Solder Sucking the Easy Way

Introducing The Solder Sucker 9000

March 3, 2015 by 73 Comments

Using a regular plunger style solder sucker is tedious at best, and usually not that effective. If you’re trying to salvage components off a PCB, sometimes it can take longer than it’s worth to do — short of reflowing the entire board that is! But what if you had something to desolder individual components faster?

After getting fed up with his cheap plunger-based solder sucker, [electro1622] decided to try a different tactic. He reuses components from old PCBs all the time, so he tried something a bit unorthodox to remove them. Compressed air.

Now let’s just preface this with it will be messy, so you might want to set up a box to catch the removed solder. Simply use your iron of choice to heat up the solder globs holding back your components, and then blast it with compressed air out of a small nozzle. Way faster than a solder sucker.

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X-Carve, The Logical Upgrade To A Shapeoko

March 3, 2015 by 33 Comments

When it comes to small CNC carving machines for hackerspaces and extremely well-equipped garages, the Shapeoko, or something like it, has been the default machine. It’s dead simple – a Dremel attached to linear rails – and is useful for everything from milling PCBs to routing complex woodworking project to plotting designs with a pen. Now, [Bart Dring], the guy behind the Buildlog.net lasers and Inventables have teamed up to create the next generation of carving machines. It’s called the X-Carve, and while it’s fully compatible with the Shapeoko 2, it adds a few improvements that make for a much better machine.

The X-Carve does away with the Dremel-based spindle and replaces it with something that can produce torque. There’s a 24VDC spindle in the stock arrangement that will give you speed control through Gcode. There is, of course, adapters to fit the Dewalt and Bosch routers most commonly used in these types of machines.

As far as the gantry goes, the X and Y axes are makerslide; no change there. The Z axis leadscrew has an optional upgrade to Acme threaded rod, an improvement over the M8 threaded rod found in just about every other DIY machine kit. The entire machine is basically all the upgrades a Shapeoko should have, with stronger corners, NEMA 23 motors, and increased rigidity.

There are a few versions of the X-Carve, ranging from an upgrade kit to the Shapeoko 2 to a fully loaded kit with a square meter of machine space. The big, high-end kit ships for around $1250, but a smaller kit with 500mm rails, NEMA 17s, and threaded rod lead screw is available for around $800.

[Bart] and [Zach], the founder of Inventables sat down and shot a video going over all the features of the X-Carve. You can check that out below.

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Retrotechtacular: Crystals Go To War

March 3, 2015 by 51 Comments

More than one of our readers suggested we highlight this beautifully-shot process documentary about the laborious and precise manufacturing of piezoelectric quartz crystals in the early 1940s. Just a few years later, Bell Labs would perfect a method of growing synthetic crystals, sending droves of brave men and daintily-handed women from the Reeves Sound Laboratories to the unemployment line.

Early radio equipment relied upon tuned or L-C circuits for clocking. These were prone to drift by a few kHz, which prompted the use of crystal oscillators for stable frequencies in the 1920s. The lives of our armed forces and those of our WWII allies depended on reliable communication equipment, so the crystal oscillators they used were top shelf, produced by hand from Brazilian crust.

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Origami Busts A Move With Dancing Paper

March 3, 2015 by 20 Comments

Origami cranes are cool, but do you know what’s cooler? Origami cranes dancing to the beat. That’s the challenge [Basami Sentaku] took on when he created Dancing Paper (YouTube link). You might remember [Basami] from his 8 bit harmonica hack. In Dancing Paper, paper cranes seem to dance all on their own – even performing some crazy spinning moves. Of course, the “magic” is due to some carefully written code, and magnets, lots of magnets.

Using magnets to move objects from below isn’t a new concept. Many of us have seen the “ice skating pond” Christmas decoration which uses the same effect. Unlike the skating pond,Dancing Paper has moving parts (other than the cranes themselves). Under the plastic surface are a series of individually controlled electromagnets. Each of the supporting dancers has a line of four magnets, while the featured dancer in the center has a 5×5 matrix. The 41 electromagnets were wound around bolts with the help of a Tamiya motor and gearbox.

The actual dance moves are controlled by C code which appears to be running on an Atmel microcontroller. Of course a microcontroller wouldn’t be able to drive those big coils, so some beefy TO-220 case transistors were employed to switch the loads. The cranes themselves needed a bit of modification as well. Thin pieces of wire travel from the neodymium magnets on their feet up to the body of the crane. The wire provides just enough support to keep the paper from collapsing, while still being flexible enough to boogie down.

Click past the break to see Dancing Paper in action!

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BeagleSNES For Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES, And – Yes – SNES

March 3, 2015 by 18 Comments

By far the most common use for the Raspberry Pi is shoving a few dozen emulators on an SD card and calling it a day. Everybody’s got to start somewhere, right? There are other tiny, credit card-sized Linux boards out there, and [Andrew] is bringing the same functionality of the Raspi to the BeagleBone Black and BeagleBoard with BeagleSNES, an emulator for all the sane pre-N64 consoles.

BeagleSNES started as a class project in embedded system design, but the performance of simply porting SNES9X wasn’t very good by default. [Andrew] ended up hacking the bootloader and kernel, profiling the emulator, and slowly over the course of three years of development making this the best emulator possible.

After a few months of development, [Andrew] recently released a new version of BeagleSNES that includes OpenGL ES, native gamepad support through the BeagleBone’s PRU, and support for all the older Nintendo consoles and portables. Video demos below.

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Fix A Broken DS By Removing A Screen

March 2, 2015 by 8 Comments

There are apparently a lot of broken Nintendo DS Lites out and about on eBay, and [Fede] has gotten his hands on one. His idea was to essentially turn one of these DS Lites into a SS (single screen?) (.es, Google translate) by modding the case, and he’s done it with pretty spectacular results.

If you’re going to do a case mod, you should go all out. To that end, [Fede] started by taking everything out of the DS and tossing the original 1000 mAh battery in favor of a 4000 mAh battery. From there he is able to shoehorn the two PCBs into the case with the speaker in between, which he notes doesn’t sound as nice as the original but works well enough.

After reshaping the plastic case in a few subtle ways and putting a few layers of paint on it, [Fede] now has a single-screen Nintendo DS for €2 plus parts and paint. While we’ve seen similar mods before, we’d be interested to see this one in action; some DS games don’t utilize the second screen as much as others, so perhaps this wouldn’t play every DS game perfectly, but for the price it can’t be beat.

The Hard Drive MIDI Controller

March 2, 2015 by 14 Comments

[shantea] builds MIDI controllers, and after a successful first endeavor with a matrix of buttons and knobs, he decided to branch out to something a little bit cooler. It’s called Ceylon, and it’s effectively a turntable controller built from an old hard drive.

As a contrast to the first MIDI controller, this would be a stripped-down build, with just three faders, LEDs for eye candy, a pair of pots for gain control, and a hard disk surrounded by six anti-vandal buttons. The hard disk is the star of the show, acting as a rotary encoder.

When manually spun, the hard disk generates a few phases of sinusoidal waves. The faster you spin it, the higher the amplitude and frequency. These signals are far too weak to be sampled directly by a microcontroller, and for digital control – as in, MIDI – you don’t need to read the analog signals anyway. These signals were turned digital with the help of an LM339 quad comparator. With two of these comparators and signals out of the hard disk that are 90 degrees out of phase, quadrature encoding is pretty easy.

The software for this MIDI controller is based on the OpenDeck Platform, a neat system that allows anyone to create their own MIDI controllers and devices.  It’s also a great looking board that seems to perform well. Video below.

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