CPU Cooler In A Printer’s Hot End

October 21, 2023 by 9 Comments

[Proper Printing] often does unusual 3D printer mods. This time, he’s taking a CPU cooler made for a Raspberry Pi with some heat pipes and converting it into a 3D printer hot end. Sound crazy? It is even crazier than it sounds, as seen in the video below.

Heat pipes contain a liquid and a wick, so bending them was tricky. It also limited the size of the heat break he could use since the two heat pipers were relatively closely spaced. Once you have the cooler reshaped and a threaded hole for the heatbreak, the rest is anticlimactic. The heatbreak holds a heat block that contains the heating element and temperature sensor. A few changes were needed to the custom extruder cut out of acrylic, but that didn’t have anything to do with the fan and mount.

Normally, a hot end assembly has a substantial heat sink, and a fan blows air over it. The heat pipe technique is a common way to move heat away from a tight space. So, the way it is used here is probably not very useful compared to a conventional technique. However, we can imagine tight designs where this would be viable.

Heat pipes aren’t the same as water cooling, even though some use water inside. A heat pipe is a closed system. The fluid boils off at the hot end, condenses at the cool end, and wicks the liquid back to close the cycle. On the other hand, you can use more conventional water cooling, too.

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Junk Bin Cyberdish Turns You Into The Satellite Tracker

October 21, 2023 by 3 Comments

The good thing about listening in on satellites is that they tend to beam down all kinds of juicy information from their lofty perches. The bad thing about satellites is that to stay in those orbits, they’ve got to be moving really fast, and that means that you’ve got to track them if you want to keep a nice consistent signal during a pass. And that can lead to all sorts of complexity, with motorized two-axis mounts and fancy tracking software.

Or does it? Not if you’re willing to act as the antenna mount, which is the boat [Gabe] from the saveitforparts channel on YouTube recently found himself in when searching for L-band signals from the GOES satellite. His GOES setup uses a 30″ (0.8 m) dish repurposed from a long-range wireless networking rig. Unfortunately, the old security camera pan-tilt unit it was mounted on wasn’t quite up to satellite tracking duty, so [Gabe] pulled the dish off and converted it to manual tracking.

With a freshly wound helical antenna and a SAWbird LNA at the focal point, the dish proved to be pretty easy to keep on track manually, while providing quite the isometric workout. Aiming was aided by an app called Stellarium which uses augmented reality to point out objects in the night sky, and a cheap tablet computer was tasked with running SDR++ and capturing data. Sadly, neither of these additions brought much to the party, with the latter quickly breaking and the former geared more toward stargazing than satellite snooping. But with some patience — and some upper-body strength — [Gabe] was able to track GOES well enough with the all-in-one “cyberdish” to get some usable images. The whole saga is documented in the video after the break.

Kudos to [Gabe] for showing us what can be accomplished with a little bit of junk and a lot of sticktoitiveness. He promises that a legit two-axis mount is in the works, so we’ll be on the lookout for that. We’ve seen a few of those before, and [Chris Lott] did a great overview of satellite tracking gear a while back, too.

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Pocket Calculator Isn’t A Brain Or Magic

October 20, 2023 by 18 Comments

If you predate the pocket calculator, you may remember slide rules. But slide rules take a a little skill to use. There was a market for other devices that were simpler or, in some cases, cheaper. One common one was the “magic brain” or Addiator which was a little metal box with some slots that could add numbers. However, using clever tricks it could also subtract and — in a fashion — multiply. [Our Own Devices] has a teardown of the device you can see in the video below. It is deceptively simple, and the description of how it works is at least as interesting as the peek inside.

We remember these on the market and, honestly, always thought they were simple tally mechanisms. It turns out they are both less and more than that. Internally, the device is a few serrated sheet metal strips in a plastic channel. The subtraction uses a complement addition similar to how you do binary subtraction using 2’s complement math. Multiplication is just repetitive addition, which is fine for simple problems.

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Finally, An Open-Source 8088 BIOS

October 20, 2023 by 7 Comments

The Intel 8088 is an interesting chip, being a variant of the more well-known 8086. Given the latter went on to lend its designation to one of the world’s favorite architectures, you can tell which of the two was higher status. Regardless, it was the 8088 that lived in the first IBM PC, and now, it even has its own open-source BIOS.

As with any BIOS, or Basic Input Output System, it’s charged with handling core low-level features for computers like the Micro 8088, Xi 8088, and NuXT. It handles chipset identification, keyboard and mouse communication, real-time clock, and display initialization, among other things.

