Hackaday Links: October 25, 2015

October 25, 2015 by 11 Comments

There are dozens of different 3D printable cases out there for the Raspberry Pi, but the BeagleBone Black, as useful as it is, doesn’t have as many options. The folks at 3D hubs thought they could solve this with a portable electronics lab for the BBB. It opens like a book, fits a half-size breadboard inside, and looks very cool.

The guy who 3D printed his lawnmower has a very, very large 3D printer. He now added a hammock to it, just so he could hang out during the very long prints.

There’s a box somewhere in your attic, basement, or garage filled with IDE cables. Wouldn’t they be useful for projects? Yep, only not all the wires work; some are grounds tied together, some are not wired straight through, and some are missing. [esot.eric] has the definitive guide for 80-wire IDE cables.

Like case mods? Here’s a golden apple, made out of walnut. Yes, there are better woods he could have used. It’s a wooden replica of a Mac 128 with a Mac Mini and LCD stuffed inside. Want a video? Here you go.

If you have a 3D printer, you’re probably familiar with PEEK. It’s the plastic used as a thermal break in non-all-metal hotends. Now it’s a filament. An extraordinarily expensive filament at €900 per kilogram. Printing temperature is 370°C, so you’ll need an all-metal hotend.

It’s the Kickstarter that just keeps going and going and going. That’s not a bad thing, though: there really isn’t much of a market for new Amiga 1200 cases. We’ve featured this project before, but the last time was unsuccessful. Now, with seven days left and just over $14k to go, it might make it this time.

DIY Powder Coating

October 25, 2015 by 65 Comments

If you don’t yet have a toaster oven you can’t use with food, here’s yet another reason: DIY powder coating. Powder coating is much harder and more durable than paint – a property imbued to it by the fact that it’s baked on to a part. [Thomas] had a go at powder coating some skateboard trucks, and with the right tools, found the process downright easy.

[Thomas] only needed a few things to powder coat his parts, the first and most important being a powder coat gun. A few years ago, Craftsman produced a powder coat gun that’s still available on Amazon and eBay for about $50. Powders are plentiful and cheap in small quantities. The only other tools needed were an N95 or better respirator, some high temperature tape for masking off the part and a toaster oven. If you want to coat big parts, there are DIY oven options for that.

After the part was sandblasted down to bare metal, [Thomas] masked off all the holes and threads of the part with polyimide tape. Any tape that’s capable of withstanding high temperatures will do, and most of us have a roll of Kapton sitting next to a 3D printer, anyway.

The part is coated with powder via an electrostatic charge, and this means attaching a ground lead from the gun to the part. After that, it’s just filling the gun with powder, putting it in the oven set at 450°F, and letting the powder liquefy.

In the video below, you can see [Thomas] sandblasting, powdering, and baking a set of aluminum skateboard trucks using his method. Compared to other methods of finishing metal parts – anodizing or plating, for instance, powder coating is remarkably easy and something anyone can do in a garage.

Thanks [Tyler] for sending this one in.

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Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Super Weather Dashboard

October 25, 2015 by 7 Comments

[InitialState] posted a great multipart tutorial about building what he calls a “Hyper-local Weather Dashboard.” In plain language, he created a Raspberry Pi-based web page that fuses weather data from Wunderground along with locally sensed weather data.

The tutorial has thee parts. The first part covers reading data from Wunderground using their developer’s API (you’ll need an API key; a free one is good for 500 queries a day). The second part covers using the Pi Sense HAT to measure local temperature, humidity, and pressure. The final part ties it all together using producing the hyper-local weather dashboard (whatever that really means).

We talked about the Sensor HAT earlier (and there’s more info in the video, below). Seems like those lights could do something, although that wouldn’t do you any good over a web interface. This is a good-looking project (and tutorial) and easy enough that it would be a good place to start
experimenting with the Raspberry Pi.

