AVR Atmega Based PID Magnetic Levitator

December 5, 2013 by 33 Comments

[Davide] saw our recent post on magnetic levitation and quickly sent in his own project, which has a great explanation of how it works — he’s also included the code to try yourself!

His setup uses an Atmega8 micro-controller which controls a small 12V 50N coil using pulse-width-modulation (PWM). A hall effect sensor (Allegro A1302) mounted inside the coil detects the distance to the magnet and that data is used by a PID controller to automatically adjust the PWM of the coil to keep the magnet in place. The Atmega8 runs at 8Mhz and the hall effect sensor is polled every 1ms to provide an updated value for the PWM. He’s also thrown in an RGB LED that lights up when an object is being levitated!

So why is there a kid with a floating balloon? [Davide] actually built the setup for his friend [Paolo] to display at an art fair called InverART 2013!

After the break check out the circuit diagram and a short demonstration video of the device in action!

Oh yeah, those of you not impressed by magnetic levitation will probably appreciate acoustic levitation.

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Logic Analyzers And X11

December 5, 2013 by 18 Comments

logic

[Andrew] recently scored an awesome HP 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer, lucky dog. Even though this machine was built in 1992, it was a top of the line device back in the day and had a few very interesting features. This logic analyzer also had a few networking ports implementing FTP, NFS, TCP/IP, and the X11 protocols over a 10Base2 (“thinlan”) and 10BaseT (“ethertwist” seriously, that’s what’s in the manual) connections. The X11 protocol interested [Andrew] so he set this logic analyzer up so he could use it via his Linux box.

X Windows is simply a way to display GUI interfaces over a network. While today we usually only see X Windows apps confined to the desktop, in the bad old days of *NIXes you had to pay for, running a GUI app over a network was considered the wave of the future. The Internet replaced this idea with a palimpsest of JavaScript, but we digress…

[Andrew]’s new toy didn’t support DHCP, so after inputting the IP address manually, he checked the host file – still the same after twenty years – and connected with his Linux Mint box. The result is a remote control panel for the ‘ol girl in a garish color scheme that violates all modern sensibilities.

Fail Of The Week: Hackaday Writer’s First CNC Adventure

December 5, 2013 by 41 Comments

This Fail of the Week post focuses on a project from [Limkpin] aka [Mathieu Stephan], one of the Hackaday contributors. He wanted a CNC mill of his very own and decided to go with a kit that you assemble yourself. If it had been clear sailing we wouldn’t be talking about it here. Unfortunately he was met with a multitude of fails during his adventure. We’ll cover the highlights below.

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Fubarino Contest Example: A Sneaky IRC Bot

December 5, 2013 by 10 Comments

adam-fubar

You may have heard about Hackaday’s contest to win one of 20 Fubarino boards. We included an example entry from [Mike]. Here’s my example entry for the contest: An IRC search Bot powered by a Wicked Device WildFire board. We’ve all seen IRC bot’s before, but how many have you seen that can turn on an LED while running off a cell phone battery?

The IRC bot’s operation is fairly straightforward. It enters a channel and can be commanded to search.  The first two searches will return links to Google searches for the strings given.  Every third search however, will return a link to Hackaday’s search page. In the example below, “SedAwk” is an unsuspecting user, and “SearchRobot” is our bot.

SedAwk: SearchRobot: SEARCH Unicorns
SearchRobot: Search Complete! https://www.google.com/#q=Unicorns
SedAwk: SearchRobot: SEARCH Rainbows
SearchRobot: Search Complete! https://www.google.com/#q=Rainbows
SedAwk: SearchRobot: SEARCH Quadcopters
SearchRobot: Search Complete! http://hackaday.com/?s=Quadcopters
SedAwk: What the heck?

Follow along after the break to see what other tricks the bot has up its sleeve…

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The “Melt-O-Matic” – A Digital Melting Point Apparatus

December 5, 2013 by 13 Comments

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A common technique in organic chemistry is to determine the melting point of a specimen. While commercial options exist, [kymyst] decided to build one with similar (or better) functionality, and managed to keep it under $100. The basis of his rig is a 60W soldering iron. He simply replaced the normal soldering tip with an aluminum heating block that holds the capillary tubes and temperature probe. Two small fans are used to quickly cool the heating block, allowing fairly quick measurement times. It should be noted that building a project like this one will mean working with wires that carry 220V (or 115V, depending on your country). Please use proper precautions.

In case organic chemistry is on your list of ‘to learns’, [kymyst] included a nice writeup of the determination of melting points. It’s a great primer for those interested in learning more.

Using this setup, [kymyst] gets readings of ±0.1 °C. He mentions the possibility of adding a webcam for determining melting point automatically, something that would make this system competitive with much more expensive hardware.

The last time we saw one of these it used a hot glue gun as the heating element.

LearnCNC Game

December 5, 2013 by 5 Comments

Do you want to learn how a CNC machine works, but don’t have access to one (yet)? One of our tipsters just informed us of this great project that was created by a team of students from the University of British Columbia, and it’s an interactive 3D learning system that teaches everything about CNC machining.

We downloaded the “game” and it’s pretty cool — you get to walk around a virtual workshop and can click on various things to learn about their functions. Alternatively, you can go just go through their lessons (that appear when you click on things) on the website. It’s a great summary to get your feet wet in the world of CNC machining.

Beyond how the machines themselves work, the website also goes into great detail about the various applications you can use CNC machining for and physics behind tooling design.

Even if you’ve had a brief introduction to CNC machining before, this site provides a great summary of most everything — it’ll be very handy if you’re hoping to use a school’s machine shop for personal projects…

[Thanks Chris!]

LavaAMP Spectrum Analzyer

December 4, 2013 by 15 Comments

lavaamp

Is your dusty Lava Lamp just not cool enough anymore? What if you could make it bubble to the music? [Christian] and [Eric] managed to do just that.

No, they aren’t regular Lava Lamps. In fact, they look like oversize jam jars, but the video of them in action is pretty cool! They designed and built this system for the UIST 2013 Student Innovation Contest, and while there isn’t too much information on the actual build, the contest required everyone to use the exact same kit. The kit consists of 8 aquarium pumps, a PumpSpark controller board, assorted tubing and fittings and an optically-isolated serial interface for use with an Arduino or another kind of microcontroller. From there, it’s pretty easy to guess the rest — analyzing the audio, and timing the pumps according to the various levels.

Other competition entries of note include an awesome game of WaterPong, a Water Bottle Bagpipe, and even an Xbox H2O!

Stick around after the break to see the LavaAMP bubble to the bass.

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