Embedding PCBs In 3D Prints

June 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

The folks over at Lunchbox Electronics are working on a very cool prototype: embedding LEDs inside standard 1×1 Lego bricks. Being a prototype, they needed a cheap way to produce Lego bricks stuffed with electronics. It turns out a normal 3D printer has okay-enough resolution, but how to put the electronics in the bricks? Gcode wizardry, of course.

The electronics being stuffed into the bricks isn’t much – just a small PCB with an LED. It does, however, need to get inside the brick. This requires stopping the 3D printer at the right layer, moving the print head out of the way, inserting the PCB, and moving the head back to where it stopped.

Gcode to the rescue. By inserting a few lines into the Gcode of the print, the print can be paused, the print head raised and returned, and the print continued.

If you want to check out what these light up Lego look like, There’s a Kickstarter happening now. It’s exactly what the 80s space sets needed, only thirty years late.

Caption CERN Contest – Tabletop Projection

June 4, 2015 by Adam Fabio 8 Comments

Week 17 of the Caption Cern Contest on Hackaday.io is now a polished sheet metal memory, but the captions live on! Thanks to everyone who entered. We may never know exactly what these scientists and their ladder holding friend were up to. We do know a bit more about some of the equipment in that photo though! Astute reader [Pierlu] dropped a photo comment here on the Blog showing some interesting lawn ornaments over at CERN. The device to the right looks quite a bit like the device on the right side of our original image. We don’t have a close-up to be sure, but chances are this is part of a Cockcroft–Walton generator.

The Funnies:

“…and six cute little kittens, too. I wonder how she got in here? Hey, hold that ladder steady, Schrödinger!” – [sbi.gaijin]
“Good news: the shrink ray worked. Bad news: we have to escape the janitor’s vacuum cleaner” – [Cody]
“Archeology Professor Ammit Duat from the University of Cairo, assisting CERN engineer Jack Orsiris in changing the locks on the door to the Egyptian underworld” – [carbonfiber]

This week’s winner is [alj5432] with “Sticking with CERN’s usual “Go Big or Go Home” theme,
scientists make adjustments to LHC’s massive “Press To Start” Button.” We’re sure [alj5432] will enjoy probing digital circuits with his new Logic Pirate From The Hackaday Store! Congratulations [alj5432]!

Week 18

CERN is no stranger to innovative display systems. That should be no surprise, considering CERN staff are trying to work with massive amounts of data collected by thousands of scientists. Here we see one of those systems, a projection table of some sort.

Today video projectors are relatively cheap and easy to make, thanks to advances in LCD and MEMS technology. Back when this image was shot in 1979 though, video projectors were expensive and rare commodities. What was this scientist doing?

You tell us!

Once again, we’re giving away a Logic Pirate from The Hackaday Store.

Add your humorous caption as a comment to this project log. Make sure you’re commenting on the contest log, not on the contest itself.

As always, if you actually have information about the image or the people in it, let CERN know on the original image discussion page.

Good Luck!

Weekly Winners: Stickvise

June 4, 2015 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

We’re in the middle of an epic run to award $50,000 in loot to Hackaday Prize entries this summer. This week we doled out a Stickvise low-profile PCB vise to 65 different projects! This actually started out as a really great project on Hackaday.io.

Winners are listed below, please check out their projects; skull the ones you find awesome and leave your words of encouragement as comments on those projects. Then get to work and submit something of your own. Your odds of winning during these weekly giveaways are quite good. Our recommendation for your best chances at winning are to polish up the information you’re sharing — tell the whole story of what you’ve done so far and what you plan to do. Post some images whether pictures of the prototype, renders of what you are working on, or hand-drawn diagrams from the back of a napkin.

Normally we launch the following week’s contest in this winner-announcement post. But we’re changing it up a bit this time around. Look for a post on Monday that shares all the details of what is coming next!

Last Week’s Winners of 65 Stickvise

Each project creator will find info on redeeming their prize as a message on Hackaday.io.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Jacquard Loom Becomes A Display

June 4, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

The world’s leading expert on mechanical computers wasn’t [Charles Babbage]; sure, he could design stuff, but eventually you need to actually build something. We are now graced with the expertise of [Chris Fenton]. He’s built mechanical calculators, a mechanical digital computer, and now a mechanical display inspired by the Jacquard loom.

[Chris] calls his creation the PixelWeaver, and the name isn’t far from the truth; it’s a 32-hook Jacquard style punch card reader that could be mounted over a small loom. Instead of weaving rugs and fabric, the PixelWeaver controls a 6×5 black and white display.

The PixelWeaver is built out of t-slot aluminum, 3D printed parts, and a web of thread to transfer motion from rotating cams to ratchets and pixels. The display itself is heavily inspired by a Lego mechanical display, and the cards that store the data for the display are laser-cut plywood. Interestingly, there’s nothing in this machine that couldn’t have been made 150 years ago; it’s the same technology used to weave rugs, although the necessity of a bitmap display in the Victorian era is a bit questionable.

