Interactive Boozeshelf Is Its Own Dance Party

October 17, 2013 by 9 Comments

boozeshelf

[Jeremy] refused to settle on your typical alcohol storage options, and instead created the Boozeshelf. Like most furniture hacks, the Boozeshelf began as a basic IKEA product, which [Jeremy] modified by cutting strips of wood to serve as wine glass holders and affixing the front end of a wine rack at the base to store bottles.

In its standard operating mode the Boozeshelf lies dark and dormant. Approaching it triggers a cleverly recessed ultrasonic sensor that gently illuminates some LEDs, revealing the shelf’s contents. When you walk away, then lights fade out. An Arduino Mega running [Jeremy’s] custom LEDFader library drives the RGB LED strips, which he wired with some power MOSFETS to handle current demands.

[Jeremy] didn’t stop there, however, adding an additional IR receiver that allows him to select from three different RGB LED color modes: simple crossfading, individual shelf colors (saved to the on-board EEPROM), or the festive favorite: “Dance Party Mode.” Stick around after the break to see [Jeremy] in full aficionado attire demonstrating his Boozeshelf in a couple of videos. Considering blackouts are a likely result of enjoying this hack, we recommend these LED ice cubes for your safety.

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SparkFun Ponders Women In STEM Fields

October 17, 2013 by 86 Comments

sparkfun-ada-loveless-day

Tuesday was [Ada Lovelace] day and to recognize it SparkFun posted an article about women in their workforce and the STEM initiative. [Ada Lovelace] is credited with forging a path for women in mathematics and computing. The STEM acronym represents a movement to get more of America’s students into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields in order to keep up with the rest of the developed world. But part of the issue includes drastically increasing the interest of young women in these fields and their access to it. The thing is, I feel the same way about the community at Hackaday.

Obviously some of the biggest names in the hobby electronics and engineering enthusiast industry are women. The name that seems to top lists is always [Limor Fried] who you may know better as [Lady Ada]. She founded Adafruit industries. But there are couple of other notables that stick out in our minds. [Jeri Ellsworth] has been huge name around here forever. Just this week Hackaday was celebrating the Kickstarter for her latest project. [Becky Stern] has had a ton of awesome project featured, mostly in conjunction with her work at Adafruit but her knitting machine hack when she was with MAKE has always stuck out in our minds. And of course, there’s [Quinn Dunki] who has long been building her own 6502 computer from the ground up (Incidentally we’re running a Guest Rant from her at midday on Friday).

What I’m missing is the grass-roots hacks from women. I know they’re out there because I see them at monthly meetings at the local hackerspace. We featured [Caroline’s] bathymetric book, and [Robin]’s collaboration that produced solar powered supercap jewelry. Both are members of Sector67.

So I call for all Hackaday readers to make this a friendly environment for anyone who wants to participate. If you’re a female reader who has been lurking around rather than sending in links to your gnarly hacks please take the plunge and send us a tip! If your female friends have awesome projects, offer to help them document it for a feature. You may not have thought of it, but sharing your projects makes you a role model for young readers.

By trade I’m an orchestra musician — a field that was completely closed off to women until well into the last century. While gender equality hasn’t been reached in all orchestras, the Regional Orchestras I have and do play with, show equal representation of gender throughout. Let’s make the same thing happen with STEM!

Unorthodox Home-made CNC Machine

October 17, 2013 by 61 Comments

Here’s a rather unorthodox home-made CNC machine we haven’t seen before!

[ModHappy] recently accepted a challenge to design and build a CNC machine out of cheap and readily available components from a hardware store.

Wandering around the store he noticed the plumbing isle and he started playing around with PVC pipes on the floor, greatly confusing the store employees. He had a frame constructed, but still needed a way to achieve linear movement. His calls were answered in the electrical isle, where he made use of conduit wall-mounts! They only required a minor modification to go from gripping the pipe, to sliding along it. A few fasteners later, some stepper motors from a broken scanner, a CD-ROM drive for the z-axis, some hacked together couplers using set screws, and the mechanical build was complete.

On the controls end, he made use of a cheap Chinese TB6560 CNC driver board off eBay, which he modified slightly to increase reliability. The whole thing runs off LinuxCNC (which is free) on his old laptop — good to note, it can also be run live if you aren’t yet enlightened with a Linux OS.

Stick around after the break to see it in action, drawing out an awesome site’s logo!

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POV Airsoft Turret On A RC Plane

October 16, 2013 by 28 Comments

To be honest, we’re surprised this hasn’t been tried before — then again, maybe it has! But what we do know is that the folks over at Flite Test have rigged up an electric Airsoft gun to a large RC airplane, aptly called The Kracken.

