Fixing Misaligned PVC With Kerf Bends

April 4, 2014 by 18 Comments

misalignment-coupler

Our old pal [Jeremy Cook] is doing his own remix of [Theo Jansen]’s Strandbeest, and like the original, he’s using PVC pipe. Unlike the originals, he’s powering it with motors, not wind, and this has caused a few problems in transmitting mechanical power through a piece of PVC. Nothing is perfect, and in a few points in the legs movement the shaft shakes violently. One motor was lost and another nearly so before [Jeremy] came up with a flex coupler made from PVC.

The technique [Jeremy] is using has seen a lot of use with people building laser cut enclosures. It’s called kerf bending, and it works simply by cutting a few slits in a panel that allow it to bend slightly. This technique was replicated by [Jeremy] on a miter saw, cutting eight slots halfway through a one inch PVC pipe, with each successive cut offset 90 degrees.

The new design works well for transmitting power, and he’s not ruining motors any more. Check out the video below.

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Throwback Handheld Built With Modern Hobby Hardware

April 4, 2014 by 23 Comments

magpi-gaming-handheld

Remember all of those fantastically horrible handheld LCD games that hit the toy stores back in the ’90s. You know, the ones that had custom LCD screens to make for some fake animation. Here’s an example of what those should have been. It’s an LCD-based handheld with some soul.

The entire thing is roughly the size of a television remote, with a 3D printed case making it very presentable. But looking at the wiring which hides inside proves this is one-of-a-kind. The Arduino Pro Mini is probably the biggest difference in technology from back in the day compared to now. It has plenty of space for all of the different settings and games shown off in the clip below. The user interface itself is definitely a throw-back though. The Nokia 3310 screen boasts a whopping 84×48 pixel monochrome area. There are four buttons serving as a d-pad, and two as action buttons. Perhaps the greatest feature (besides the printed case we already mentioned) is the ability to recharge the internal battery via USB.

[Zippy314] built this with his son. What’s more fun: learning to program the games, or mastering them and discovering the bugs you missed along the way?

 

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Blinkenschild, The RGB LED Display For Every Occasion

April 3, 2014 by 33 Comments

turd

One morning [overflo] decided to protest the European Parliament’s stance on equine rights of defecation, a cherished liberty dating back to the time of Charlemagne. The best way to do this is, of course, blinking lights. He calls his project Blinkenschild, and it’s one of the best portable LED displays we’ve seen.

The display is based around fifteen RGB-123 LED panels, each containing an 8×8 matrix of WS2811 LEDs. That’s 960 pixels, all controlled with a Teensy 3.1. Power is supplied by fifteen LiPo cells wired together in parallel giving him 6 Ah of battery life. Clunky, yes, but it’s small enough to fit in a backpack and that’s what [overflo] had sitting around anyway.

The animations for the display are generated by Glediator, an unfortunately not open source control app for LED matrices. Glediator sends data out over a serial port but not over IP or directly into a file. Not wanting to carry a laptop around with him, [overflo] created a virtual serial port and dumped the output of Glediator into a file so it could be played back stored on an SD card and controlled with an Android app. Very clever, and just the thing to raise awareness of horse and Internet concerns.

Video below.

UPDATE: Check out [overflo’s] clarification in the comments below.

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Raspberry Pi UPS Using Supercapacitors

April 3, 2014 by 21 Comments

What happens when you want to integrate a Raspberry Pi into some kind of project that gets turned on and off with mains voltage? Do you power the Pi separately, or make a UPS for it?

[Lutz Lisseck] decided he wanted to turn his ambient-lamp (Rundbuntplasma) on and off with only the main power switch in his Hackerpsace. He could build a traditional UPS using a battery pack (it’s only 5V after all!) but decided to take it a step further. He picked up a pair of 50F supercapacitors. This way his UPS would last longer than his Pi would! The caps store just enough power that when the main supply is cut, a GPIO notices, tells the Pi, and it begins a shutdown sequence lasting about 30 seconds.

While [Lutz] is using two 2.7V supercapacitors, he mentions it would be a lot cheaper to use a step-up converter instead of putting them in series — but he had the caps on hand so decided to use both.

If you need it to last a bit longer, you could make one with rechargeable batteries…

LightByte: Animated Shutters

April 3, 2014 by 28 Comments

lighrbright

Here’s another interesting project to come out of the MIT Media Lab — it’s called LightByte, and it’s all about interacting with sunlight and shadows in a new, rather unorthodox way.

We suppose its technical name could be a massive interactive sun pixel facade, but that’s a bit too much of a mouthful. What you really want to know is how it works, and the answer is, a lot of servos. We weren’t able to find an exact number but the hardware behind LightByte includes well over 100 servos, and a matrix of Arduinos to control them. While that is quite impressive by itself, it gets better — it’s actually completely interactive; recognizing gestures, responding to text messages and emails, and you can even draw pictures with the included “wand”.

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Some Tips About Tips

April 3, 2014 by 15 Comments

hackadayTipsaboutTips02

Gather, boys and girls, while we take a moment to talk about submitting projects via the Hackaday Tips Line. Come across something really cool that you think deserves a mention on our page? Let us know about it! Did you yourself make something really cool? Tell us about that, too! It doesn’t matter if it’s a project that’s been sitting on some dark corner of the Internet for a few years. If we haven’t seen it yet, we want to.

Don’t think your project is good enough for Hackaday? You’re probably too self-critical. We’re after hacks: it’s the idea that counts. Not polished? No problem. The only thing that needs to be complete is your description of the hack.

Stick with us after the jump; we’ve got plenty of tips about tips to help you out.

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Turning The Makerbot Into A Tattoo Machine

April 3, 2014 by 24 Comments

tattoo

ENSCI les Ateliers, the famous design school in Paris, had a “Public Domain Remix” and hackathon recently, with teams splitting up to remix public domain and other free-to-use IP in projects. Most of the teams came up with similar ideas, but one team went above and beyond the call of duty; they turned a 3D printer into a tattoo machine, capable of inking a real, live human test subject.

The build began by plotting a circle with a pen onto a piece of paper. This evolved into printing a tool holder for a tattoo machine graciously provided by an amateur tattoo artist. Tests with “artificial skin” (any one care to hazard a guess at what that is?) were promising, and the team moved on to a human guinea pig.

The biggest problem the team faced is that humans aren’t flat. They tried a few tricks to tighten the skin around the area to be tattooed – metal rings, elastics, and finally the inner tube from a scooter. In the end, the team was able to tattoo a small circle on the forearm of the test subject.

It’s an extremely simple and small tattoo, and scaling this build up to a sleeve would be difficult. A better solution would be to create a point cloud of an arm before going for a much larger tattoo.

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