[Dave’s] Not Just A Member Of The Air Club For Tweezers

January 14, 2017 by 9 Comments

We are always surprised how much useful hacking gear is in the typical craft store. You just have to think outside the box. Need a hot air gun? Think embossing tool. A soldering iron? Check the stained glass section. Magnification gear? Sewing department.

We’ve figured out that people who deal with beads use lots of fine tools and have great storage boxes. But [Dave] found out they also use vacuum pickup tweezers. He had been shopping for a set and found that one with all the features he wanted (foot pedal, adjustable air flow, and standard tips) would run about $1000.

By picking up a pump used for bead makers and adding some components, he put together a good-looking system for about $200. You can see a video of the device, below, and there are several other videos detailing the construction.

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A Portable Jacob´s Ladder

January 8, 2017 by 16 Comments

A Jacob´s ladder is a favorite project of high voltage enthusiasts. It makes a visually attractive and fun display of a high voltage electrical arc climbing a pair of electrodes. [Keystone Science] shows us how to make a Jacob´s ladder that runs on 9 V batteries.

The ladder itself is pretty easy to make. It is nothing more than a pair of stiff wires in a V shape, connected to a high voltage power supply. The more difficult part is the HV power supply. [Keystone Science] explains how to build one using a flyback transformer from an old CRT tv and a few other components. It is a pretty simple circuit and can be powered by a 9 V battery. The ladder works because, when HV is applied to the electrodes, an arc is established at the bottom, where they are nearest each other. The arc is at high temperature so the air rises, and the arc starts to climb the ladder. Since the electrodes are further away from each other as the arc rises, at a certain point the distance is too large to sustain the arc and the process repeats.

This is a nice weekend project if you want to try it. In case you don´t want to make your own HV power supply, you can try another ladder project that uses a commercial one.

Colorful, Touch-Sensitive Light Table Is Ready For Gaming

December 26, 2016 by 1 Comment

It’s an ambitious build for sure — you don’t start with $500 worth of wood if you don’t intend for the finished product to dazzle. And this 240-pixel touch-sensitive light box coffee table does indeed dazzle.

Sometimes when we see such builds as these, fit and finish take a back seat to function. [dasdingo89] bucks that trend with a nicely detailed build, starting with the choice of zebrawood for the table frame. The bold grain and the frosted glass top make for a handsome table, but what lurks beneath the glass is pretty special too. The 240 WS2812 modules live on custom PCBs, each thoughtfully provided with connectors for easy service. There’s also an IR transmitter-receiver pair on each board to detect when something is placed over the pixel. The pixel boards are connected to custom-built shift register boards for the touch sensors, and an Arduino with Bluetooth runs the whole thing. Right now the table just flashes and responds to hand gestures, but you can easily see this forming the basis of a beautiful Tetris or Pong table.

This build reminds us a little of this pressure-sensitive light floor we featured recently, which also has some gaming possibilities. Maybe [dasdingo89] and  [creed_bratton_] should compare notes and see who can come up with the best games for their platform.

[via r/DIY and a tip from emptycanister]

Clear The Air Around Your CNC Router With A Custom Dust Shroud

December 18, 2016 by 11 Comments

Using a CNC router is a dusty business if your material of choice is wood. Sure, you can keep things tidy by chasing the cutter around the table with a shop vac, but that sort of takes the fun out of having a machine that can make cuts without you. The big boy machines all have integrated dust collection, and now you can too with this 3D-printed CNC router dust shoe.

Designed specifically for the X-Carve with a DeWalt 611 router, [Mark Edstrom]’s brush is a simple design that’s almost entirely 3D printed. The shroud encloses the router body and clamps to the mounting bracket, totally surrounding the business end of the machine. The cup is trimmed with a flexible fringe to trap the dust and guide it to the port that fits a small (1-1/4″ diameter) shop vac hose. The hose is neatly routed along the wiring harness, and the suction is provided by a standard shop vac.

