[Ken Shirriff] Explains The TL431

May 26, 2014 by Adam Fabio 5 Comments

[Ken Shirriff] had to get down into a bit of semiconductor physics to give us an explanation of the TL431, which he calls “the most common chip you’ve never heard of”. [Ken] may well be right about the TL431. Even Texas Instruments can’t nail down a single name for it. Their page for the part calls it a “Adjustable Precision Shunt Regulator”, yet the datasheet is titled “Precision Programmable Reference”. You’d think they’d have figured this out by now, considering the TL431 was launched in 1978.

TL431’s can most often be found hiding in switching power supplies. The Apple II switcher had one, and many current ATX supplies have 3. Uninformed parts scroungers may miss them, as they often hide in TO-92 or SOT-23 packages. The TL431 is no transistor though. The TL431’s operation is actually pretty simple. When the voltage at the reference pin is above 2.5V, the output transistor conducts. When the reference voltage falls below 2.5V, the device stops conducting. In a power supply, this operation would help the control electronics maintain a stable output voltage.

The real subject of [Ken’s] article is the layout of the TL431 on its silicon die. Rather than bust out the fuming nitric acid himself, [Ken] uses some of [Zeptobars’] decapped chip images. Inside the TL431, [Ken] discovers that transistors aren’t made up of the three layer NPN or PNP sandwich we’ve come to know and love. In fact, the base isn’t even in the middle. Transistors, including the BJT’s used in the TL431, can be assembled in a nearly infinite number of ways.

[Ken] moves on to the resistors and capacitors of the TL431. The capacitors are formed two different ways, one as a reverse biased diode, and the other as a more traditional plate style capacitor. The resistors include fuses which can be blown to slightly increase the resistance values.

The takeaway from all this is that once you get down to the silicon level, it’s a whole new ball game. Chip layout may look a bit like PCB layout, but the rules are completely different. [Ken] mentions that in a future blog he’ll go into further detail on the operation of the TL431’s bandgap voltage reference. We’ll be watching for that one, [Ken]!

The Design And Fabrication Of A Digital Clock

May 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

This clock is the first thing that [Kevin] ever made, way back before the Arduinofication of making, and long before the open hardware community exploded, and before the advent of cheap, custom PCBs. It’s an elegant design, with six seven-segment displays, a time base derived from line frequency, controlled entirely by 74-series logic chips. There was only one problem with it: it kinda sucked. Every so often, noise would become a factor and the time would be displayed as 97:30. The project was thrown in the back of the closet, a few revisions were completed, and 13 years later, [Kevin] wanted to fix his first clock.

The redesign used the same 1Hz timebase to control the circuitry, but now the timebase is controlled by a DS3231 RTC with an ATtiny85. The bridge rectifier was thrown out in favor of a much simpler 7805 regulator, and a new board was designed and sent off to OSHPark. Oh, how times have changed.

With the new circuitry, [Kevin] decided to construct a new case. The beautiful Hammond-esque enclosure was replaced with the latest and greatest of DIY case material – laser cut acrylic. Before, [Kevin] would put a jumper on the 1Hz timebase derived from the line frequency to set the clock – a task that makes plugging a clock in exactly at midnight a much simpler solution. Now, the clock has buttons to set the hours and minutes. Much improved, but still an amazing look at how far DIY electronics have come in a little over a decade.

Vector Graphic Flappy Bird Harder Than It Should Be

May 26, 2014 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

The dark room at Maker Faire was loud, after all it’s where Arc Attack was set up plus several other displays that had music. But if you braved the audio, and managed not to experience a seizure or migraine from all the blinking you were greeted with these sharply glowing vector displays on exhibit at the TubeTime booth. We did the best we could with the camera work, but the sharpness of the lines, and contrast of the phosphorescent images against the black screen still seems to pop more if viewed in person.

This isn’t [Eric’s] first attempt at driving high-voltage tube displays. We previously covered his dekatron kitchen timer. But we’d say he certainly stepped things up several notches in the years between then and now. He blogged about Asteroids, which is running on the same hardware as the Flappy Bird demo from our video above. An STM32F4 Discovery board is running a 6502 emulator to push the game to [Eric’s] CRT vector driver hardware.

Just before we were done at the booth, [Eric] turned to us with a twinkle in his eye. He confessed his delight in purposely leaving out any button debounce from the Flappy Bird demo. As if it wasn’t hard enough it tends to glitch after passing just a few of the pipe gates. Muhuhahaha!

Achievement Unlocked: Drill A Square Hole With A Rotary Broach

May 26, 2014 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

There are times in a man’s life when he needs to drill a square hole through an 8mm thick piece of steel. If that man doesn’t have one or two thousand dollars to spend on commercial tooling to do this, he might just shrug his shoulders and make do with round holes. But if that man is [Chris], he rolls up his sleeves and makes his own tool to drill square holes with a rotary broach.

