How To Design, Manufacture, And Document A Hardware Product

May 6, 2016 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

It’s pretty awesome to have a hardware design hero jump at the chance to work on a Hackaday conference badge. I am of course talking about Voja Antonic.

I’ve gotten to know him over the last two years when we were introduced and he agreed to work on some original articles. He’s long been a hacker and shared his story of technology despite politics and society changing around him. His Galaksija computer was the first personal computer available in Yugoslavia with over 8,000 kits sold. Since those days he never stopped refining his design and fabrication skills. For instance, his method of making cases from FR4 is beyond compare, and reading some of his wisdom from hardware design in the casino industry is the kind of fascinating stuff that rarely makes it out for others to enjoy.

But I digress — the point is Voja’s been around the block, he knows what he’s doing, and he does it at an amazingly high level. He did an incredible job with the Hackaday | Belgrade conference badge. It features a 16×8 LED display, IR comms hardware, 5 user buttons, USB programming, an option for an accelerometer module, and has spectacular life running on two AAA batteries. It was a hit at the conference, and so was his talk discussing the design and fabrication. Check it out below and then join me below the fold.

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Hackaday Dictionary: Transformers

May 6, 2016 by Richard Baguley 27 Comments

Funny stuff, electricity. It’s all about the volts and the amps, and controlling these two factors. Most of the time, the electricity coming into your device is at a higher voltage than you need, so you have to convert it down to something more usable. The easiest way to do this is with a transformer.

The transformer in your power supply takes a high voltage from the mains and converts it down into a lower voltage to power your gadgets. You’ll find one in all power supplies, from the miniature USB version that powers your cell phone to the big ones hanging on a telephone pole that drive your home’s mains electricity. Although these transformers are different sizes, they share the same fundamental design.

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Fallout Inspired Cellphone Wristwatch

May 6, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 13 Comments

[Mr. Volt] mentions that some of the commenters on his videos believed that he shouldn’t be making large, retro computer themed communicator watches. He believes they are wrong, naturally we are compelled to agree with him.

In his latest build he has produced a rather well-built and large cell-phone watch. After the untimely death of an Apple II cellphone watch, he decided to up his game and make one that could take more of a beating. The case is 3D printed, which is hard to believe given the good finish. He must have spent a long time sanding the prints. Some wood veneer for looks and aluminum panels for strength complete the assembly.

The electronics are a Teensy and a GSM module. It looks like he places calls by calling the operator since the wrist communicator only has four inputs: a red button, a blue button, and a momentary switch rotary encoder.

The communicator appears to work really smoothly, and it would certainly draw attention to him were he to wear it anywhere other than the Wasteland. Video after the break.

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Up Your CAD Game With Good Reference Photos

May 6, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 28 Comments

I’ve taken lots of reference photos for various projects. The first time, I remember suffering a lot and having to redo a model a few times before I got a picture that worked. Just like measuring parts badly, refining your reference photo skills will save you a lot of time and effort when trying to reproduce objects in CAD. Once you have a model of an object, it’s easy to design mating parts, to reproduce the original, or even for milling the original for precise alterations.

I’m adding some parts onto a cheap food dehydrator from the local import store. I’m not certain if my project will succeed, but it’s a good project to talk about taking reference photos. The object is white, indistinct, and awkward, which makes it a difficult object to take a good photo for reference use in a CAD program. I looked around for a decent tutorial on the subject, and only found one. Maybe my Google-fu wasn’t the best that day. Either way, It was mostly for taking good orthogonal shots, and not how to optimize the picture to get dimensions out of it later.

There are a few things to note when taking a reference photo. The first is the distortion and the setup of your equipment to combat it. The second is including reference scales and surfaces to assist in producing a final model from which geometry and dimensions can be accurately taken. The last is post-processing the picture to try to fight the distortion, and also to prepare it for use in cad and modeling software.

