Maker Faire NY: Programmable Air

September 22, 2018 by 10 Comments

At this year’s World Maker Faire in New York City we’re astonished and proud to run into some of the best projects that are currently in the running for the Hackaday Prize. One of these is Programmable Air, from [Amitabh], and it’s the solution to pneumatics and pressure sensing in Maker and IoT devices.

The idea behind Programmable Air is to create the cheapest, most hacker-friendly system for dealing with inflatable and vacuum-based robotics. Yes, pneumatic robotics might sound weird, but there’s plenty of projects that could make use of a system like this. The Glaucus is one of the greatest soft robotic projects we’ve ever seen, and it turns a bit of silicone into a quadruped robot with no moving parts. The only control you have over this robot is inflating one side or the other while watching this silicone slug slowly crawl forward. This same sort of system can be expanded to a silicone robot tentacle, too.

On display at the Programmable Air booth were three examples of how this device could be used. The first was a simple pressure sensor — a weird silicone pig with some tubing coming out of the nostrils was connected to the Programmable Air module. Squeeze the pig, and some RGB LEDs light up. The second demo was a balloon inflating and deflating automatically. The third demo was a ‘jamming gripper’, basically a balloon filled with rice or coffee grounds, connected to a pump. If you take this balloon, jam it onto an odd-shaped object and suck the air out, it becomes a gripper for a robotic arm. All of these are possible with Programmable Air.

Right now, [Amitabh] has just finalized the design and is getting ready to move into mass production. You can get some updates for this really novel air-powered robotics platform over on the main website, or check out the project over on Hackaday.io.

Prusa Introduces A Resin Printer At Maker Faire NY

September 22, 2018 by 35 Comments

For one reason or another, the World Maker Faire in New York has become the preeminent place to launch 3D printers. MakerBot did it with the Thing-O-Matic way back when, and over the years we’ve seen some interesting new advances come out of Queens during one special weekend in September.

Today Prusa Research announced their latest creation. It’s the resin printer you’ve all been waiting for. The Prusa SL1 is aiming to become the Prusa Mk 3 of the resin printer world: it’s a solid printer, it’s relatively cheap (kit price starts at $1299/€1299), and it produces prints that are at least as good as resin printers that cost three times as much.

The tech inside the SL1 is about what you’d expect if you’ve been following resin printers for a while. The resin is activated by a bank of LEDs shining through a photomask, in this case a 5.5 inch, 1440p display. Everything is printed on a removable bed that can be transferred over to a separate ‘curing chamber’ after the print is done. It’s more or less what you would expect, but there are some fascinating refinements to the design that make this a resin printer worthy of carrying the Prusa name.

Common problems with a masked SLA printer that uses LEDs and an LCD are the interface between the LCD and the resin, and the temperature of the display itself. Resin is not kind to LCD displays, and to remedy this problem, Prusa has included an FEP film on the bottom of the removable tank. This is a user-replaceable part (technically a consumable, at least to the same extent as a PEI build plate on a filament printer), and Prusa will be selling those as spare parts on their store. The LCD is also cooled; one of the major drawbacks of shining several watts of UV through an LCD is the lifetime of the display. Cooling the display helps, and should greatly increase the lifetime of the printer. All of this is wrapped up in an exceptionally heavy metal case with the lovely hinged UV-opaque orange plastic lid.

Of course, saying you’ve built a resin printer is one thing, but how do the prints look? Exceptional. The Prusa booth at Maker Faire was loaded up with sample prints from the machine, and they’re of the same high quality you would expect from the Form 3D printers that have been the go-to in the resin printer world. The Prusa SLA also works with big-O Open resins, meaning you’re not tied to a single resin vendor.

This is just the announcement of the Prusa resin printer, but they are taking preorders. The price for the kit — no word on how complex of a kit it is — is $1300, while the assembled printer is $1600, with the first units shipping in January.

Join Hackaday For A Night Of Pre-Maker Faire Hacks

September 19, 2018 by 2 Comments

This weekend is the World Maker Faire in New York, and Hackaday will be there looking at the latest and greatest projects from makers around the globe. We’ll also be buying bottles of water for five dollars, but that’s another story entirely.

As always, this year’s World Maker Faire will be held at the wonderful New York Hall of Science, and the lineup is spectacular. There will be cosplay, and Adam Savage will be there with a half dozen Junior Mythbusters. There will be a twenty-six foot tall hydraulic hand trucked in from Burning Man. You’re looking at the greatest event in STEAM education since the Bay Area Maker Faire last May.

Hackaday has a fantastic New York community and we’re holding a meetup this Thursday to sync up with Maker Faire. Guess what?  You’re invited!

We’re teaming up with our friends at Kickstarter to bring you an awesome night of hardware builds, music hacks, snacks, and more. While this is an informal event, we do have a few people who will be bringing their latest hacks to show off. Nick Chelyapov, a designer turned gear head who designed an Arduino-based synthesizer and drum machine. This isn’t a toy, but it’s also not a complicated mess of patch cables and eurorack modules. The Bitty is a real instrument that’s easy enough for anyone to pick up and make bleep bloops.

Also confirmed for this meetup is Nick Yulman, an artist who works with sound and interactive media in a variety of contexts. He’s gearing up to install his robotic musical instruments in the Areté Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. But this week he’ll be showing us how musical robots helped him stop worrying and love digital music.

