Hackaday Podcast 045: Raspberry Pi Bug, Rapidly Aging Vodka, Raining On The Cloud, And This Wasn’t A Supercon Episode

December 6, 2019 by 5 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams talk over the last three weeks full of hacks. Our first “back to normal” podcast after Supercon turns out to still have a lot of Supercon references in it. We discuss Raspberry Pi 4’s HDMI interfering with its WiFi, learn the differences between CoreXY/Delta/Cartesian printers, sip on Whiskey aged in an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner, and set up cloud printing that’s already scheduled for the chopping block. Along the way, you’ll hear hints of what happened at Supercon, from the definitive guide to designing LEDs for iron-clad performance to the projects people hauled along with them.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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Testing Carbon Fibre Reinforced Filament By Building An Over-Engineered Skateboard

December 3, 2019 by 4 Comments

Advances in filaments for FDM 3D printers have come in leaps and bounds over the past few years, and carbon fibre (CF) reinforced filament is becoming a common sight. Robotics extraordinaire [James Bruton] got his hands on some CF reinforced PLA, and ended up building a completely over-engineered 3D printed skateboard. (Video, embedded below.)

[James] started by printing some test pieces with a 0.5 mm and a big 1.2 mm nozzle with and without the CF, which he subjected to cantilever deflection tests. The piece with CF was 20% stiffer than without.

[James] then built an extremely strong and cool looking skateboard deck with alternating section of the CF PLA and toughened PLA, totalling 2.7 kg of filament. It was extremely strong, so after bolting on a set of trucks and wheels, he did some mild riding at a local skate park, where it survived without any problems. He admits it was completely over-engineered, but points out in that the internal cavities in the deck is the perfect place for batteries on an electric long board.

Designing something from the ground up with the strength and weaknesses 3D printing in mind, leads to some very interesting and innovative designs, of which this is a perfect example, and we hope to see many more like it. We’ve featured a number of [James]’ project, including the remote controlled bowling ball he built for [Mark Rober] and his impressive OpenDog and Start Wars robots.

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Supercon: The Things You Brought, And A Few You Forgot

December 2, 2019 by 3 Comments

Part of the fun of Supercon is that there is so much available in one place. For the price of admission, you’re surrounded by expertise, power, and soldering irons. Digi-Key brought several large parts bins stuffed full of everything from passives to LEDs to chips for people use in hacking away on their badges. But one thing that makes the whole experience really special is the stuff people bring. We don’t just mean the projects you brought to show off, we mean the stuff you bring to enhance your Supercon experience, whether it be tools, bits and bobs, or other fun stuff to play with.

This year was my first Supercon, and you never forget your first. I had a great time, and was overwhelmed by how much awesomeness was going on in one place. I wish Supercon was a simulation I could run again and again so I could listen to every talk, attend every workshop, and spend time talking to everyone about the things they brought and the cool things they’re doing with their time and badges.

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Let A CPR Robot Save The Day

November 30, 2019 by 24 Comments

Four highschool students in Lyon France are building a CPR robot, with the aim of removing the endurance problem faced by those delivering this form of essential first aid.

By every after action report, CPR is an emotionally and physically exhausting way to save a life. When someone’s heart stops beating their breathing stops too. After that there’s a very small window in which to keep just enough oxygen in the blood to prevent brain damage and organ failure. A person has to precisely position their hands and press, repeatedly, with enough force to break someone’s sternum in order to keep their heart pumping; sometimes for over fifteen minutes waiting for rescue to arrive. On top of that, depending on which school of thought they learned the technique, they may be required to also force air into the patients lungs.

While this pushes the boundary of human endurance, a robot would not have the same issue. In fact, many of the existing problems are solved. CPAP Machines can force air into lungs all day long. A motor and a mechanism could position and provide the mechanical pumping motion to keep the blood flowing. Sensors could tell when the heart takes back over. The machine is currently a proof-of-concept built from plywood, and off-the-shelf parts. Yet it can maintain the 30 compression – 2 breath cycle indefinitely on a CPR Dummy.

It’s an interesting idea; while defibrillators do exist, they don’t always get the heart going in time. We wonder if someone more medically inclined can weigh in on this interesting idea.

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Multi Material 3D Printing Makes Soft Robot

November 30, 2019 by 8 Comments

When you zoom in on a fractal you find it is made of more fractals. Perhaps that helped inspire the Harvard 3D printers that have various arrays of mixing nozzles. In the video below you can see some of the interesting things you can do with an array of mixing nozzles. The coolest, we think, is a little multi-legged robot that uses vacuum to ambulate across the bench. The paper, however, is behind a paywall.

There are really two ideas here. Mixing nozzles are nothing new. Usually, you use them to mimic a printer with two hot ends. That is, you print one material at a time and purge the old filament out when switching to the new filament. This is often simpler than using two heads because with a two head arrangement, both the heads have to be at the same height, you must know the precise offset between the heads, and you generally lose some print space since the right head can’t cross the left head and vice versa. Add more heads, and you multiply those problems. We’ve also seen mixing nozzles provide different colors.

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Robot Vs. Superbug

November 30, 2019 by 6 Comments

Working in a university or research laboratory on interesting, complicated problems in the sciences has a romanticized, glorified position in our culture. While the end results are certainly worth celebrating, often the process of new scientific discovery is underwhelming, if not outright tedious. That’s especially true in biology and chemistry, where scaling up sample sizes isn’t easy without a lot of human labor. A research group from Reading University was able to modify a 3D printer to take some of that labor out of the equation, though.

This 3D printer was used essentially as a base, with the printing head removed and replaced with a Raspberry Pi camera. The printer X/Y axes move the camera around to all of the different sample stored in the print bed, which allows the computer attached to the printer to do most of the work that a normal human would have had to do. This allows them to scale up massively and cheaply, presumably with less tedious inputs from a large number of graduate students.

While the group hopes that this method will have wide applicability for any research group handling large samples, their specific area of interest involves researching “superbugs” or microbes which have developed antibiotic resistance. Their recently-published paper states that any field which involves bacterial motility, colony growth, microtitre plates or microfluidic devices could benefit from this 3D printer modification.

A Fantastic Frontier Of FPGA Flexibility Found In The 2019 Supercon Badge

November 29, 2019 by 7 Comments

We have just concluded a successful Hackaday Superconference where a highlight for many was digging into this year’s hardware badge. Shaped in the general form of a Game Boy handheld gaming console, the heart of the badge is a large FPGA opening up new and exciting potential for badge hacking.

Beyond our normal tools of compiling custom code or modifying hardware with a soldering iron, we now have the option to change core hardware behavior with Verilog. And people explored this new frontier to great effect, as seen at the badge hacking ceremony. (Video embedded below.)

FPGAs are not new, technically speaking, why are they exciting now? We can thank their recent growth in capability, their rapidly falling cost, and the relatively new availability of open source toolchains. These developments elevated FPGA into one of the most exciting trends in hardware today, so this year’s badge master [Sprite_TM] built an open FPGA playground for several hundred of his closest Supercon friends. Let’s take a look at what people were able to accomplish in just a few days using this unique and powerful hardware.

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