So you’re looking to buy your first 3D printer, and your index finger is quivering over that 300 US Dollar printer on Amazon.com. Stop! You’re about to have a bad time. 3D printing has come a long way, but most 3D printers are designed through witchcraft, legends, and tall tales rather than any rigorous engineering process. I would say most 3D printer designs are either just plain bad, or designed by a team of Chinese engineers applying all their ingenuity to cost cutting. There are a few that are well designed, and there is a comparatively higher price tag attached.
I’ll start by going through some of the myths and legends that show up in 3D printers. After that I’ll go through some of the common, mostly gimmick, features that typically hinder your printer’s ability, rather than adding any useful function. Next I’ll go onto the things that will actually make your printer better. Finally, I’ll add some special consideration if you’re a beginner buying your first printer.
[Michael Brumlow] found us and sent us a link. Within a few seconds, we were driving a webcam-enabled Nerf dart tank through his office and trying not to hit walls or get stepped on by his co-workers. Unfortunately, it was out of darts at the time, but you can find them all over the floor if you scout around.
It runs fairly smoothly, considering the long round trip from [Michael]’s office in Texas, through wherever Amazon keeps their Web Services, over to us in Germany and back. Once we got used to the slight lag, and started using the keyboard’s arrow keys for control, we were driving around like a pro.
It’s got a few glitches still, like the camera periodically overheating and running out of WiFi distance. [Michael] said he’d try to keep it charged up and running while you give it a shot. The controls are multiplexed in the cloud, so your chance of steering it is as good as anyone else’s. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when thousands of Hackaday readers try to control it at once!
It takes a certain kind of bravery to put your telepresence robot up on the open Internets. So kudos to you, [Michael], and we hope that you manage to get some work done this week, even though you will have all of Hackaday driving into your cubicle walls.
Punch card data input is so 1890 US Census, right? Maybe not, if your goal is to educate kids about binary numbers and how they can encode characters. In which case, this paper clip and metal tape punch card reader might be just the thing you need.
Built as part of the educational outreach efforts of the MakeICT hackerspace, this project allows kids and adults to play with binary numbers and get some instant feedback. The reader itself is a simple affair of wood and plastic; bent paperclips make contact with a foil tape strip and LEDs show the state of the five input bits. A card is provided to students with spaces for the letters of a word that they want to input, along with a table to translate each letter into a number. Students use a paper punch to encode each character in binary. As the card is pulled through the reader, the letters are spoken by the Pi in turn and the whole word is pronounced at the end.
We’ll no doubt hear quibbles with the decision not to use ASCII for the character set, but we can see the logic in keeping the number of bits to a minimum and not distracting from the learning process. What’s cool about this is that it engages kids on so many levels. They learn about binary numbers, encoding systems, interfacing a computer to the real world, and if they care to delve deeper, they can learn about the code behind everything. It’s a great hook into the hacking arts.
The Raspberry Pi Zero contest is presented by Hackaday and Adafruit. Prizes include Raspberry Pi Zeros from Adafruit and gift cards to The Hackaday Store! See All the Entries || Enter Your Project Now!
It’s a small, cheap, British single board computer, and nobody can get hold of them. Another Raspberry Pi Zero story, you might think, but no, this is about the other small cheap and difficult to find British SBC, the BBC micro:bit. Samsung UK have produced an app for the micro:bit that allows owners to write code on their Android phones, and upload it to their micro:bit via Bluetooth.
The micro:bit story has played out with agonising slowness over the last year, but it seems that there may now be light at the end of the tunnel. The idea is a good one: give a small but very capable single board computer to every Year 7 (about 12 years old) child, and watch them learn something more useful about computers than how to use a Windows application. It has echoes of the BBC Micro 8-bit computer for schools sponsored by the UK government in the 1980s, and the hope is that it will help reproduce the same technical literacy enjoyed by 1980s kids.
The plan was for the youngsters to receive their boards last October but the project as been plagued by a series of delays and the latest estimate from January was that the boards would reach the kids after the school half-term. In other words within the next couple of weeks, depending on which part of the UK the school is located in.
We recently had a brief opportunity here at Hackaday to examine a micro:bit in the wild. It is a capable little board in its own right, being at heart an mbed, however the recommended web-based micro:bit IDE and compiler differs from the more usual mbed toolchain. One thing that caught our attention in the demo we were given was the micro:bit’s use of USB to deploy code; since schools lock down computer hardware to the n’th degree we were concerned that the micro:bits might not be visible on school USB ports. Easy Bluetooth deployment through the Samsung app promises to bypass that barrier, which can only be a good thing.
We’ve been watching the micro:bit story here at Hackaday from the start, most recently we noted the arrival of Python on the platform. If it has a formative influence on the generation of developers and engineers you’ll be hiring in the mid-2020s then we expect it to feature in many future stories.
If you’ve ever known anyone who has to monitor their blood glucose level, you know it is annoying to have to prick your finger with a lancet to draw blood for each measurement. A new sweatband that incorporates flexible electronics can measure glucose–as well as sodium, potassium, and lactate–from your sweat, without a painful pin prick.
Like ridiculously large electromechanical devices? [Fran] took a tour of the Wanamaker Pipe Organ in Philly, the largest fully playable pipe organ in the world. The scale is tremendous – 28,000 pipes in 463 ranks spread out over five floors of a department store.
The Nintendo Entertainment System is well over thirty years old now, and still there are only about ten or so games that require the Nintendo Zapper, the light gun so primitive you can use a light bulb to beat Duck Hunt. Now there’s a new game: Super Russian Roulette. Yes, it’s Russian Roulette with the NES Zapper. It’s actually a very advanced game for the NES, using a lot of Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) for real audio in the game. Of course it’s also Russian Roulette with a gun that doesn’t look like a revolver, making this the perfect game to introduce young children to the wonders of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Video demo.
Tek logos and typefaces through the years. Click to embiggen.
Tektronix has a new logo! It’s not as cool as the old CRT flying spaceman globe thingy logo, but at least it’s not awash with 90s era corporate industrial design motifs.
The new logo is finally a logo and not just a serif typeface with a red slash below it. In keeping with every new corporate branding in recent memory, the new typeface is a sans-serif with a few bits cut off here and there. Is it a good logo? I’m sure it tested well in focus groups. Sometimes art is more of a science than an art. A lot of people don’t get that.
Because you – yes, you – don’t believe content creators should be paid, adblock reigns supreme. While Hackaday.com only has a few static, nonintrusive ads per page, Wired is taking a far different approach. They’re requiring you to whitelist their domain in adblock (loading over a dozen ads, some of them video, sponsored links to products on Amazon, and other advertisements masquerading as content), or pay them $1 per month. Someone over at noisebridge still reads Wired and has a JavaScript one-liner that fixes Wired’s Ad Blocker Blocker. Of course this will eventually lead to more articles and content targeting the ‘doesn’t understand Internets’ and ‘not sophisticated enough to install a browser plugin’ demographic, i.e. low brow clickbait. A much better solution would be to take responsibility for the media you consume. Whitelist Hackaday in your ad blocker.
Hackaday.io user [mincepi] wanted a VGA output on his Raspberry Pi Zero. His quest led him to design a PCB that mates with a VGA monitor and the Pi board and–according to his estimates–costs about $3.62 each (although to get that price, you have to build three).
