A Balancing, Walking Cube Named Cubli

December 19, 2013 by 44 Comments

Meet Cubli! Cubli is a 15 x 15 x 15cm robotic cube that can roll around and balance on its corners using a series of gyroscopes.

The project has been going strong since February 2011 at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control in Zurich, where it is starting to get quite impressive. We first shared Cubli earlier this year, when it was just a wee 2-dimensional and corded 3-dimensional prototype.

Since then, it has become a fully enclosed wireless cube capable of jumping up on its end, balancing, and controlled falling — it can walk and roll! To do this, it has three large reaction wheels on each axis which can impart their angular velocity on the entire cube when the braked, allowing it to move in any direction.

According to the video after the break, the team is just building the cube “because they can”, however other researchers are interested in the technologies applications in self-assembling robots, and even planetary exploration.

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Staff Update And Philanthropy

December 19, 2013 by 16 Comments

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It is my pleasure to welcome two new members of the Hackaday team. [Kevin Darrah] and [Kristina Panos] both have electronics backgrounds, and following in the tradition of the entire team they are long-time readers of Hackaday. Both are already hard at work. You can learn a bit more about them on the Staff Page.

While I have your attention the writers, editors and I would like to thank our parent company. We frequently refer to them as the “Evil Overlords” (actually, they started it!) but it’s turning out to be a really great relationship. I asked them to make a donation to Wikipedia in Hackaday’s name and they were happy to do so. Not only do we often link to Wikipedia in our articles, our writers use it constantly when researching for posts. Thanks SupplyFrame!

Fail Of The Week: Baby Monitor Hack Ends In Facepalm

December 19, 2013 by 21 Comments

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Editor’s Note: This was the last Fail of the Week tip we had stored up. If you want to see the series continue on a weekly basis we need help finding more documented fails! Please look back through your projects and document the ones that didn’t go quite right. We also encourage you to send in links to other fails you’ve found. Just drop the links in our tips line. Thanks!

Now on with business. This is a baby monitor which [Eric] cleverly repaired, only to realize that he more than likely did it the hard way. The monitor was broken and went unused until his son figured out how to climb out of the crib, so he figured it was time to start monitoring again. Pulling the unit from the brink of the parts bin he set to work repairing the broken power connector.

Further inspection of the power adapter showed that it was spec’d to put out 5V at 1A. This falls in line with USB power, so he clipped the end off of a USB-B cable and used a hunk of proto-board to inject the 5V lines into the device. It was when it came time to reassemble the case that he flipped the board over and discovered an existing USB-B port. He could have just cut a hole in the case to get at the connector and plugged the un-altered cable in directly. Oh well… we’re sure it was fun figuring out his own custom solution!

2013-09-05-Hackaday-Fail-tips-tileFail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

A Weird Kind Of Printer

December 19, 2013 by 23 Comments

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[Benjamin] is just putting the finishing touches on his home-made, paper-stabbing, needle-printer!?

From a distance, it looks like the bare bones of a regular inkjet printer, but it’s not. Instead of an ink-head it features a needle — It’s kind of like a dot-matrix (hole-matrix?) printer. He’s using it for silk-screening masks, which we have to admit, must be pretty handy — it certainly makes soldering SMT’s less scary! It could also be used for embossing or even braille printing.

The frame of the printer is laser cut out of clear plastic, and two Nema 17 steppers drive the X & Y axes. A simple solenoid actuator provides the needle-stabby action. He’s controlling the whole thing using an Arduino, and sending the data to it using a call-and-response protocol to avoid any data losses. It was built for just shy of $200, which was his original goal for the project.

Check it out after the break!

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From CT Scans To 3D Prints

December 19, 2013 by 23 Comments

[the_digital_dentist] had a CT Scan done back in 2007 for treatment using orthodontics. Some how, he managed to get a copy of the CT Scan data from the lab, and has been playing around with it lately.

Since he has a 3D printer, the obvious end goal was to print his face using some of the data extracted from the CT Scan. This required a lot of manipulation to get it to the finished model you see above. He used an open source software called DeVIDE to process the data and export the STL. Not much information on this is given on his site, but in our research we managed to find another video documenting the process in DeVIDE on extracting the STL model from DICOM CT scan data.

5eachUnfortunately, the STL is far from being ready to print after being extracted; there is a lot of extraneous data that needs to be cleaned up. He used mesh editing software to help blow away the unnecessary details. We don’t know for sure what software [the_digital_dentist] used, but MeshLab is a good one.

After that, it was just a matter of printing the STL file. But the really cool thing about using data from CT scans is the amount of detail it captures… Stick around after the break to see an animated GIF demonstrating this.

Anyone want to print a copy of their own skull? It’d look great with a plating of Adamantanium…

Fubarino Contest: LED Matrix Game Console

December 19, 2013 by 3 Comments

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A good amount of entries for our Fubarino Contest are finally starting to roll into the tip line. Good thing, too, as this is the last day for submissions. What are you waiting for? we just passed the entry deadline.

The latest one comes from [Vojtak], who created an awesome looking minimalist game console with nothing but the power of sheer will, impressive determination, and an Arduino. The 8×8 red LED matrix is driven by the wonderful Max7219 display driver, and a 3-axis accelerometer and battery charging circuit fills out the build. On the software side, [Vojtak] has written a number of apps for his console including Snake, a maze game, and a lot of stuff that uses the built-in accelerometer.

As an entry to our Fubarino Contest,  [Vojtak] needed to implement our URL as an easter egg. By entering the Konami code and going into the console’s image viewer, you have four additional slots to save your artwork which are initially filled with something resembling the title pic for this post. The most impressive easter egg for this submission comes from the maze game. At first glance, nothing looks weird, but after scrolling around the huge maze you can see “HACKADAY.COM” written with pixels. Remind us to do this when we build a hedge maze.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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Thermochromic Imaging

December 19, 2013 by 10 Comments

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[clarii_d] is currently finishing up her thesis project on thermochromic pigment to silkscreen receipts. The idea behind it is that when a receipt is touched, part of it fades revealing a hidden message.

As you can guess, thermochromic paint is a type of substance that changes color when introduced to heat — or in this case, fades altogether. Remember when mood rings were all the rage? Same thing.

In her project she is using silkscreening to transfer text onto the back of receipt paper using regular ink. Once dried, she silkscreens an image over top of the message, this time using a thermochromic pigment. The result is a slightly obscured image, but after holding it for a few seconds, it disappears and only the text remains.

Color-changing anything is a bit gimmicky, but we think [clarii_d’s] project is a pretty cool and unique application of it. A few years ago we shared another interesting project utilizing thermochromism; a color-changing clock face that utilized the heat given off by resistors!