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3D Printing Hailstone Molds For Science

May 6, 2016 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Hollywood would have you believe that tornadoes are prevalent in the Midwest. We’re much more likely to see hail in the springtime—balls of slushy ice that pelt our roofs and dimple our cars. [Dr. Ian Giammanco] and his wife and fellow scientist [Tanya Brown-Giammanco] have been studying hail at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety’s research lab since 2012. In 2013, their team created over 9,000 artificial hailstones and fired them at a mock-up of a house in the first indoor full-scale hailstorm.

As fun as it sounds to shoot balls of ice at different things, they did it to better understand the humble hailstone and the damage it can do to insurable goods. Those hailstones from a few years ago were created manually by injecting molds and freezing them. Recently, [the Giammancos] and have taken a more advanced approach to creating artificial hail so they can study the physical characteristics. They scan actual hailstones in order to create models of them. Then they make a 3D-printed mold and use it in a hail-making machine that uses diffused carbon dioxide to mimic the layering that occurs when natural hailstones are formed.

While it would be nice to be able to control hail, the next best thing is mitigating the damage it causes. The better that scientists understand hail, the better materials will become that can withstand its impact. Perhaps someone can perfect a shape-shifting building material and make it resistant to hail.

Fail Of The Week: ESP8266 Heats Temperature Sensor

May 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 61 Comments

[Richard Hawthorn] sent us in this interesting fail, complete with an attempted (and yet failed) clever solution. We love learning through other people’s mistakes, so we’re passing it on to you.

First the obvious-in-retrospect fail. [Richard] built a board with a temperature sensor and an ESP8266 module to report the temperature to the Interwebs. If you’ve ever put your finger on an ESP8266 module when it’s really working, you’ll know what went wrong here: the ESP8266 heated up the board and gave a high reading on the temperature sensor.

Next came the clever bit. [Richard] put cutouts into the board to hopefully stop the flow of heat from the ESP8266 module to the temperature sensor. Again, he found that the board heats up by around four degrees Celcius or nine degrees Farenheit. That’s a horrible result in any units.

What to do? [Richard’s] first ideas are to keep hammering on the thermal isolation, by maybe redoing the board again or adding a heatsink. Maybe a daughterboard for the thermal sensor? We can’t see the board design in enough detail, but we suspect that a flood ground plane may be partly to blame. Try running thin traces only to the temperature section?

[Richard]’s third suggestion is to put the ESP into sleep mode between updates to reduce waste heat and power consumption. He should be doing this anyway, in our opinion, and if it prevents scrapping the boards, so much the better. “Fix it in software!” is the hardware guy’s motto.

But we’ll put the question to you ~~electronics-design backseat drivers~~ loyal Hackaday readers. Have you ever noticed this effect with board-mounted temperature sensors? How did you / would you get around it?

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.

Clever And Elegant Tilt Sensors From Ferrofluid

May 5, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 53 Comments

Let’s talk about tilt sensors for a second. The simplest tilt sensors – the dead simplest – are a few ball bearings rolling around in a small metal can. When the can is tilted, the balls roll into a pair of electrical contacts, completing the circuit. How about a drop of mercury in a glass ampule with a few contacts? Same thing. You can get more expensive tilt sensors, including a few that are basically MEMS gyros, but they’re all pretty much the same. For [Aron]’s project for the Hackaday Prize, he’s come up with a tilt sensor that is so clever, so innovative, and so elegant, we’re gobsmacked by his creativity.

Instead of electrical contacts or gyroscopes, [Aron] is using induction to measure the tilt of a sensor. By wrapping a tube with one long primary winding of copper wire, and several secondary windings in various places, [Aron] built a Linear Variable Differential Transformer. If you insert an iron rod inside this transformer, different voltages will be induced in the primary. Simple, and this device is effectively a position sensor for any ferrous material.

Now for the real trick: put ferrofluid in the core of that transformer. Liquids always find their level, and different tilts will induce different voltages in the primary. Brilliant. Continue reading “Clever And Elegant Tilt Sensors From Ferrofluid” →