Project Giant Robot Arm

December 26, 2015 by 21 Comments

[Antoniopenamaria] is working on a giant robot arm. The beauty is, he’s posting a step-by-step guide (translated) of his entire journey from start to finish.

Why does he want to build a giant robot arm? Well, the idea originally came to him a few years ago when he was soldering something together and thought, “Man, I could really use another hand!”. So he got out a Meccano set, and built a mini robot arm. Nothing fancy, but it worked. From there, he decided to program it, and was able to teach it to move things from point A to point B… as he continued to expand on his little project, the vision grew, and now he’s working on project D.I.M.E.R. — a giant robot arm.

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Mostly Wood Motorized Camera Slider

December 26, 2015 by 6 Comments

Camera slides can make for interesting dolly shots in your videos, or can spice up an otherwise drab time-lapse sequence. When it came time for one of his own, [Bob] did what any hacker would do and rolled his own motorized camera slide in the wood shop.

We always like to see work based on a hacker’s own prior art, and [Bob] managed to leverage parts and techniques from his impromptu claw machine build for this slider. The rollers in this project use the same 3/4″ angle aluminum and skateboard bearings as the previous build. The bearings roll on a plywood strip capped with the same angle stock for durability and low friction. The stepper motor bracket and pillow blocks are 3D printed, as are the timing pulleys. [Bob] admits that the whole rig is a little noisy and blames it on the rough quality of the pulley prints. He has plans to replace them with commercially available pulleys, which should help; one further suggestion we have is to code a soft-start algorithm into the ATtiny85 to eliminate that jerkiness you see when he demos the slider in the video below.

There are plenty of ways to move a camera along a single axis, and a surprising number of them use parts from the roller sports. We’ve covered quite a few of them before, like this slide that uses skateboard trucks, or this non-motorized rig built from fence posts and inline skate wheels.

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Four Seasons In One Photo

December 25, 2015 by 18 Comments

What an interesting way to show a year: Norwegian hacker [Erikso] created a condensed timelapse that shows a year in a single photo. He had taken a timelapse of the view from his living room window in the frozen north every day during 2010, using a camera that was locked in place taking an image every 30 minutes. Then, with the help of some hacker friends, he came up with a script that slices these images up and combines them so that each day is represented by a vertical slice. The result is a gorgeous image that gives a wonderful sense of the seasons, and how that affects the trees. You can see the leaves grow and fall, and the snow on the ground come, go and come again.

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Little Helper: Open Source Hardware Hacker Multitool

December 25, 2015 by 27 Comments

We love a good multitool. There’s something seductive about knowing that if, for some reason, you need to saw down a tree on a moment’s notice, you have a tiny saw in your pocket. We also like electronic versions of the multitool: gadgets that serve a lot of purposes as you develop and debug hardware. One of the most polished-looking ones we’ve seen is [Phillip Schuster’s] Little Helper.

The open source gadget looks like an iPod (if an iPod had header pins sticking out of it). It has basic analog I/O capability, can generate PWM pulses, sniff I2C traffic, and do lots of other features. It is open source, so you can always add more capabilities if you need them.

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Cyberpunking Home Alone

December 25, 2015 by 7 Comments

[Macaulay Culkin] err… [Kevin McCallister] pulled off some epic 1990 hacks to scare off a couple of bumbling burglars in the classic film Home Alone. Now celebrating its 25th Anniversary, it’s fun to see the tricks [Kevin] used to spoof a house party brought into this age of high-technology.

The trick in the original movie was all about silhouettes in the windows that made the house look full of people. [Michael Jordan’s] cardboard cutout taped to a model train is fairly believable. But really, who has a half-dozen mannequins just sitting in their attic? Creepy.

The marketing company RedPepper are behind the facelift of this pop culture icon. They outfitted their offices with some window dressings that are perfect for the silhouettes. In a delightful cyberpunk twist they went with projects and digital silhouettes. Embracing our current tech-heavy lives is the mobile aspect of it all. Of course there’s an app for that. It means [Kevin] doesn’t have to pull the strings. He can hide outside the building and decide which animations are played by the projectors within. Check it out after the break.

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Nikon Resurrection: Repairing A Broken Lens

December 25, 2015 by 14 Comments

Modern DSLR cameras are amazing devices. Mechanics, electronics, and optics, all rolled up in a single package. All that technology is great, but it can make for a frustrating experience when attempting any sort of repair. Lenses can be especially difficult to work on. One misalignment of a lens group or element can lead to a fuzzy image.

[Kratz] knew all this, but it didn’t stop him from looking for a cheap lens deal over on eBay. He found a broken Nikon DSLR 55-200mm 1:4-5.6 AF-S VR camera lens for $30. This particular lens is relatively cheap – you can pick up a new one for around $150 online. Spending $30 to save $120 is a bit of a gamble, but [Kratz] went for it.

The lens he bought mostly worked – the auto-focus and vibration reduction system seemed to be fine. The aperture blades however, were stuck closed. Aperture blades form the iris of a lens. With the blades closed down, the lens was severely limited to brightly lit situations. All was not lost though, as the aperture is a relatively simple mechanical system, which hopefully would be easy to repair.

pinNikonKeeping screws and various parts in order is key when taking apart a lens. [Kratz] used a tip he learned right here on Hackaday: He drew a diagram of the screw positions on a thick piece of paper. He then stuck each screw right into the paper in its proper position.

Carefully removing each part, [Kratz] found a pin had slipped out of the rod that connects the lens’ internal parts with the external aperture control arm. Fixing the pin was simple. Getting the lens back together was quite a bit harder. Several parts have to be aligned blindly. [Kratz] persevered and eventually everything slipped into alignment. The finished lens works fine, albeit for a slightly noisy auto-focus.

It’s worth noting that there are service and repair manuals for many cameras and lenses out there in the dark corners of the internet, including [Kratz]’s 55-200 lens. Reading the repair procedures Nikon techs use shows just how many tools, fixtures, and custom bits of software go into making one of these lenses work.

Build Your Own Thermal Camera

December 25, 2015 by 44 Comments

We have featured thermal camera projects by [Max Ritter] before, but [Max] has just taken the next step: he is offering the latest version as a build-it-yourself kit. The DIY Thermocam improves on his previous designs by capturing 60 by 80 pixel thermal images, which can be combined with visible light images from an accompanying  640 by 480 pixel camera to produce the final image. It is built around the FLIR Lepton module that has been used in many of the recent commercial thermal cameras that we have seen. Max has also added a battery and display, making the whole thing a standalone camera.

The firmware that runs all this is open-source and written in C++ for easy modification, so users can build their own thermal camera.”The approach is to offer people the self-assembly kit so that they can use it as a development platform to do whatever they want to achieve with thermal imaging”[Max] told us. The kit runs €429 (about $468), with free shipping worldwide.

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