3D Laser Carving With The Smoothieboard

March 4, 2016 by 21 Comments

Expensive laser cutters have a 3D engraving mode that varies the laser power as it is etching a design, to create a 3D effect. [Benjamin Alderson] figured this could be replicated on a cheap Chinese laser — so he made his own program called SmoothCarve.

He’s got one of those extra cheap blue-box 40W CO2 lasers you can nab off eBay for around $600-$800, but he’s replaced the control board with a SmoothieBoard as an easy upgrade. He wrote the program in MatLab to analyze a grey scale image and then assign power levels to the different shades of grey. You can see the software and try it yourself over at his GitHub.

The resulting application is pretty handy — watch it carve the Jolly RancherWrencher after the break!

Continue reading “3D Laser Carving With The Smoothieboard” →

Wiring Was Arduino Before Arduino

March 4, 2016 by 149 Comments

Hernando Barragán is the grandfather of Arduino of whom you’ve never heard. And after years now of being basically silent on the issue of attribution, he’s decided to get some of his grudges off his chest and clear the air around Wiring and Arduino. It’s a long read, and at times a little bitter, but if you’ve been following the development of the Arduino vs Arduino debacle, it’s an important piece in the puzzle.

Wiring, in case you don’t know, is where digitalWrite() and company come from. Maybe even more importantly, Wiring basically incubated the idea of building a microcontroller-based hardware controller platform that was simple enough to program that it could be used by artists. Indeed, it was intended to be the physical counterpart to Processing, a visual programming language for art. We’ve always wondered about the relationship between Wiring and Arduino, and it’s good to hear the Wiring side of the story. (We actually interviewed Barragán earlier this year, and he asked that we hold off until he published his side of things on the web.)

The short version is that Arduino was basically a fork of the Wiring software, re-branded and running on a physical platform that borrowed a lot from the Wiring boards. Whether or not this is legal or even moral is not an issue — Wiring was developed fully open-source, both software and hardware, so it was Massimo Banzi’s to copy as much as anyone else’s. But given that Arduino started off as essentially a re-branded Wiring (with code ported to a trivially different microcontroller), you’d be forgiven for thinking that somewhat more acknowledgement than “derives from Wiring” was appropriate.

screenshots_comparo
See what we mean?

The story of Arduino, from Barragán’s perspective, is actually a classic tragedy: student comes up with a really big idea, and one of his professors takes credit for it and runs with it.

Continue reading “Wiring Was Arduino Before Arduino” →

Dual UART/I2C Breakout Goes Both Ways

March 4, 2016 by 30 Comments

[Jesus Echavarria] sent us a link to this cute little tool that he’s built. It’s a dual USB-to-I2C-or-UART adapter, with a few more oddball features thrown in for good measure. If you were electronics Batman, you’d have this on your utility belt.

[Jesus] originally designed the board because he wanted to sniff a bi-directional UART conversation using his computer, and get it all done in inexpensive hardware with minimal fuss. So he looked to the Microchip MCP2221 chip, which is an inexpensive USB to serial and I2C chip, but with some extras. In particular, it’s got four GPIOs, a ten-bit ADC and a five-bit DAC with selectable reference voltage, and it’s all controllable over USB. And [Jesus]’s board has two of them.

Implementing USB on a microcontroller isn’t always that much fun, so we can see why he took the straight-ahead hardware approach. And as a side benefit, he gets all the other kooky functionalities that the chip brings. And we have been introduced to what looks like a neat chip to use in USB and microcontroller projects. We’re going to put one in our next random chip order.

Polyhedrone

March 4, 2016 by 6 Comments

[Brainsmoke] had a simple plan. Make a quadcopter with lots of addressable LEDs.

