lives on in companies like Lulzbot, Prusa, SeeMeCNC, and others, the vast community dedicated to creating Open Hardware for desktop manufacturing has somehow morphed into YouTube channels that feature 3D printed lions, 3D printed Pokemon, and a distinct lack of 3D printed combs. Still, though, there are people out there contributing to the effort.

[Nick Seward] is famous in the world of RepRap. He designed the RepRap GUS Simpson, an experimental 3D printer that is able to print all of its components inside its own build volume. The related LISA Simpson is an elegant machine that is unlike any other delta robot we’ve seen. He’s experimented with Core XZ machines for years now — a design that is only now appearing on AliBaba from random Chinese manufacturers. In short, [Nick Seward] is one of the greats of the RepRap project.

[Nick] is designing a new kind of RepRap, and he’s entered it in the Hackaday Prize. It can print most of its own component parts, it has an enormous build volume, and it’s unlike any 3D printer you’ve seen before. It’s a SCARA — not a, ‘robotic arm’ because SCARA is an acronym for Selective Compliance Articulated Robot Arm — that puts all the motors in the non-moving portion of the base. Its design is inspired by the RepRap Morgan, a printer whose designer won $20,000 in the GADA prize for being mostly self-replicating.

Improvements over the RepRap Morgan include a huge build volume (at least three 200x200mm squares can be placed in this printer’s build volume), a relatively fast print speed, high accuracy and precision, and auto bed leveling. Despite being more capable than some RepRap printers in some areas, the RepRap Helios should wind up being cheaper than most RepRap printers. It can also print most of its component parts, bringing us ever closer to a truly self-replicating machine.

You can check out a few of the videos of this printer in action below.

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The Internet Connected Dog Treat Machine

May 7, 2017 by 5 Comments

[Eric] and [Shirin] have a dog called [Pickles], who is the kind of animal that if you are a dog lover you will secretly covet. They evidently dote upon [Pickles], but face the problem that they can’t always be at home to express their appreciation of him. But rather than abandon him entirely, they’ve applied technology to the problem. [Eric] has built an Internet-connected dog treat dispenser, through which they can dispense treats, and watch the lucky mutt wolfing them down.

The body of the machine has been made with lasercut acrylic, and the dispenser mechanism is a rotating hopper driven by a stepper motor. The whole thing — in all its transparent glory — is controlled through a Raspberry Pi, which plays a sound clip of [Shirin] calling [Pickles] for his treat, records his dining enjoyment with its camera, and emails the result to his owners. Behind the scenes it hosts an MQTT server, which can be triggered via an iPhone app, Alexa, or the adafruit.io site. Imagine for a moment: “Alexa, feed my dog!”. It has a ring to it.

He makes the point that this machine is not simply limited to dispensing treats, it could be used to engage [Pickles] in more activities. He hints at a future project involving a ball throwing device (have you ever seen such joy from a dog). There’s no substitute for being there with your dog, but maybe with this device they can make their dog’s life a little less of, well, a dog’s life.

You can see the machine in action in the video we’ve posted below the break.

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Sorting Two Tonnes Of Lego

May 7, 2017 by 28 Comments

Have you ever taken an interest in something, and then found it’s got a little out of hand as your acquisitions spiral into a tidal wave of bags and boxes? [Jacques Mattheij] found himself in just that position with Lego. His online purchases had run away with him, and he had a garage packed with “two metric tonnes” of the little coloured bricks.

Disposing of Lego is fairly straightforward, there is a lively second-hand market. But to maximise the return it is important to be in control of what you have, to avoid packaging up fake, discoloured, damaged, or dirty parts. This can become a huge job if you do it by hand, so he built a Lego sorting machine to do the job for him.

The machine starts with a hopper for the loose Lego, with a slow belt that tips individual parts down a chute to a faster belt derived from a running trainer. On that they run past a camera whose images are analysed through a neural net, and based on its identification the parts are directed into appropriate bins with carefully timed jets of compressed air.

The result is a surprisingly fast way to sort large amounts of bricks without human intervention. He’s posted some videos, one of which we’ve placed below the break, so you can see for yourselves.

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Remotely Controlling A Not-So-Miniature Hot Air Balloon

May 7, 2017 by 17 Comments

Calling [Matt Barr]’s remote controlled hot air balloon a miniature is a bit misleading. Sure, it’s small compared with the balloons that ply cold morning skies with paying passengers and a bottle of champagne for the landing. Having been in on a few of those landings, we can attest to the size of the real thing. They’re impressively big when you’re up close to them.