You can see a few videos of the PixelWeaver below. If you’re wondering what else has come out of [Chris]’ mechanical computing lab, check out his digital computer and Fibonacci calculating set of gears. For a real treat, here’s a machine that will calculate all primes under 1000 in 30 years.

Continue reading “Jacquard Loom Becomes A Display” →

Prof Gershenfeld Speaks On Fab Labs And All-things Digital

June 4, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 2 Comments

Fab Labs have developed hand-in-hand with the all-too-familiar hackerspaces that we see today. If you’re curious to discover more about their past and future, [Prof Gershenfeld], founder of the Fab Lab, and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms brings us a fresh perspective on both these fab labs and the digital world we live in.

In a casual one-hour chat on Edge, [Prof Gershenfeld] dives deeply into the concept of digital in our world. We might consider digital to be a binarized signal, an analog waveform discretized into a 0 and 1 from which all of computer architecture is built upon today. Digital doesn’t just exist in the computing sense, however; it’s a concept that has been applied to communication, computation, and, these days: personal fabrication.

[Prof Gershenfeld’s] talk may highlight coming changes in the future, but changes are already happening today. These days, fab labs and hackerspaces serve their communities in a very special way. They take “experts-of-the-field” away from universities and isolated labs, and they scatter them all over the world. With this shift, anyone can walk through their doors and build a solid foundation in fields like embedded programming and computer aided manufacturing by striking a conversation with these local experts. In a nutshell, both spaces found a culture for development of expertise far more accessible to the world community than their university counterparts.

If you can spare the hour, put on some headphones, tune in, and resume your CAD work, PCB layout, or that Arduino library. You may discover that your work is built on a number of digital principles, and that your contributions push the rest farther along the development chain towards building something awesome.

Finally, if you’re interested in taking notes on building your own fab lab, have a look at the inventory, layout, and guidelines at the CBA website.

Lasersaur That Cuts 1/2″ Plywood And 10mm Acrylic (Pew-Pew)

June 4, 2015 by George Graves 54 Comments

Remember when building your own 3D printer was a big deal? We’re starting to think that building your own laser cutter might be the next hot topic.

Boasting a 16,000 square-foot facility, the Dallas Makerspace is an impressive collaboration of local artists, engineers, makers, and thinkers. Recently they embarked on building a serious laser cutting machine. They chose to go with the an open-hardware design rather than buying an off-the-shelf unit. What they built is based on the Lasersaur plans. (Another popular open-source build is the buildlog.net unit.)

They ended up with a huge 24″ by 48″ cutting bed and with a laser tube rated for 100 watts continuous output. It can cut 1/2″ plywood and 10mm acrylic with ease. The entire machine is built from 20mm Misumi aluminum t-slot extrusions, making more like a giant erector set then a commercial built machine. We hadn’t seen too many of the Lasersaur builds out in the wild, so we thought you might like to see one too.

Now, before you start ordering parts to build your own, you should know that a top of the line build like this will run you about $7-10k. But by comparison if you were to go with something with the same cutting area and power, you’d be looking at something like the “Epilog Fusion 40” at a whopping $40k. With that said, we expect to see more budget laser cutter builds. Cost can be cut dramatically when you go for a smaller machine, with less cutting area, and less power. With that, you can use less expensive steppers, drivers, and frame. We suspect a little as $700 for a smart shopper could yield a very respectable laser cutter.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Dallas Makerspace, we took a video tour back in early 2014.

Tweet-Powered Bat Removes Effort Required To Obtain Pinata Contents

June 4, 2015 by Rich Bremer 9 Comments

A child filled game-launch event was happening in London and [Roo] was asked to use his serious making skills to construct a machine that would hit a pinata with a baseball bat. This is a great idea, well, because giving bats to a bunch of kids at a populated event probably wouldn’t end well. One of the characters from the game Skylanders is named ‘Painyatta‘ and that is whom the pinata is modeled after. Tweeting #HitPainyatta initiates a bat swing. The swing tweeter gets to keep any treats that happen to fall out.

The physical machine is pretty simple. Most of it is made of MDF and wood. A large base supports a tall, skinny box. Mounted on top is a large stepper motor with a long wooden arm holding an aluminum bat. Once a tweet came in, a moderator would check for offensive content (hey, there are kids around) using a custom Twitter API app, and if acceptable, the tweet would be displayed on an LED matrix while an Arduino controlled a stepper driver to spin the motor and swing the bat.

…no children were harmed in the making of this project…

Continue reading “Tweet-Powered Bat Removes Effort Required To Obtain Pinata Contents” →