Of course, BIOSes for 8088-based machines already exist. However, in many cases, they are considered to be proprietary code that cannot be freely shared over the internet. For retrocomputing enthusiasts, it’s of great value to have a open-source BIOS that can be shared, modified, and tweaked as needed to suit a wide variety of end uses.

If you want to learn more about the 8088 CPU, we’ve looked in depth at that topic before. Feel free to drop us a line with your own retro Intel hacks if you’ve got them kicking around!

Converting A Polaroid SX70 Camera To Use 600 Film

October 20, 2023 by 4 Comments

These days, it’s possible to buy a number of different Polaroid instant cameras new off the shelf. That’s largely thanks to the retro resurgence that has buoyed interest in everything from vinyl records to analog synthesizers. However, if you’re truly old-school, you might still be rocking a vintage Polaroid SX-70 camera. Thankfully, there’s a way to convert these old rigs to work properly with the more popular modern 600 film.

The interesting thing about the SX-70 camera design is that its shutter speed and aperture setting are essentially linked together as the aperture and shutter assembly are combined into one unit with a variable tear-drop shaped opening. Thus, the timing of the shutter opening and closing and the extent to which it opens are what determines exposure and aperture.

Thankfully, [Jake Bright] has learned a lot about these unique cameras and exactly how this complex system operates. He shares his tips on firstly restoring the camera to factory-grade operation, and then the methods in which they may be converted to work with modern film. Fundamentally, it’s about changing capacitors or resistors to change the shutter/aperture timing. However, do it blindly and you’ll have little success. You first need to understand the camera’s mechanics, pneumatics, and its “Electric Eye” control system before you can get things dialed in just so.

We’ve seldom seen such a great deep dive into a camera outside of full-fat engineering documentation. [Jake] should be commended on his deep understanding and command of these fine instant cameras from yesteryear. May the Polaroid picture never die. Video after the break. Continue reading “Converting A Polaroid SX70 Camera To Use 600 Film” →

Spinning Up A New Laundry Monitor

October 20, 2023 by 17 Comments

For all that modern washers and dryers do, they don’t let you know when they’re finished. Or they do, but it’s only a short victory song that plays once and can be easy to miss. What most of us need is a gentle reminder that there’s damp laundry festering in the washer, or fresh laundry in the dryer getting wrinkly.

This laundry monitor from [Sparks and Code] is version 2.0. The first version was working fine, but it was based on vibration (or lack thereof). Fast forward a few years, and [Sparks and Code] got a modern pair that’s so finely tuned, it doesn’t produce enough vibration to register. Back to the drawing board [Sparks and Code] went, and eventually came up with version 2.0.

Now, [Sparks and Code] is detecting whether the machines are on using a pair of split-core transformers to monitor power at the breaker box. With these, you just run the wire through the hole, and it gives the relative mV value going through the wire on a 3.5mm cable. Those cables are connected to an ESP32 inside the 3D-printed box, which is mounted above the cabinet door. Since [Sparks and Code] already has home assistants all over the house, it was easy to integrate and have them all play the message ‘please flip the laundry’.

Once this project was all buttoned up, they thought of one issue — the self-cleaning cycle. Since it takes about four hours, they like to run it overnight. You can see the problem here — no one wants to hear Alexa at 3AM. Fortunately, [Sparks and Code] was able to adjust the Python script to ignore these events. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.

If only the dryer could empty itself and fold the clothes. Oh wait, there’s a robot for that.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Haunted Keyboard Is Free From Ghosting

October 20, 2023 by 1 Comment

This may look like another DIY mechanical keyboard, but it’s hiding a secret. [Mx. Jack Nelson] has combined Halloween and keyboards in glorious, haunted fashion. Type a line, any line into this bad boy and you get a spooky, sort of cryptic response generated by AI.

Essentially, a Raspberry Pi Pico W does all the work, it handles the keyboard matrix, connects to Wi-Fi, sends the input to ChatGPT, and spits the response out on the screen wherever the cursor happens to be. Incidentally, it turns out [Mx. Jack Nelson] used ChatGPT to generate much of the CircuitPython code.

The layout is a custom 40% that is heavily influenced by the Akko 40%, with the Ctrl, Alt, and Win keys replaced by Ctrl, Cmd, and Opt. This was [Mx. Jack Nelson]’s first PCB, and you never forget your first. You don’t want to miss the demo video after the break.

Are keyboards just not spooky enough for you? Here’s a creepy baby doll that does basically the same thing.

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