Turn Cheap USB Soldering Irons In To Tweezers

December 7, 2016 by 22 Comments

This is 2016, and almost every hacker dabbles with SMD parts now, unlike back in the day. This means investing in at least some specialized tools and equipment to make the job easier. One handy tool is the SMD soldering tweezers – useful not only for manual soldering of parts, but also for de-soldering them quickly and without causing damage to the part or the board. Often, especially when repairing stuff, using a hot air gun can get tricky if you want to remove just one tiny part.

smd_tweezer_04[adria.junyent-ferre] took a pair of cheap £5 USB soldering irons and turned them into a nifty pair of SMD soldering tweezers. The two irons are coupled together using a simple, 3D printed part. [adria]’s been through a couple of iterations, so the final version ought to work quite well. The video after the break shows him quickly de-soldering a bunch of 0805 SMD resistors in quick succession.

Earlier this year, we had posted [BigClive]’s tear down of these 8 watt USB soldering irons which turned out to be surprisingly capable and this spurred [adria] to order a couple to try them out.

The 3D printed part is modeled in SolveSpace – a parametric 2D and 3D CAD software that we blogged about a while ago. Continue reading “Turn Cheap USB Soldering Irons In To Tweezers” →

Don’t Leave 3D Printers Unattended – They Can Catch Fire

December 7, 2016 by 105 Comments

The holidays are almost here, and with that comes the traditional Mass Consumption of Consumer Goods and Gift Exchange. 3D printers are getting really good and really cheap, and it’s inevitable that a lot of 3D printers will be given as gifts this year. Be careful if you’re giving or receiving one of these printers: they can cause fires as [Ben Hencke] found out when diagnosing a problem with a printer he bought this year.

The printer in question is the Monoprice Maker Select V2, a Prusa i3 clone with impressive specs for a $300 printer. This printer is a rebranded Wanhao Duplicator i3, and we’ve reviewed it favorably. It’s a capable printer that beats the pants off of any Kickstarter printer in quality (and for the fact that you can buy it right now). We’re pretty sure there are going to be more than a few of these printers under the Saturnalia tree this year.

After a few weeks, [Ben] noticed a bit of smoke coming from the printer while the bed was preheating. This wasn’t blue pixie smoke, like you’d find from an exploded capacitor. There was a lot of smoke.

After a closer inspection and help from [Elecia White] from embedded.fm, the problem was traced to the power connector for the heated bed. The green, bromine-infused plastic for this connector was charred and there’s little doubt this could have caused a fire.

3D printing is a fantastic tool, and has enabled more hacks and builds over the last few years than we could have ever imagined. 3D printers are getting very good, and very cheap, and of course this will eventually mean someone losing their workshop to a printer fire. Until someone figures out how to build a ‘thermal fuse’ or something of that nature, 3D printers — from the high-end ones to the still very good Monoprice and Wanhao units — have the potential to start a fire.

Continue reading “Don’t Leave 3D Printers Unattended – They Can Catch Fire” →

Building A Whegged Robot

December 6, 2016 by 13 Comments

[Jaidyn Edwards] is building a robot. This isn’t going to be a normal robot, though, he’s building a whegged robot, inspired by Boston Dynamic’s version of the RHex design.

A wheg (TM) is a curved leg that rotates around a foxed fixed (Ed note: Fixed!) point on one end, driven by a motor. Hence the name: part wheel, part leg. By driving each leg separately, you can keep the robot balanced and push it forwards. This is a complex system to build. Unlike normal wheels or drive systems, you need to know exactly where the leg is to use it properly, as the position of the leg depends on the rotation of the motor.

The legs themselves are going to be 3D printed from a combination of rigid and flexible fabrics that should provide both strength and grip. In this first video, [Jaidyn] outlines his design, and explains why he is trying this approach. It’s the first in an ongoing series that should definitely be worth tuning into.

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Half A Chevy Becomes A Boat Launch

December 6, 2016 by 29 Comments

A tired 1990 Chevy Lumina isn’t the platform one would normally pick for a custom build. When you’re drag boat racing team on a budget though, you use what you can get cheap. Normally small boats are launched and landed using a trailer and tow vehicle. [Ashley Ruf’s] team at Little John’s racing is launching her boat “Kwitchabitchin” with a bit more style.

