A Thoughtful Variety Of Projects And Failures

September 24, 2017 by 1 Comment

Our friends at [The Thought Emporium] have been bringing us delightful projects but not all of them warrant a full-fledged video. What does anyone with a bevy of small but worthy projects do? They put them all together like so many mismatched LEGO blocks. Grab Bag #1 is the start of a semi-monthly video series which presents the smaller projects happening behind the scenes of [The Thought Emporium]’s usual video presentations.

Solar eclipse? There are two because the first was only enough to whet [The Thought Emporium]’s appetite. Ionic lifters? Learn about the favorite transformer around the shop and see what happens when high voltage wires get too close. TEA lasers? Use that transformer to make a legitimate laser with stuff around your house. Bismuth casting? Pet supply stores may have what you need to step up your casting game and it’s a total hack. Failures? We got them too.

We first covered ionocraft (lifters) awhile back. TEA lasers have been covered before. Casting is no stranger to hackaday but [The Thought Emporium] went outside the mold with their technique.

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I’ve Seen The Future And It’s Full Of Freakin’ Huge Bricks

September 8, 2017 by 31 Comments

“Did you know you can 3D-print LEGO bricks that can actually be used as regular LEGO?”–me, in 2009

Those magical words made real to me the wonder that was 3D printing. It was a magical time! Everyone was 3D printing everything, though most of it wasn’t very good because the technology wasn’t there. But just as every technology goes through an evolution, the goalposts of coolness move on past what used to be remarkable to the new thing everyone’s talking about.

These days, no one is going to be more than mildly curious about your 3D-printed LEGO brick. Still, when you look at that uneven lump of plastic as being just one step in an evolution, it’s pretty momentous. What I’m saying is that we’re looking at a future that can be described in three words: Freakin’ Huge Bricks.

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This Electric Longboard Collapses For Air Travel

September 8, 2017 by 26 Comments

How do you manage to get an electric off-road longboard past TSA and onto an international flight? Simple — make it a collapsible longboard that fits into a carry-on bag.

The mechanical and electrical feats accomplished by [transistor-man] may not be the most impressive parts of this hack. We’re pretty impressed by the build, starting as it did with the big knobby tires and front truck from an unused mountain board and the hub motor from a hoverboard, turning this into a trike. The incredible shrinking chassis comes courtesy of a couple of stout drawer slides and cam locks to keep it locked in place; collapsed, the board fits in a carry on bag. Expanded, it runs like a dream, as the video below shows.

But we think the really interesting part of this hack is the social engineering [transistor-man] did to ensure that the authorities wouldn’t ground his creation for electrical reasons. It seems current rules limit how big a battery can be and how many of them can be brought on a flight, so there was a lot of battery finagling before his creation could fly.

Electric longboards look like a real kick, whether they be all-aluminum or all-plastic, or even all-LEGO. This one, which went from concept to complete a week and a half before the flight, really raises the bar.

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Polyurethane, Meet 3D Printing

September 3, 2017 by 9 Comments

3D printing makes prototyping wonderful. But what do you do when your plastics of choice just aren’t strong enough? For [Michael Memeteau], the answer was to combine the strength of a vacuum-poured polyurethane part with the ease of 3D-printed molds. The write-up is a fantastic walk through of a particular problem and all of the false steps along the way to a solution.

The prototype is a connected scale for LPG canisters, so the frame would have to support 80 kg and survive an outdoor environment. Lego or MDF lattice were considered and abandoned as options early on. 3D printing at 100% infill might have worked, but because of the frame’s size, it would have to be assembled in pieces and took far too long anyway.

The next approach was to make a mold with the 3D printer and pour the chosen polyurethane resin in, but a simple hollow mold didn’t work because the polyurethane heats as it cures. The combined weight and heat deformed the PLA mold. Worse, their polyurethane of choice was viscous and cured too quickly.

The solution, in the end, was a PET filament that deforms less with heat, clever choice of internal support structures to hold the stress in while being permeable, and finally pouring the polyurethane in a vacuum bag to help it fill and degas. The 3D-printed hull is part of the final product, but the strength comes from the polyurethane.

Mold-making is one of the killer apps of 3D printing. We’ve seen 3D prints used as molds for spin-casting hollow parts, and used as a sacrificial shell for otherwise epoxy parts. But for really complex shapes, strength, and ease of fabrication, we have to say that [Michael]’s approach looks promising.

Modular Storage With Peanut Butter And Lasers

August 23, 2017 by 22 Comments

I have storage on the mind, and it comes from two facts in my life:

First, I have tons of stuff in my workshop, far too much for the amount of space I have. A lot of this material is much easier to use if it’s well-organized. Think electronics, robotics, building sets. Modular parts that need to go together a certain way for them to be useful. It is imperative, therefore, that I come up with some sort of organization system to keep the chaos in check.

Second, my favorite tool is the laser cutter, born from my love for building vector designs. I can do art on the computer and have it manufactured in front of my eyes, and share my designs with someone else who can remix it into something even cooler.

So with those two facts in mind, I set about creating a modular storage system in Inkscape and cutting out the design from pine boards using a laser cutter. Let us go on a journey through my thought process:

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GuitarBot Brings Together Art And Engineering

August 15, 2017 by 10 Comments

Not only does the GuitarBot project show off some great design, but the care given to the documentation and directions is wonderful to see. The GuitarBot is an initiative by three University of Delaware professors, [Dustyn Roberts], [Troy Richards], and [Ashley Pigford] to introduce their students to ‘Artgineering’, a beautiful portmanteau of ‘art’ and ‘engineering’.

The GuitarBot It is designed and documented in a way that the three major elements are compartmentalized: the strummer, the brains, and the chord mechanism are all independent modules wrapped up in a single device. Anyone is, of course, free to build the whole thing, but a lot of work has been done to ease the collaboration of smaller, team-based groups that can work on and bring together individual elements.

Some aspects of the GuitarBot are still works in progress, such as the solenoid-activated chord assembly. But everything else is ready to go with Bills of Materials and build directions. An early video of a strumming test proof of concept used on a ukelele is embedded below.

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Hackaday Prize Best Product Finalist: Reconfigurable Robots

August 12, 2017 by 2 Comments

Reconfigurable robots have been around for ages. One of the first and most popular reconfigurable robots came out of the MIT Media Lab, and last year, DTTO, a modular snake-like robot, won the 2016 Hackaday Prize. There’s a lot that can be learned from a robot that can turn from a walker to a swimmer to something that clambers over rough terrain, and [Salvador]’s EMME does just that. It’s a 3D printed robot and controller that’s the closest you can get to, ‘the Lego of robots’. All you need to do is plug some wheels into a controller and you’re off to the races.

[Salvador]’s EMME is a brilliant little robot that’s only made of a few generic parts. These parts snap together or join with magnets to turn into any device you can imagine that somehow turns rotation of a wheel into linear motion. All the parts are 3D printed, work without cables or connectors, and the robot itself is controlled by a wireless gem-shaped 3D printed controller.

Already, [Salvador] has on-road wheels for EMME, off-road wheels, above-water wheels, and submersible accessories. This is already an all-terrain robot that’s easy to put together and easy to control, but [Salvador] isn’t done yet. he’s working on new hardware based on the ESP32 and working on the vast amount of documentation required for a robot that can do anything.

You can check out [Salvador]’s pitch video for EMME below.

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