Hackaday’s own mythical beast, Sophi Kravitz makes some amazing collaborative tech-art pieces. In this talk, she walks us through four of the art projects that she’s been working on lately, and gives us a glimpse behind the scenes into the technical side of what it takes to see an installation from idea, to prototype, and onto completion.
Watch Sophi’s talk from the Hackaday | Belgrade conference and then join us after the jump for a few more details.
We told you about these “printable” magnets a while back. When you have the ability to squeeze many smaller magnets into a tiny spot and adjust their north/south orientations at will, you can not only control the strength of the overall magnetic field, you can construct new and seemingly physics-defying widgets. This article will not focus on the magnets themselves, but instead we’re going to peel away the closed source shroud that hides the inner workings of that nifty little printer of theirs. There has been a lot of talk about these printable magnets, but very little about how they’re made. This changes today. We’ll show you how this magnetic field printer works so you can get busy making your own.
Several years ago, a company called Correlated Magnetic Research introduced to the world the idea of a magnetic field printer with the Mini MagPrinter. It sold for a whopping $45,000, which limited it to businesses and well-funded universities. They eventually changed their company to Polymagnet and now focus on making the magnets themselves. It appears, however, that they’ve refined their printer for a higher resolution. Skip to 2:45 in this video to see the Mini MagPrinter in action. Now skip to 7.25 in this video to see their next generation printer. Now lets figure out how they work.
Firstly, you can toss your Kickstarter idea in the recycle bin because they hold several patents for their printer. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make one in your garage or for your hackerspace. Their machine might have cost $45k, but we’d be willing to bet a dozen Raspberry Pi Zeros that you could make one for two orders of magnitude less. But first we need to know how it works. Let’s look at the science first.
The Curie Point is a temperature where a magnet loses its magnetic field. It is theorized that magnetism arises from the spin and angular momentum of electrons. If you get them lined up correctly, you get a magnet. When you heat the metal past the Curie Point, this alignment gets all messed up and you lose the magnetic properties. And, of course, you can align the atoms back up by introducing the metal to a strong magnetic field.
A Halbach array is created when smaller magnets are arranged so their magnetic fields are focused in a particular direction and cancel out in another direction. The magnets made by the magnetic field printer can be considered Halbach arrays.
Everything begins with a blank Neodymium magnet. We’re all familiar with CNC technology, so we’ll focus on the magnetic field printing head itself. Reading through the comments of the original article, many believe that it uses a combination of heating to exceed the Curie Point and a high strength electromagnet to “write” the magnetic field into the blank. However, after looking closely at this patent, it appears this is not the case. There is no heating involved. The printer head consists of “an inductor coil having multiple layers and a hole extending through the multiple layers” and works by “emitting from the inductor coil a magnetic field that magnetizes an area on a surface of the magnetizable material…”. In short, it’s just a strong, local magnetic field.
Now that you have a basic idea of how to print magnetic fields, you can start working on one of your own design. You already know how to make 3d printers and laser cutters. Just take one of these designs and replace the head with your custom-built magnetic printer head, whip up some software and bring this technology into the open source community. Blank Neodymium magnets and magnetic field viewing film are fairly cheap. First one to print the skull and wrenches logo gets a free t-shirt!
Blood doping is so last decade! The modern cyclist has a motor and power supply hidden inside the bike’s frame.
We were first tipped off to the subject in this article in the New York Times. A Belgian cyclocross rider, Femke Van den Driessche, was caught with a motor hidden in her bike.
While we don’t condone sports cheating, we think that hiding a motor inside a standard bike is pretty cool. But it’s even more fun to think of how to catch the cheats. The Italian and French press have fixated on the idea of using thermal cameras to detect the heat. (Skip to 7:50 in the franceTVsport clip.) We suspect it’s because their reporters recently bought Flir cameras and are trying to justify the expense.
The UCI, cycling’s regulatory body, doesn’t like thermal. They instead use magnetic pulses and listen for the characteristic ringing of a motor coil inside the frame. Other possibilities include X-ray and ultrasonic testing. What do you think? How would you detect a motor inside a bike frame or gearset?
Today marks the beginning of the Anything Goes challenge, a 2016 Hackaday Prize contest that will reward 20 finalists with $1000 for solving a technology problem and a chance at winning the entire Hackaday Prize: $150,000 and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena.
The Hackaday Prize is empowering hackers, designers, and engineers to use their time to Build Something that Matters. For the next five weeks what matters is solving a technology problem. Have an idea to power vehicles without polluting the atmosphere? Great! Want to figure out how to get your washing machine to work better? We want to see that too. Anything goes so design it, prototype it, document it and you could be one of the twenty entries headed to the final round.
We have already seen a groundswell of progress in the Hackaday Prize. The first round, Design Your Concept, had over five hundred entries! But today is a brand new day, a new challenge, and all bets are off. It’s the perfect clean slate for you to join the movement.
Start your project right now
and submit it to the Hackaday Prize. If you have previously started a project page you can add it to the Anything Goes challenge using the “Submit Project To” dropdown menu on the left sidebar of your project page.
