3D Printering: Making A Thing In Blender, Part I

January 3, 2014 by 52 Comments

printering

In case you weren’t aware, having a 3D printer is nothing like owning a real-life Star Trek replicator. For one, replicators are usually found on Federation starships and not hype trains. Secondly, the details of how replicated objects are designed in the 24th century is an issue completely left unexplored by TNG, and DS9, and only a minor plot point in a few Voyager episodes. Of the most likely possibilities, though, it appears replicated objects are either initially created by ‘scanning’ them with a teleporter, or commanding the ship’s computer to conjure something out of the hologrid.

No, with your own 3D printer, if you want a unique object you actually have to design it yourself. Without a holodeck. Using your hands to move a mouse and keyboard. Savages.

This series of ‘Making a Thing’ tutorials aims to fix that. With this post, we’re taking a look at Blender, an amazing 3D modeling and animation package.

Because we still haven’t figured out the best way to combine multiple blog posts together as a single resource − we’re working on that, though − here’s the links to the previous “Making a Thing” posts:

This list is sure to grow thanks to your suggestions on what 3D modeling software to feature, but for now let’s make a thing in Blender.

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3D Acoustic Manipulation: Seemingly-Unreal Levitation Using Soundwaves

January 3, 2014 by 33 Comments

Wow. [Yoichi Ochiai], [Takayuki Hoshi] and [Jun Rekimoto] are researchers from the University of Tokyo and the Nagoya Institute of Technology, and they have just learned how to airbend.

Using a series of standing ultrasound waves, it is possible to suspend small particles at the sound pressure nodes. The acoustic axis of the ultrasound beam is parallel to gravity, which also allows the objects to be manipulated along the fixed axis by varying the phase or frequencies of the sound. By adding a second ultrasound beam perpendicular to the first it is possible to localize the pressure node, or focal point, and levitate small objects around a 2D plane.

In their demonstrations they float foam particles, a resistor, an LED, they show off the waves using a piece of dry ice, and even manage to float a small screw.

Sound like crazy talk? Just watch the video.

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Fire At The Geek Group

January 3, 2014 by 121 Comments

Geek Group

The Geek Group, an absurdly large and well stocked hackerspace in Grand Rapids, Michigan caught fire yesterday.

You may recall The Geek Group from their many over-the-top projects that include a quarter shinker, a 200,000 Watt Tesla coil, enough capacitors to kill a demi-god, and a giant robot that crushes TVs. From what TGG has shown on their website and their YouTube, they have an amazing space that could still be the home of quite a few amazing builds.

According to Geek Group head honcho [Chris], the fire was caused by an overheated electric motor. No one was at the space at the time, but the fire was hot enough to crack the exterior brick and melt porcelain insulators in their high voltage lab. To add insult to injury, this was only TGG’s second day of being open to the public.

The folks at The Geek Group are looking for volunteers for their cleanup, so if you’re around the Grand Rapids area and would like to pitch in, head on over around noon today.

A Low Cost Dual Discriminator Module For The Easy-phi Project

January 3, 2014 by 9 Comments

A few months ago I presented you the Easy-phi project, which aims at building a simple, cheap but intelligent rack-based open hardware/software platform for hobbyists. With easy-phi, you simply have a rack to which you add cards (like the one shown above) that perform the functions you want.

Recently my team finished testing our FPGA-based discriminator or “universal input” if you prefer. As easy-phi cards use a well-defined electrical signal to communicate with each other, we needed to make a card that would translate the different kinds of electrical signals from the outside, as well as perform plenty of other functions. It was therefore designed to have a 100MHz input bandwidth with an AC/DC coupled 50 ohm/high impedance input stage (x2) and 4 easy-phi outputs. For this module, we picked the (old) spartan3-an FPGA to perform the different logic functions that may be needed by the final users (high speed counter, OR/XOR/AND, pulse creation,…). Using the cortex-m3 microcontroller present on the board, it may be easily reconfigured at will. All design resources may be found on our Github, and you can always have a look at our official website.

Myst(ery) Box

January 3, 2014 by 7 Comments

Anyone remember the game Myst? Well, [Michael] and his girlfriend have been playing quite a bit of it lately, so for her birthday, he decided to make her something inspired from it.

For those unaware of the classic that is the Myst series, it is a set of games that started back in 1993 where you assume the role of the Stranger who gets to explore other planets (called Ages) to solve various logical and mechanical puzzles.

Anyway, [Michael] got his girlfriend tickets to visit GC319QK (a geocache site requiring diving) — since the gift is a relatively small token, it was logical for [Michael] to make a fancy box for it — and that’s exactly what he did. It’s a peculiar little wooden box with LEDs, a button, a latch, an unplugged wire, different rods and strange looking sensors — and it is a very clever little puzzle.

We could explain to you how it works (with the Arduino, phototransistors and maybe the source code), but instead we think you’ll enjoy watching [Michael’s] video of it.

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Spoofing Pokemon Trades

January 2, 2014 by 16 Comments

[Adan] had an old Game Boy sitting around, and without anything better to do decided to investigate the link cable protocol with a microcontroller. He had a Stellaris Launchpad for the task, but initially had no project in mind. What he came up for this adventure in serial protocols is a first gen Pokemon trade spoofer that allows him to obtain pokemon without having two Game Boys, or for the weird ones out there, “friends.”

The Game Boy link protocol is extremely well documented (dead link, try Internet Archive), so getting data from the Game Boy to the Launchpad was as simple as a soldering up an old link cable connector to a piece of perf board. After figuring out the electronics, [Adan] looked at what happened when two Pokemon games tried to trade pokemon. When two Game Boys are linked, there are two in-game options: trade or battle. Looking at the data coming after the ‘trade’ option, [Adan] found something that could possibly be the data structure of the Pokemon being sent. He reverse-engineered this all by himself before discovering this is also  well documented.

Bringing everything together, [Adan] figured out how to trade non-existent Pokemon with a small dev board. Right now he’s only transmitting Pokemon that are hard-coded on the Launchpad, but it’s very possible to transmit the Pokemon values in real-time over USB.

Thanks [Dan] for sending this in, and no, we don’t know what’s up with the influx of Pokemon posts over the last week. Video of the spoof below.

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Gesture Based Security Lock

January 2, 2014 by 13 Comments

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A team of students from Cornell University are looking into alternative ways of creating a security system that can be locked or unlocked by using physical gestures in an enclosed space.

It is the final year project for [Ankur], [Darshan] and [Saisrinivasan] in their MEng of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The system prototype is capable of recording a gesture and then comparing the gesture with future gestures to lock or unlock the system. Consider it like a secret handshake to get into the office!

To analyze the gesture they are using four SparkFun proximity sensors setup in a linear array to sense the distance a hand is moved. An ATMega1284P is used to convert the analog sensor signal to digital for further processing. The project is extremely well documented, as it appears to be the final report for the project.

A short video after the break shows off the prototype and gives a good explanation of how the system works.

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