While [Matt]’s balloon is certainly smaller, it’s not something you’d just whip together in an afternoon. Most of [Matt]’s build log concentrates mainly on the gondola and its goodies — the twin one-pound camp stove-style propane tanks, their associated plumbing, and the burner, a re-tasked propane weed torch from Harbor Freight. Remote control is minimal; just as in a full-size balloon, all the pilot can really do is turn the burner on or off. [Matt]’s approach is a high-torque RC servo to control the burner valve, which is driven by an Arduino talking to the ground over a 2.4-GHz RF link. The balloon is big enough to lift 30 pounds and appears to be at least 12 feet tall; we’d think such a craft would run afoul of some civil aviation rules, so perhaps it’s best that the test flight below was a tethered one.

Sadly, no instructions are included for making the envelope, which would be a great excuse for anyone to learn a little about sewing. And knowing how to roll your own hot air balloon might come in handy someday.

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Open Source Firmware For Hoverboards

May 7, 2017 by 16 Comments

2015 was two years ago, and to the surprise of many, we actually had hoverboards at the time. Of course, these weren’t Back to the Future-style hovering skateboards; they were crappy two-wheeled balancing scooters that suffered a few battery explosions and were eventually banned from domestic flights by some carriers. But oh boy, there were some funny Vines of these things.

While the rest of the world moved on from hoverboards, [Casainho] has been working on Open Sourcing the firmware for these interesting bits of electronics and motors. Now, his work is wrapping up and he has new firmware for electric unicycles and hoverboards.

The popular and cheap electric unicycles and hoverboards that have been swimming across the Pacific from the great land of Ali Baba for the past five years are based around a single, cheap controller board. This controller board is built around the STM32F1038T6 microcontroller, and are able to control a pair of three-phase brushless motors. The teardown began on the electric unicycle forum and was completely documented in a GitHub repo.

The Open Source firmware is now mostly complete, although the necessary self-balancing function doesn’t work. We’re thinking that’s alright; with this new firmware, these electric unicycles have a crazy amount of torque and could be the basis for a few very cool builds. You can check out a video of this torque below.

If two wheels seems far too safe, exercise your inner daredevil with a 3D printed unicycle conversion for a hoverboard.

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Butter Passing Battlebot

May 6, 2017 by 14 Comments

The idea of purpose is one of great importance to many sentient beings; one can only imagine the philosophical terror experienced by a robot designed solely to pass butter. Perhaps wishing to create a robot with more reason to exist, [Micah “Chewy” Leibowitz] decided to build this battlebot armed with a flamethrower, named Flamewar.

In the video, we see it rather successfully facing off against a robot named T800, at least in the early part of the fight. T800 is armed with a spinning weapon, and while it is able to deliver a heavy thump thanks to stored kinetic energy, more often than not T800 seems to knock itself over rather than do any serious damage to Flamewar. Flamewar is repeatedly able to fire its primary weapon, as the flamethrower is built into its arms, far above the reach of T800’s armament. We won’t spoil the ending of the fight. Video below the break.

The robot was built by [Micah] who competes with [Team Tiki], who have documented some of their past builds online. We would like to see some footage of Flamewar actually passing some butter, though. The bout was a part of Robogames 2017, and we’re impressed that such things like flamethrowers are allowed in the rules. Obviously safety is a paramount concern of these events, so it’s awesome to see they’ve found a way to make things work.

If you’re unaware of the dairy product reference, fill yourself in here. We’ve seen other takes on this, too.

We love seeing combat robots here at Hackaday. If you’re thinking about getting started yourself, why not get started with an ant-weight bot to cut your teeth?

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Phase Modulation With An FPGA

May 6, 2017 by 29 Comments

There are two radio modulation schemes everyone should know. Amplitude modulation changes the amplitude — or ‘volume’, if you will — of a carrier frequency and turns all radio into channels owned and operated by a church. Frequency modulation changes the pitch of a carrier frequency and is completely run by Clear Channel. Amateur radio operators are familiar with dozens of other modulation schemes, but there’s one hardly anyone touches. Phase modulation is weird and almost unheard of, but that doesn’t mean you can’t implement it on an FPGA. [nckm] is transmitting audio using phase modulation on an FPGA (Russian, here’s the Google Translatrix).

This hardware is just an Altera MAX10 board, with a single input used for serial data of the audio to be transmitted, and two outputs, each connected to a few bits of wire for a quarter-wave antenna. No, there’s no output filter or anything else except for a few bits of wire. It’s an experiment, chillax.

The Verilog for this project receives an audio signal as serial data in mono, 22050 BPS, 8-bit unsigned samples. These samples are fed into a dynamic PLL with phase shift in the FPGA. Shifting the phases also changes the frequency, so [nckm] can receive this audio signal with the FM transmitter on his phone.

Is this really phase modulation if it’s being received by an FM radio? Eh, maybe. PM and FM are closely related, but certainly distinguishable as modulation schemes in their own right. You can grab [nckm]’s code over on the gits, or check out the video demo below.

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