The planes are a scaled up version of their own FT Versa Wing, which feature two props, giving them the ability of differential thrust. Not only were they able to strap a semi-automatic Airsoft pistol on top, they also have two GoPros filming the action and giving the gunner a POV for shooting down the enemy plane! Don’t worry though, the enemy plane features its own weapon — A permanent marker! This hardly seems fair though, as the closer the marker gets, the easier shooting down the plane will be!

Don’t take our word for it though, check out the awesome video for yourself, after the break.

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Going Mobile With Your Air Tools

October 16, 2013 by 34 Comments

airtank

If you’ve ever worked with air tools outside of a shop setting, you know that lugging the air hose around can get more and more annoying the further away you are from the compressor. [headsplosive] posted a video (embedded after the break) showing how to go mobile with your air tools.

Air tanks made for paintball are high-pressure in a tiny space, and make a very convenient energy source. In this case, [headsplosive] used a 68 cubic inch, carbon fiber wrapped tank rated at 4500psi. The normal regulator only steps that pressure down to 800psi, so he added a second regulator to hit the 120-140psi that air tools need. He then attached a ‘remote line’, or a coiled high-pressure hose, and added a standard air tool coupler at the end.

The yield is pretty impressive. With a half-charge of the tank, he managed to drive 100 two-inch nails. [headsplosive] has a scuba tank handy, and uses that to recharge the paintball tank. He estimates a scuba tank will last you about 2000 shots from a nailer, and only costs about $7.50 to recharge. Not bad at all. We can’t help but wonder how long you’d get out of an air-powered cutoff wheel, or even a hammer drill. While the parts aren’t terribly cheap unless you buy them used, it will still pay for itself in convenience if you have the need.

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Monitor GitHub Activity With An RGB LED Matrix

October 16, 2013 by 2 Comments

tim-display

Ever wonder who is forking your code? [Jack] did, so he built a real time GitHub activity display for his company’s repositories. The display is based a Wyolum The Intelligent Matrix (TiM) board. The TiM is an 8 x 16 matrix of the ubiquitous WS2811/Smart Pixel/NeoPixel RGB LEDs with built-in controller. We’re seeing more and more of these serial LEDs as they drop in price. Solder jumpers allow the TiM to be used as 8 parallel rows of LEDs (for higher refresh rates), or connected into one long serial chain.

[Jack] wasn’t worried about speed, so he configured his board into a single serial string of LEDs. An Arduino drives the entire matrix with a single pin. Rather than reinvent the wheel, [Jack] used Adafruit’s NeoMatrix library to drive his display. Since the TiM uses the same LEDs as the Adafruit NeoPixel Matrix, the library will work. Chalk up another victory for open source hardware and software!

An Electric Imp retrieves Github data via WiFi and passes it on to the Arduino. This is a good use of a microcontroller such as the AVR on the Arduino. [Jack’s] display has a scrolling username. Every step in the scroll animation requires all the pixel data be clocked out to the TiM board. The Arduino can handle this while the IMP takes care of higher level duties.

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[Ben Krasnow] Discusses The Heat Treatment Of Steel

October 16, 2013 by 18 Comments

steel

For home metallurgy, there are two sources of information for the heat treatment and tempering of steel. The first source is academic publications that include theoretical information, while the second includes the home-spun wisdom of blacksmiths who learn through trial and error. [Ben Krasnow] put up a great video that tries to bridge that gap with some great background information with empirical observations to back up his claims.

For investigating the hardness of steel, a few definitions are in order. The first is stiffness, or the ability of a material to ‘spring back’ after being flexed. The second is strength, specifically yield strength, which is the amount of strain a material can withstand before being permanently deformed.

[Ben] did all these experiments with a 1/8″ W1 steel drill rod. As it came from McMaster, this rod could handle a bit of force before becoming permanently bent, and in terms of stiffness was much better than a piece of coat hanger wire [Ben] had lying around. After taking a piece of this drill rod, heating it up to a cherry red and quenching it in water, [Ben] successfully heat treated this steel to a full hardness. After putting it on his testing jig, this full hardness steel didn’t deform at all, it simply broke.

Full hardness steel is basically useless as a structural material, so [Ben] tried his hand at tempering pieces of his drill rod. By putting a few pieces in a kiln at the requisite temperature, [Ben] was able to temper his drill rods to be stronger than the stock material, but not as terribly brittle as a full hard rod.

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