Not just a normal quadcopter with ugly festoons of LED tape though. [Brainsmoke] wanted to put his LEDs in a ball. Thus was born the polyhedrone, the idea of a flying deltoidal hexecontahedron covered as you might expect with all those addressable LEDs.

polyhedrone-PCB-kicadA Catalan solid makes a good choice for the homebrew polyhedron builder because its faces are all identical. Thus if you are making PCBs to carry LEDs, for example, you need only create a single PCB design to use on all faces. A bit of work in KiCAD, and a single face design with interlocking edges was ready. The boards were tested, a wiring layout was worked out, and the polyhedron was assembled.

But [Brainsmoke] didn’t stop there. He produced a flight case for the polyhedron, in the form of a larger polyhedron from what looks like lasercut thin ply.

Having a finished polyhedron, the next thing was to hook up a Raspberry Pi and write some software. First in Python, then in Go.

polyhedrone-light-1The results are simply stunning. If the mathematics and construction of a polyhedron were not enough to make this project worth a second look, then the gallery of images should be enough. You’ll notice that this is ostensibly a quadcopter project, yet no mention of flying has been made on this page. That’s because this is still a work in progress at Tech Inc Amsterdam, and there is more to come. But it honestly doesn’t matter if this project never moves a millimeter off the ground, as far as we are concerned [Brainsmoke] has created a superbly built thing of beauty in its own right, and we like that.

As you might expect, this is just the latest of many projects featured here that have involved addressable LEDs or quadcopters. Of note among them is this LED polyhedron that cleverly closes in all its bits, and this LED-equipped quadcopter that generates very pleasing patterns with a hi-res cross of pixels.

Connect Four Robot Uses Raspberry Pi

March 3, 2016 by 5 Comments

Most people play games for entertainment. Hackers build robots to play games for entertainment. That’s what [piandchips] did. He used a Raspberry Pi and a MeArm kit to build a Connect 4-playing robot. The robot–named 4-Bot–has to do two things: the first is it has to be able to manipulate the pieces. Secondly, it has to be able to see the board. The MeArm imbues 4-Bot with the manipulation ability, and a clever scanning system does the trick.

Continue reading “Connect Four Robot Uses Raspberry Pi” →

World’s Smallest Cordless Power Tools, 3D Printed Of Course

March 3, 2016 by 46 Comments

What is this?  A circular saw for ants?!

There isn’t much information we could find on this one (sorry, no source files that we know of), but this little hack is so playful and fun, we just had to share it with you. [Lance Abernethy] has built both a working cordless drill, and circular saw using nothing more than a 3D printer, what seems to be a pager-type vibration motor, a tactile switch and a coin cell battery – you can see them both working in the video after the break.

drillinside

[Lance] used an Ultimaker 2, running a 0.25mm nozzle, and printing at a 0.04mm layer height in PLA. As you would expect, the 0.25mm nozzle is needed for such small parts – it’s also close to the limit of what extruder can still squeeze plastic through. it greatly increases the chance of blocked or clogged nozzles.

[Lance] admits that the saw can’t quite cut anything just yet, but he does say that he has plans to make more miniature cordless tools.  We can’t wait to see how he might manage the mechanism for a jig-saw.

[VIA adafruitdaily.com newsletter]

Continue reading “World’s Smallest Cordless Power Tools, 3D Printed Of Course” →

Get Really Basic With Steppers And Eight Buttons

March 3, 2016 by 21 Comments

[Kevin Darrah] put together a good video showing how to control a stepper motor with, not a motor driver, but our fingers. Taking the really low-level approach to do this sort of thing gave us a much better understanding about the features of our stepper driver chips. Such as, for example, why a half step needed twice the current to operate.

[Kevin] starts with the standard explanation of coils, transistors, and magnets that every stepper tutorial does. When he hooks up simple breadboard with passives and buttons, and then begins to activate the switches in sequence is when we had our, “oh,” moment. At first even he has trouble remembering the correct sequence, but the stepper control became intuitive when laid out with tactile switches.

We set-up our own experiment to see if we remembered our lessons on the subject. It was a fun way to review what we already knew, and we learned some more along the way. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Get Really Basic With Steppers And Eight Buttons” →