This tool that [Chris] has named the Wobble Drive drills a square hole by applying force to each of the corners of a square bit one a time. How, you might ask, did he achieve this? With a two-part tool and the power of offset driving. He took a cylindrical chunk of steel and bored a little cup for a ball bearing to move around in. He didn’t have one rolling around his tool box, so he liberated one from a 2209 double row self-aligning cylindrical bore with a screwdriver. Then he hammered a square rod of steel into a hole in the other end and made the rod’s bottom a little bit concave on the grinding wheel. He also took a little off the sides to aid the weeble wobble action. A second steel cylinder with a ball bearing cup sits in the chuck of his Bridgeport mill and wobbles the tool bit through the power of a 1/4″ offset.

[Chris] tested it on the same sacrificial plate he used to demonstrate the awesome power of Lil’ Screwy, his 100-ton homebrew press. He drilled a 3/8″ round pilot hole and then went to work with the Wobble Drive. The tool bit side proved to be too long to provide the requisite stroke, so he cut it down by about half. Once the tool has chewed through the steel, the tool bit decouples at the ball bearing and [Chris] has himself a square hole and that much more hacking cred.

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Servo Stock, The Future Of 3D Printers

May 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 101 Comments

printer If you think about it, the RepRaps and other commercial 3D printers we have today are nothing like the printers that will be found in the workshops of the future. They’re more expensive than they need to be, and despite the RepRap project being around for a few years now, no one has cracked the nut of closed loop control yet. [mad hephaestus], [Alex], and [Will] over on the Hackaday Projects site are working on the future of 3D printing with the Servo Stock, a delta printer using servos and closed loop control to build a printer for about a quarter of the price as a traditional 3D printer.

The printer itself is a Kossel derivative that is highly modified to show off some interesting tech. Instead of steppers, the printer has three axes controlled by servos. On each axis is a small board containing a magnetic encoder, and a continuous rotation servo. With this setup, the guys are able to get 4096 steps per revolution with closed loop control that can drive the servo to with ±2 ticks.

The electronics and firmware are a clean sheet redesign of the usual 3D printer loadout. The motherboard uses a Pic32 running at 80MHz. Even the communication between the host and printer has been completely redesigned. Instead of Gcode, the team is using the Bowler protocol, a system of sending packets over serial, TCP/IP, or just about any other communications protocol you can think of.

Below is a video of the ServoStock interpreting Gcode on a computer and sending the codes and kinematics to the printer. It seems to work well, and using cheap servos and cut down electronics means this project might just be the first to break the $200 barrier for a ready to run 3D printer.

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A Wireless Computer Remote That Emulates A USB Keyboard

May 25, 2014 by Nick Conn 7 Comments

PCRemote

If you are anything like [Antoine], you would love to be able to control your PC with a simple hand-held remote control from anywhere in your house. [Antoine] wrote in to tell us about his wireless computer remote that emulates a USB keyboard, making it suitable for any device that uses a USB keyboard.

His blog post is very well written and contains a ton of design information and background on the project. He initially wanting to easily control his PC’s music from anywhere in his house without needing to be within line of sight of his computer. The end result is a very handy remote that can be used to change music, video, and even launch applications on his computer. The system consists of a base station for his remote that connects to the computer and acts as a USB keyboard, and the remote itself. The base station uses V-USB on an Arduino to interface with the computer, and VirtualWire to handle the wireless protocol for the remote. For those of you who don’t know about VirtualWire (now superseded by RadioHead), it is a very cool Arduino library that lets you easily use raw wireless interfaces (also called vanilla wireless interfaces).

Without going into too much detail here (be sure to see the actual post for more information), the remote itself was redesigned after the initial proof of concept to maximize battery life. The final power consumption is very impressive, resulting in a battery life of more than two years! This remote system is very well put together and contains many aspects that can easily be reused for other projects.

Abandoned DIY Laser Cutter installed in Ikea Desk

Ikea Desk Laser Cutter Combo

May 25, 2014 by Rich Bremer 3 Comments

Craigslist can be a good source for finding someone else’s abandoned projects. Besides being extremely jealous, you’ll agree that [Mike’s] find is atypical of the normal Craigslist listings. He scored a 75% complete group of laser cutter parts for $500. That included the XY frame, stepper motors, Gecko motor drivers, optics, and 40 watt CO2 laser tube. He paired the laser parts with another Craigslist find, a $15 desk. A few more parts and 3 weeks of tinkering later, [Mike] had a working DIY mutant Ikea Desk Laser Cutter.

The laser cutter has a 23 x 14 inch work envelope and is controlled via Mach3. The X Axis of the frame had a little bit of wobble in it so [Mike] added a THK linear rail and bearing to stiffen it up. To add a little bit of mistake proofing to the laser, [Mike] put a water flow sensor in the laser tube cooling system. The laser will not turn on unless water is pumping to cool the laser tube. Wrecking your laser tube by accident would be a total bummer!

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