Smelting Solar Style

November 7, 2022 by 32 Comments

If you attended the 2022 Supercon, you might have heard the story about the SMD soldering challenge table nearly catching on fire. A magnifying lamp caught the sun just right and burned a neat trench into another lamp’s plastic base. While disaster was averted, [Jelle Seegers] does this on purpose using a huge 5-meter lens to smelt metal.

The Design Academy Eindhoven student is participating in Dutch Design Week and built the machine which is able to manually track the sun to maximize the amount of solar energy applied to the metal.

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Overengineered Fume Extractor, Version 2

November 7, 2022 by 12 Comments

We all know the temptation of adding one more feature to your latest project. [Arnov Sharma] didn’t resist the urge. Building on his 3D-printed fume extractor, he developed a new version made of PCB material.

The device has a 18650 battery and corrects several flaws in the original design we covered earlier. In particular, the new version uses a quiet fan and consumes less power. There is also a 3D-printed filter housing that uses cotton as a filter media. Continue reading “Overengineered Fume Extractor, Version 2” →

Four M.2 cards of different sizes on a desk surface

M.2 For Hackers – Cards

November 7, 2022 by 17 Comments

Last time, I’ve explained everything you could want to know if you wanted to put an M.2 socket onto your board. Today, let’s build M.2 cards! There’s a myriad of M.2 sockets out there that are just asking for a special card to be inserted into it, and perhaps, it’s going to be your creation that fits.

Why Build Cards?

Laptops and other x86 mainboards often come with M.2 slots. Do you have a free B-key slot? You can put a RP2040 and bunch of sensors on a B-key PCB as an experimental platform carried safely inside your laptop. Would you like to do some more advanced FPGA experiments? Here’s a miniscule FPGA board that fits inside your laptop and lets you play with PCIe on this same laptop – the entire setup having a super low footprint. Are you looking for an extra PCIe link because you’re reusing your laptop as a home server? Again, your WiFi slot will provide you with that. Want to get some PCIe out of a SteamDeck? Building a M-key 2230 card seems to be your only hope! Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Cards” →

An RP2040 Powered Pick And Place

November 7, 2022 by 15 Comments

Pick and place machines are a wonder to behold, as they delicately and accurately place part after part. Unfortunately, they have to have a similarly wondrous price tag. Luckily, they aren’t too difficult to make yourself as they share many properties of a 3D printer with some extra constraints. [Stargirl Flowers] released Starfish, an open-source pick-and-place control board based around an RP2040 to help people make their own.

She purchased a LumenPnP, and the itch to tinker became too much to ignore. The STM32 on the stock controller also happened to get fried, leaving an obvious opening to create a custom board. [Stargirl] chose Trinamic TMC2209 motor controllers to drive the three stepper motors. The power circuit is impressively overbuilt with a 3A fuse, a TVS diode for shunting voltage spikes, a P-channel MOSFET for reverse polarity protection, a low-pass filter for AC ripple, and a large 100μF capacitor.

The RP2040 is a good choice since it’s easy to get and has plenty of digital I/O. USB connects the board to the outside work and includes ESD TVS diodes to protect the board when connecting and disconnecting the USB port. Motors for vacuums are controlled by a 74HC2G34 buffer that drives enable lines to two MOSFETs. Solenoids are similar but with a high current peak and a much smaller current to keep them open. The DRV120 fits the bill as it is a single-channel relay with current regulation. I2C vacuum sensors are the same ones on the Lumen motherboard; they just required an I2C multiplexer.

It’s an extremely well-documented project explaining why each part was chosen and why. If you want to create an RP2040 project that needs to last, we consider this a guiding star. It’s all up on GitHub for you to take a look at.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen RP2040 as part of a motor controller, and we suspect we’ll see more.

Dosimetry: Measuring Radiation

November 7, 2022 by 21 Comments

Thanks to stints as an X-ray technician in my early 20s followed by work in various biology labs into my early 40s, I’ve been classified as an “occupationally exposed worker” with regard to ionizing radiation for a lot of my life. And while the jobs I’ve done under that umbrella have been vastly different, they’ve all had some common ground. One is the required annual radiation safety training classes. Since the physics never changed and the regulations rarely did, these sessions would inevitably bore everyone to tears, which was a pity because it always felt like something I should be paying very close attention to, like the safety briefings flight attendants give but everyone ignores.

The other thing in common was the need to keep track of how much radiation my colleagues and I were exposed to. Aside from the obvious health and safety implications for us personally, there were legal and regulatory considerations for the various institutions involved, which explained the ritual of finding your name on a printout and signing off on the dose measured by your dosimeter for the month.

Dosimetry has come a long way since I was actively considered occupationally exposed, and even further from the times when very little was known about the effects of radiation on living tissue. What the early pioneers of radiochemistry learned about the dangers of exposure was hard-won indeed, but gave us the insights needed to develop dosimetric methods and tools that make working with radiation far safer than it ever was.

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Rope Core Drum Machine

November 6, 2022 by 7 Comments

One of our favorite musical hackers, [Look Mum No Computer] is getting dangerously close to building a computer. His quest was to create a unique drum machine, inspired by a Soviet auto-dialer that used rope core memory for number storage. Rope memory is the read-only sibling to magnetic core memory, the memory technology used to build some beloved computers back in the 60s and early 70s. Rope core isn’t programmed by magnetizing the ceramic donuts, but by weaving a wire through them. And when [Look Mum] saw the auto-dialer using the technology for a user-programmable interface, naturally, he just had to build a synth sequencer.
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A multi-colored chair with a stainless steel frame sits on wooden legs against a grey background.

Recycled Chairs Bring The Subway To Your Living Room

November 6, 2022 by 38 Comments

Public transit seats have a rough life. Enduring a number of wear cycles that would make your sofa weep, they take a beating and have to keep looking presentable. When trains and buses are retired, where do the old seats go? A team from the MIT Hobby Shop investigated what was happening to the seats from retiring MBTA Red Line cars and recycled them into stylish chairs.

After some sleuthing and many emails, the MBTA relinquished a number of old subway seats to the team. Since the subway seats didn’t have legs, wood from old church pews was used to create bases. It took one pew end support to create each set of legs, which were cut out on a bandsaw. The old dark stain was sanded off, and the bases were finished with three coats of gel topcoat, letting the natural beauty of the old oak shine through.

We love seeing old things given new life here at Hackaday. If you want to see some more recycled furniture, check out this tire table, this upcycled jeans chair, or these best practices for making box forts.