Files for the cup are up on Thingiverse; we suspect it’d be easy to modify the design to work with other routers and dust collectors. You might even find a way to shroud a laser cutter and capture the exhaust with a DIY filter.

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Smartphone Will Destroy You At Air Hockey

December 15, 2016 by 21 Comments

Most of us carry a spectacularly powerful computer in our pocket, which we rarely use for much more than web browsing, social media, and maybe the occasional phone call. Our mobile phones are technological miracles, but their potential sometimes seems wasted.

It’s always a pleasure to see something that makes use of a mobile phone to drive some nuts-and-bolts hardware. [Jose Julio]’s project does just that, using the phone as the brains behind a robotic air hockey table.

Readers with long memories will remember previous air hockey tables from [Jose], using 3D printer components controlled by an Arduino Mega with a webcam suspended above the field of play. This version transfers camera, machine vision, and game strategy to an Android app, leaving the Arduino to control the hardware under wireless network command from above.

The result you can see in the video below the break is an extremely fast-paced game, with the robot looking unbeatable. If you want to build your own there are full instructions and code on GitHub, or if you follow the link from the page linked above, he sells the project as a kit.

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Soviet Portable Scopemeter Teardown

November 25, 2016 by 5 Comments

Browsing YouTube may prove to be your largest destroyer of productive time outside of Hackaday, once you have started looking at assorted Lincolnshire plumbers or young Ukrainians doing dangerous stunts it’s easy to lose an hour with very little to show for it. There is so much to divert our attention, it’s a wonder that any of us ever make anything!

So to ensure you lose a further quarter hour today, we’d like to bring you [Jesper Broe]’s demonstration and teardown of his latest oscilloscope. This might seem unpromising when we tell you it’s a single-trace model with a bandwidth of 10MHz, but don’t give up. This is a RIMEDA C1-112, a portable instrument made in Lithuania when the country was part of the Soviet Union, and its party piece is that it contains a digital multimeter with a vector display using the oscilloscope CRT.

We’re shown the compact device being unpacked, then put through its paces as an oscilloscope. It gives useful results above 10MHz, but it is visibly losing amplitude and eventually it has trouble triggering as the frequency increases. Interestingly all the controls work in the opposite direction to the ones you will be used to, anticlockwise rotation increases rather than decreases. Then we’re shown the multimeter function, which is compared to a modern DMM and found to be still pretty accurate after nearly three decades.

The ‘scope’s lid is then removed, and we see something of the logic boards that produce the digital display. A host of Soviet K155 series logic ICs are at the heart of it, and at the end of the video we’re shown a period review in Russian with a glimpse at the waveforms they produce to vector draw the figures.

Take a look at the video below the break, we’re sure you’ll agree it’s an instrument that many of us would still find useful today.

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Compressed Air Levitation And The Coanda Effect

November 24, 2016 by 20 Comments

What do you want to levitate today? [Latheman666] uses his air compressor to make all kinds of stuff float in mid air. Light bulb, key chain, test tube, ball bearing, tomato… pretty neat trick to try in your shop.

It is interesting to see what physics explain this behavior. The objects do not float just because they are pushed upwards by the airflow, that would be an unstable equilibrium situation. Instead, they obtain lift in a very similar way as the wings of an airplane. Not all objects will levitate using this trick: the object has to be semi-spherical at the top.

[Applied Science] nicely shows this behavior by levitating a screwdriver first, then an identical object but with a flat top. The flat top screwdriver fails to levitate. The curvature provides the path for a smooth airflow, because of the Coanda effect, creating a zone of low pressure at the top, making the situation analogous to that of an airplane wing. Therefore, for this to work, you need an object with some kind of airfoil shaped surface. Another great demonstration is that of [NightHawkInLight], using a high speed camera.

A very impressive experiment that needs nothing more than an air compressor!, we are sure you will try it next time you work with one. For more on this topic of levitation with air streams, check the ping pong ball levitation machine.

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