Let’s get it out of the way right up front: you still need to etch the boards. However, [Mikey77] found that flexible plastic (Ninjaflex) will adhere to a bare copper board if the initial layer height is set just right. By printing on a thin piece of copper or conductive fabric, a resist layer forms. After that, it is just simple etching to create a PCB. [Mikey77] used ferric chloride, but other etchants ought to work, as well.
Sound simple, but as usual, the devil is in the details. [Mikey77] found that for some reason white Ninjaflex stuck best. The PCB has to be stuck totally flat to the bed, and he uses spray adhesive to do that. Just printing with flexible filament can be a challenge. You need a totally constrained filament path, for one thing.
The electric motor is the fundamental building block of almost all robotic projects but, without some form of feedback, it lacks the precise positional control required for the task. Small servos from the modelling world will often use a potentiometer to sense where they are on their travel, while more accomplished motors will employ some form of shaft encoder.
Commercial shaft encoders use magnets and Hall-effect sensors, or optical sensors and encoder discs. But these can be quite expensive, so [Hello1024] hacked together an alternative in an afternoon. It uses another motor as the encoder, taking advantage of the minute changes in inductance as the magnet passes each of its coils. It’s a technique that works better with cheaper motors, as their magnets are more imperfect than those on their expensive cousins.
The sensing is rather clever in its economy, sending a pulse to the motor through an off the shelf motor controller and measuring the time it takes to decay through the body diode of the driving MOSFET. It requires a calibration procedure before first use, and it is stressed that the whole thing is very much still in beta, but it’s a very impressive hack nevertheless. He’s posted a video demonstration which you can see below the break.
It is funny how almost everything has its own set of problems. Rich people complain about taxes. Famous people complain about their lack of privacy. It probably won’t happen us, but some Kickstarter campaigners find they are too successful and have to scale up production, fast. We’d love to have any of those problems.
[Limpkin] found himself in just that situation. He had to program several thousand Atmel chips. It is true that you can get them programmed by major distributors, but in this case, he wanted unique serial numbers, cryptographic keys, and other per-chip data programmed in. So he decided to build his own mass programming workbench.
When we see a new build by [Gord] from Gord’s Garage, we never know what to expect. He seems to be pretty skilled at whatever he puts his hand to, with a great design sense and impeccable craftsmanship. You might expect him to tone it down a little for a STEM-outreach wind turbine project then, but when you get a chance to impress 28 fifth and sixth graders, you might as well go for it.
Starting with an idea from his daughter’s teacher for wind turbines each kid could make, [Gord] applied a little lean methodology so the kids would be able to complete the build in the allotted time. The design is simple – a couple of old CDs holding vertical sections of PVC tubing to catch the breeze and spin neodymium magnets over four flat coils of magnet wire. It’s enough to light a single LED and perhaps a kid’s imagination.
As simple as the turbine is, the process of building it needed to be stripped of as much unnecessary work as possible, and [Gord] really shines here. He built jigs and fixtures galore, pre-built some assemblies, and set up well-organized workstations for each step of the build. Everything was clearly labeled, adult volunteers were trained using the video after the break, and a good time was had by all.
Sometimes the hack isn’t in the product but in the process, and [Gord] managed to hack a success out a potential disaster of disappointed kids. If getting a taste of [Gord]’s style makes you want to see more, check out his guitar fretting jig or his brake rotor mancave clock.
Scenario: your little three-hour boat tour runs into a storm, and you’re shipwrecked on a tropic island paradise. You’re pretty sure your new home was once a nuclear test site, but you have no way to check. Only your scrap bin, camera bag, and hot glue gun survived the wreck. Can you put together a Geiger-Müller counter from scrap and save the day?
Probably not, unless your scrap bin is unusually well stocked and contains a surplus Russian SI-3BG miniature Geiger tube, the heart of [GH]’s desert island build. These tubes need around 400 volts across them for incident beta particles or gamma rays to start the ionization avalanche that lets it produce an output pulse. [GH]’s build uses the flash power supply of a disposable 35mm camera to generate the high voltage needed, but you could try using a CCFL inverter, say. The output of the tube tickles the base of a small signal transistor and makes a click in an earbud for every pulse detected.
You’ll no doubt notice the gallons of hot glue, alligator clips, and electrical tape used in the build, apparently in lieu of soldering. While we doubt the long-term robustness of this technique, far be it from us to cast stones – [GH] shows us what you can accomplish even when you find yourself without the most basic of tools.
Things seem to go in cycles. Writing a document using old-fashioned tools like TROFF or LaTeX is like knowing a secret code. Visual editors quickly took over, although even WordStar had some “dot commands” that you put in as text. Then HTML showed up and we were back to coding formatting as text strings.
Fast forward to the present, and HTML’s ubiquity makes that seem normal. Sure, there are visual editors, but it seems perfectly normal now to write <b> for bold text. However, as HTML grows to handle more tasks it also gets more complex. That’s led to the creation of things like Markdown which is just for simple text formatting. Continue reading “Documentation By Markup”→
KiCad is the premiere open source electronics design automation suite. It’s used by professionals and amateurs alike to design circuits and layout out printed circuit boards. In recent years we’ve seen some incredible features added to KiCad like an improved 3D viewer and push-and-shove routing. This Friday at 10 am PST, join in a Hack Chat with KiCad lead developer [Wayne Stambaugh] to talk about recent improvements and what the team has planned for KiCad in the future.
[Wayne] has been an electronics engineer for over 30 years with a wide range of experience in analog and digital hardware design and embedded and application software design. He started hacking on KiCad ten years ago when the project was first opened to public development and a little over two years ago became the project leader. This is an excellent opportunity to learn how the development team works, what their current goals are, and to talk all things KiCad.
Also on Friday, taking place just an hour before the KiCad chat, is a Tindie Hack Chat. All are welcome as the 9:00 am PST discussion gets under way. Discussion will focus on all aspects of selling unique hardware on Tindie.
Here’s How to Take Part:
Buttons to join the project and enter Hack Chat
Hack Chat are live community events that take place in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Visit that page (make sure you are logged in) and look for the “Join this Project Button” in the upper right. Once you are part of the project, that button will change to “Team Messaging” which takes you to the Hack Chat.
You don’t have to wait for Friday, join Hack Chat whenever you like and see what the community is currently talking about.
Join Us Next Week Too for CircuitPython
Block out your calendar for noon PST on Friday the 27th for next week’s Hack Chat. Joining us are Adafruit’s Ladyada, Tony DiCola, and Scott Shawcoft. They’ll be leading a discussion about CircuitPython Beta, Adafruits new extension to MicroPython that adds SAMD21 support and other enhancements.