Talk about your idea, document your plan for seeing it through to completion, and then start writing build logs as you begin to work on the prototype. On May 30th our panel of judges will review all the entries and choose twenty that exhibit the best the Hackaday Prize has to offer.
You have the talent. You can make the time. You will make a difference. The greatest things in the world start small but with passion. This is your moment, now start your journey.
Biometrics–the technique of using something unique about your body as a security device–promises to improve safety while being more convenient than a password. Fingerprints, retinal scans, and voice identification have all found some use, although not without limitations.
Now researchers in Germany want you to use your head, literally. SkullConduct measures vibrations of your skull in response to a sonic signal. A small prototype was successful and is particularly well suited for something you are holding up to your head anyway, like a smartphone or a headset like a Google Glass.
There are some limitations, though. For one thing, background noise can be a factor. It stands to reason, also, that more testing is necessary.
This looks straightforward enough that you could try your own version of it. After all, scanning veins in your hand has been hacked. We’ve even seen a biometric safe.
Fail Of The Week is a long-running series here at Hackaday. Over the years we’ve been treated to a succession of entertaining, edifying, and sometimes downright sad cock-ups from many corners of the technological and maker world.
You might think that we Hackaday writers merely document the Fails of others, laughing at others’ misfortunes like that annoying kid at school. But no, we’re just as prone to failure as anyone else, and it is only fair that we eat our own dog food and tell the world about our ignominious disasters when they happen.
And so we come to my week. I had a test process to automate for my contract customer. A few outputs to drive some relays, a few inputs from buttons and microswitches. Reach for an Arduino Uno and a prototyping shield, divide the 14 digital I/O lines on the right into 7 outputs and 7 inputs. Route 7 to 13 into a ULN2003 to drive my relays, tie 0 to 6 high with a SIL resistor pack so I can trigger them with switches to ground. Job done, and indeed this is substantially the hardware the test rig ended up using.
So off to the Arduino IDE to write my sketch. No rocket science involved, a fairly simple set of inputs, outputs, and timers. Upload it to the Arduino, and the LED on pin 13 flashes as expected. Go for a well-deserved lunch as a successful and competent engineer who can whip up a test rig in no time.
Back at the bench refreshed by the finest British pub grub, I started up the PC, plugged the shield into the Arduino, and applied the power. My sketch worked. But wait! There’s a slight bug! Back to the IDE, change a line or two and upload the sketch.
And here comes my fail. The sketch wouldn’t upload, the IDE reported a COM port error. “Damn’ Windows 10 handling of USB serial ports”, I thought, as I’m not a habitual Windows user on my own machines. Then followed something I’ve not done for quite a while; diving into the Windows control panel to chase the problem. Because it had to be a Windows problem, right?
The seasoned Arduinisti among you probably spotted my fail four paragraphs ago. We all know that pins 0 and 1 on an Arduino are shared with the serial port, but who gives it a second thought? I guess I’d always had the good fortune to drive those pins from lines which didn’t enforce a logic state, and had never ended up tying them high. Hold them to a logic 1, and the Arduino can’t do its serial thing so sketches stay firmly in the IDE.
I could have popped the shield off every time I wanted to upload a new sketch, but since in the event I didn’t need all those inputs I just lifted the links tying those pins high and shifted the other inputs up the line. And went home that evening a slightly less competent engineer whose ability to whip up a test rig in no time was a bit tarnished. Ho hum, at least the revised sketch worked and the test rig did its job exactly as it should.
So that’s my Fail Of The Week. What’s yours?
Header image: pighixxx.com, CC-BY-ND via MarkusJenkins
Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your own failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.
Pill cameras, devices for ‘capsule endoscopy’, or in much cruder terms, ‘poopable cameras’, are exceedingly cool technology. They’re astonishingly small, communicate through a gastrointestinal tract to the outside world, and have FDA certification. These three facts also mean pill cameras are incredible expensive, but that doesn’t mean a hardware hacker can’t build their own, and that’s exactly what [friarbayliff] is doing for his entry into The Hackaday Prize.
First things first: [friarbayliff] is not building one of these for human consumption. That’s a morass of regulatory requirements and ethical issues. This pill camera is only being built as an experiment, because it would be fun to build one. The pill cams swallowed by patients every day have millions of dollars in R&D behind them before human trials. That said, given a good food-safe enclosure, I’d down one of these as an experiment.
This pill camera will use a simple, off-the-shelf 2 megapixel image sensor that can be bought on eBay for less than five dollars. With a small 32-bit micro, these cameras are easy to drive and capture images from. Power is provided from a single silver oxide button cell battery and a boost converter. In total, [friarbayliff] estimates the total PCB area to be just under one square inch, making this a relatively inexpensive device to build. There will be a radio transceiver in there somewhere, but [friar] hasn’t figure that part out yet.
Pill cameras are some amazing technology, but relatively inaccessible unless you get a used one. Ew. [Mike Harrison] tore one of these pill cams apart a few years ago, and it really is an incredible device. Building one for fun – even if it won’t be used in a human – is a fantastic learning experience and a great entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize.