This isn’t an event to be missed. You can RSVP for the event over on Eventbrite, and be sure to bring whatever project you’re working on. It’s going to be an entire night of drinks and hacks, just the thing before Maker Faire really gets rolling. Once the weekend hits, find us at the Faire; several of us from the Hackaday crew will be wandering the grounds looking for awesome hardware projects. Stephen Tranovich is even giving a talk about the Hackaday Prize on Sunday at 11. See you at the Faire!

Damaged Power Cord Repaired With Shop-Made Mold

September 13, 2018 by 25 Comments

We’ve likely all seen a power tool with a less-than-functional strain relief at one end of the power cord or the other. Fixing the plug end is easy, but at the tool end things are a little harder and often not worth the effort compared to the price of just replacing the tool. There’s no obsolescence like built-in obsolescence.

But in the land of Festo, that high-quality but exorbitantly priced brand of premium tools, the normal cost-benefit relationship of repairs is skewed. That’s what led [Mark Presling] to custom mold a new strain relief for a broken Festool cord. The dodgy tool is an orbital sander with Festool’s interchangeable “Plug It” type power cord, which could have been replaced for the princely sum of $65. Rather than suffer that disgrace, [Mark] built a mold for a new strain relief from two pieces of aluminum. The mold fits around the cord once it has been slathered with Sugru, a moldable adhesive compound. The video below shows the mold build, which has some interesting tips for the lathe, and the molding process itself. The Sugru was a little touchy about curing, but in the end the new strain relief looks almost like an original part.

Hats off to [Presser] for not taking the easy way out, and for showing off some techniques that could really help around the shop. We suppose the mold could have been 3D-printed rather than machined; after all, we’ve seen such molds before, and that 3D-printed dies can be robust enough to punch metal parts.

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Repairing A Desktop Jukebox

September 11, 2018 by 4 Comments

Although vinyl records have had a bit of resurgence, they are far away from their heyday. There was a time when 45 RPM singles were not just how you listened to music at home, but they also populated the jukeboxes you’d find in your local malt shop or anywhere else in public. [Fran] has an old 45 RPM “desktop jukebox” from RCA. It really isn’t a jukebox, but an automatic record changer dating from the 1950s. The problem is, the cartridge was toast. Replacing it wasn’t a big problem, even though replacing it with an exact duplicate wasn’t possible. But, of course, that was just the start.

You can see in the video below, that there were some weight problems with the cartridge, but the changer part would not work. She tears it down and makes some modifications. She even pulled out the schematic which had three tubes — one of which was just a rectifier.

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Retro Console Upgrade Gives Atari Flair

September 5, 2018 by 3 Comments

If you’re desperate for a sense of nostalgia for video games of yore but don’t want to shell out the big bucks for an NES classic, you can always grab a single arcade-style game that’ll plug straight into your TV. Of course it’s no longer 1980, and playing Space Invaders or Asteroids can get old after a while. When that happens, just replace the internals for an upgraded retro Atari 2600 with all the games from that system instead of just one.

As expected for something that has to fit in such a tiny package, this upgrade is based on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s not quite as simple as throwing RetroPi on it and calling it a day, though. For one, [Blue Okiris] is still using the original two-button controller/joystick that came with the Ms. Pac-Man game this build is based on, and that added its own set of challenges. For another, RetroPi didn’t have everything he needed so he switched to another OS called Recalbox. It also includes Kodi so it could be used as a media center as well.

The build looks like a hack in the truest sense of the word. The circuit board sticks out the bottom a little bit, but this is more of a feature than a bug because that’s where some extra buttons and the power switch are. Overall, it’s a great Retro Atari system that has all the true classics that should keep [Blue Okiris] entertained until Atari releases an official system one day. If you’d like to go a little deeper in the Atari world, though, you could always restore one instead.

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Air Wrench Becomes A Milling Machine Power Drawbar

September 3, 2018 by 20 Comments

We sometimes wonder if designers ever actually use their own products, or even put them through some sort of human-factors testing before putting them on the market. Consider the mechanism that secures toolholders to the spindle of a milling machine: the drawbar. Some mills require you to lock the spindle with a spanner wrench, loosen the drawbar with another wrench, and catch the released collet and tool with – what exactly?

Unwilling to have the surgical modifications that would qualify him for the Galactic Presidency, [Physics Anonymous] chose instead to modify his mill with a power drawbar. The parts are cheap and easily available, with the power coming from a small butterfly-style pneumatic wrench. The drawbar on his mill has a nearly 3/8″ square drive – we’d guess it’s really 10 mm – which almost matches up with the 3/8″ drive on the air wrench, so he whipped up a female-to-female adapter from a couple of socket adapters. The wrench mounts to a cover above the drawbar in a 3D-printed holster. Pay close attention to the video below where he goes through the Fusion 360 design; we were intrigued by the way he imported three orthogonal photos on the wrench to design the holster around. That’s a tip to file away for a rainy day.

This is a great modification to a low-cost milling machine. If you’re in the process of buying machine tools, you should really check out our handy buyer’s guides for both milling machines and lathes. It’ll let you know what features to look out for, and which you’ll have to add later.

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