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Fitting 3D Prints On Eagle Boards

October 25, 2015 by 14 Comments

One of the hardest things you’ll ever do is mesh your electronic design with a mechanical design. Getting holes for switches in the right place is a pain, and if you do it enough, you’ll realize the beauty of panel mount jacks. This is especially true when using Eagle to design a PCB, but with a few tricks, it’s possible to build 3D printable pieces directly from Eagle designs.

[Tyler] built a clock with a bunch of LEDs. While the clock worked great, there was a lot of light leakage around the segments of his custom seven-segment numbers. The solution is a light mask, and [Tyler] figured out how to make one in Eagle.

The first step is to draw a new layer on the Eagle board that defines the light mask. This is exported as an EPS file in the CAM processor that gives him a 2D drawing. At least it’s to scale.

The next step is to install Inkscape and install paths2openscad. This turns the two-dimensional drawing into a 2D object that can be rendered in OpenSCAD and exported as a 3D printable STL file.

Does the project work? The results are great – the entire light mask is a single-wall print, and since this light mask doesn’t need any mechanical strength, it should hold up well. The clock looks much better than before, and [Tyler] has a new technique for making 3D objects for his 2D PCBs.

An Improvised Synthetic Aperture Radar

October 25, 2015 by 14 Comments

[Henrik] is at it again. Another thoroughly detailed radar project has shown up on his blog. This time [Henrik] is making some significant improvements to his previous homemade radar with the addition of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to his previous Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) system.

[Henrik’s] new design uses an NXP LPC4320 which uniquely combines an ARM Cortex-M4 MCU along with a Cortex-M0 co-processor. The HackRF also uses this micro as it has some specific features that can be taken advantage of here like the Serial GPIO (SGPIO) which can be tediously configured and high-speed USB all for ~$8 in single quantity. The mixed signal design is done in two boards, a 4 layer RF board and 2 layer digital board.

Like the gentleman he is, [Henrik] has included schematics, board files, and his modified source from the HackRF project in his github repo. There is simply too much information in his post to attempt to summarize here, if you need instant gratification check out the pictures after the break.

The write-up on his personal blog is impressive and worth look if you didn’t catch our coverage of his single board Linux computer, or his previous radar design.

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This Animatronic Hand Is So Metal

October 25, 2015 by 2 Comments

According to his Instructables profile, [bwebby] wants to make cool stuff in the special effects industry. We think he has a pretty good chance at it based on the animatronic hand he built.

The finger segments are made from copper pipe. They are connected to each other and to the sheet metal palm with tiny hinges and superglue. That stuff inside the finger segments is epoxy putty. It keeps the ends of the tendons made from bicycle gearing cable firmly attached to the fingertip segments, and provides a channel through the rest of the fingers. These cables run through 50mm aluminium tubes that are set in a sheet metal forearm, and they connect to high-torque servos mounted on a piece of MDF. [bwebby] used a Pololu Mini Maestro to control the servos using the board’s native USB interface and control software.

Watch [bwebby] run through some movements and try out the grip after the break. If you want to make an animatronic hand but aren’t ready for this type of undertaking, you could start with an approach closer to puppetry.

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BTTF Alarm Clock

Back To The Future Alarm Clock Is As Real As It Gets

October 24, 2015 by 14 Comments

While real time-travel is obviously not happening anytime soon, with this Back to the Future themed alarm clock, you can go to the future in seven hour eight hour increments by going to sleep. Great Scott!

[CrossleyAcoustics] spent the past few months designing and building this movie-prop worthy alarm clock, and it certainly shows. After designing everything on breadboards, he had custom PCBs made, he modeled the whole thing in Sketchup (first time he’s used it!) and even tried his hand at the sheet metal fabrication after shops quoted him thousands for what he wanted.

The coolest part of the build is that [CrossleyAcoustics] had some detailed drawings that he had made himself… when he was 8 years old. Talk about a plan coming together!

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