The team started by cutting the Lumina in half. Since the Chevy is a front wheel drive platform, everything behind the driver is more or less along for the ride. The gas tank was relocated, and notched to receive the front of the boat. The team then added a quad tire trailer frame. The frame is connected to the car with a long hydraulic cylinder. When the boat is being launched or landed, the cylinder can extend far enough to get the boat floating.

You might be thinking that there is no way this is street legal, and you’d be right. The Lumina only gets the boat into and out of the water. The boat is then pulled all the way forward using the hydraulics. The boat/car pair is a then perfect fit inside the team’s racing travel trailer.

You can check out a video of the car at work after the break

Continue reading “Half A Chevy Becomes A Boat Launch” →

Homebrew Dash Cam Enables Full Suite Of Sensors

December 6, 2016 by 21 Comments

You heard it here first: dash cams are going to be the next must-have item for your daily driver. Already reaching market saturation in some parts of the world but still fairly uncommon in North America, we predict that car makers will soon latch onto the trend and start equipping cars with dash cams as standard equipment. And you can just bet that whatever watered-down, overpriced feature set they come up with will be sure to disappoint, so you might want to think about building your own Raspberry Pi dash cam with an accelerometer and lots of LEDS.

Still very much in the prototyping phase, [CFLanger]’s project is at its heart a dash cam, but it looks like he wants to go far beyond that. Raspivid and a PI NoIR camera take care of the video streaming, but the addition of a Pi SenseHAT gives [CFLanger] a bunch of options for sensing and recording the car’s environment. Not content with the SenseHAT’s onboard accelerometer, he added an ADXL345 to the sensor suite. The 64-pixel LED display is just for fun – it displays pitch and roll of the platform – and a yet-to-be-implemented bar-graph display will show acceleration in the X-axis. He figures the whole thing is good for a couple of days of video, but we hope he adds audio capture and perhaps ECU data from an OBDII-Bluetooth adapter.

We’ve seen surprisingly few DIY dash cams on Hackaday, at least so far. There has been a dash cam teardown and retasking, and there are plenty of dashboard computer builds, though. Seems like most hackers want that DIY self-driving car first.

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For Your Binge-Watching Pleasure: The Clickspring Clock Is Finally Complete

December 6, 2016 by 26 Comments

It took as long to make as it takes to gestate a human, but the Clickspring open-frame mechanical clock is finally complete. And the results are spectacular.

If you have even a passing interest in machining, you owe it to yourself to watch the entire 23 episode playlist. The level of craftsmanship that [Chris] displays in every episode, both in terms of the clock build and the production values of his videos is truly something to behold. The clock started as CAD prints glued to brass plates as templates for the scroll saw work that roughed out the frames and gears. Bar stock was turned, parts were threaded and knurled, and gear teeth were cut. Every screw in the clock was custom made and heat-treated to a rich blue that contrasts beautifully with the mirror polish on the brass parts. Each episode has some little tidbit of precision machining that would make the episode worth watching even if you have no interest in clocks. For our money, the best moment comes in episode 10 when the bezel and chapter ring come together with a satisfying click.

We feature a lot of timekeeping projects here, but none can compare to the Clickspring clock. If you’re still not convinced, take a look at some of our earlier coverage, like when we first noticed [Chris]’ channel, or when he fabricated and blued the clock’s hands. We can’t wait for the next Clickspring project, and we know what we’re watching tonight.

Continue reading “For Your Binge-Watching Pleasure: The Clickspring Clock Is Finally Complete” →

The Internet Of Tampons

December 6, 2016 by 116 Comments

At the 2016 Hackaday Superconference, Amanda Brief and Jacob McEntire gave a talk on what they’ve been working on for the past few years. It’s My.Flow, the world’s first tampon monitor capable of tracking saturation, and eliminating anxiety, leakage, and infection. It’s better than a traditional tampon, and it’s one of the rare Internet of Things things that actually makes sense.

There’s a long history of technological innovation to deal with menstruation. What began with simply sending women out of the village for a week turned into a ‘sanitary belt’ after a few thousand years. This astonishing technological advance of treating women as people led to the pad, the cup, and eventually, the disposable tampon. Now My.Flow is applying modern electrochemical technology to move the state of the art forward.

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