Repairs You Can Print: Broken Glue Gun Triggers Replacement

January 30, 2018 by 10 Comments

Picture this: you need to buy a simple tool like a glue gun. There’s usually not a whole lot going on in that particular piece of technology, so you base your decision on the power rating and whether it looks like it will last. And it does last, at least for a few years—just long enough to grow attached to it and get upset when it breaks. Sound familiar?

[pixelk] bought a glue gun a few years ago for its power rating and its claims of strength. Lo and behold, the trigger mechanism has proven to be weak around the screws. The part that pushes the glue stick into the hot end snapped in two.

It didn’t take much to create a replacement. [pixelk] got most of the measurements with calipers and then got to work in OpenSCAD. After printing a few iterations, it fit well enough, but [pixelk] saw a chance to improve on the original design and added a few teeth where the part touches the glue stick. The new part has been going strong for three months.

We think this entry into our Repairs You Can Print contest is a perfect example of the everyday utility of 3D printers. Small reproducible plastic parts are all around us, just waiting to fail. The ability to not only replace them but to improve on them is one of the brightest sides of our increasingly disposable culture.

Still haven’t found a glue gun you can stick to? Try building your own.

Repairs You Can Print: Take A Deep Breath Thanks To A 3D Printed Fume Extractor

January 29, 2018 by 12 Comments

If you are a maker, chances are that you will be exposed to unhealthy fumes at some point during your ventures. Whether they involve soldering, treating wood, laser cutting, or 3D printing, it is in your best interest to do so in a well ventilated environment. What seems like sound advice in theory though is unfortunately not always a given in practice — in many cases, the workspace simply lacks the possibility, especially for hobbyists tinkering in their homes. In other cases, the air circulation is adequate, but the extraction itself could be more efficient by drawing out the fumes right where they occur. The latter was the case for [Zander] when he decided to build his own flexible hose fume extractor that he intends to use for anything from soldering to chemistry experiments.

Built around not much more than an AC fan, flex duct, and activated carbon, [Zander] designed and 3D printed all other required parts that turns it into an extractor. Equipped with a pre-filter to hold back all bigger particles before they hit the fan, the air flow is guided either through the active carbon filter, or attached to another flex duct for further venting. You can see more details of his build and how it works in the video after the break.

Workspace safety is often still overlooked by hobbyists, but improved air circulation doesn’t even need to be that complex for starters. There’s also more to read about fumes and other hazardous particles in a maker environment, and how to handle them.

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Repairing A Sunburned Game Boy Screen

January 26, 2018 by 23 Comments

The original Game Boy is a classic. Sure, it had no backlight, but there is something special about playing on that classic green screen. Unfortunately, some of these older systems are suffering a terrible fate — screen burn. Game Boy’s played best with lots of light — especially out in the sun. But that same sun did terrible things to the screen. A black splotch in the center of the LCD is the telltale sign of a burned Game Boy. You might think that screen replacement is the only option, but [The Retro Future] shows us how to repair this issue.

A reflective LCD is a layer cake made up of polarizers, two panes of glass, and a reflector. The burns often seen on Game Boy screens usually are in the polarizer and the optically clear glue which attaches the plastic polarizer to the glass. We’re guessing these burns happen when someone leaves their Game Boy out in the sun. Between the sun rays directly striking the top polarizer and the rays bounced back from the reflector at the rear of the screen, that poor polarizer doesn’t stand a chance.

Repairing the burn is a delicate operation, as one false move could crack the thin LCD glass. The first step is to carefully peel off the burned polarizer. This leaves a mess of dried glue, which can be scraped off or dissolved with alcohol. A new linear polarizer can then be placed on the front of the screen. [The Retro Future] chose not to glue the polarizer, but we’re betting some UV cure LOCA (Liquid Optically Clear Adhesive) from a cell phone screen protector would do the trick.

If you love the look of the classic Game Boy, but want to play just about any classic game, grab a Raspberry Pi zero, and build a retro Pi Boy.

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Asgard: The Open Source Air Data Computer

January 25, 2018 by 14 Comments

We get a lot of awesome projects sent our way via the tip line. Well, mainly it seems like we get spam, but the emails that aren’t trying to sell us something are invariably awesome. Even so, it’s not often we get a tip that contains the magic phrase “determine Mach number” in its list of features. So to say we were interested in the Asgard Air Data Computer (ADC) is something of an understatement.

Now we’ll admit right up front: we aren’t 100% sure who the target audience for the Asgard is, but it certainly looks impressive. Team member [Erik] wrote into tip line with information about this very impressive project, which is able to perform a number of measurements on incoming air, such as true speed, viscosity, and temperature. The team says it has applications ranging from HVAC to measuring the performance of bicycles. We don’t know who’s going so fast on their bike that they need to measure air speed, but of course the hacker community never ceases to amaze us.

Even if you don’t have a jet fighter that could benefit from a high performance ADC such as Asgard, you have to be impressed by the incredible work the team has done not only designing and building it, but documenting it. From the impeccably designed 3D printed case to the stacked PCB internals, every aspect of Asgard screams professional hardware.

Data collected from Asgard can be stored on the internal micro SD if the device is to be used in stand-alone mode, or you can connect to it over USB or Bluetooth thanks to the HC-05 module. The team has even put together some scripts to merge the Asgard’s generated air data with GPS position information.

We’re all for putting high quality sensors in the hand’s of the community and seeing what they can come up with. The spirit and build quality of this project reminds us of the impressive work [Radu Motisan] has been doing with his distributed air quality sensors.

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Someone’s Made The Laptop Clive Sinclair Never Built

January 21, 2018 by 42 Comments

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was one of the big players in the 8-bit home computing scene of the 1980s, and decades later is sports one of the most active of all the retrocomputing communities. There is a thriving demo scene on the platform, there are new games being released, and there is even new Spectrum hardware coming to market.

One of the most interesting pieces of hardware is the ZX Spectrum Next, a Spectrum motherboard with the original hardware and many enhancements implemented on an FPGA. It has an array of modern interfaces, a megabyte of RAM compared to the 48k of the most common original, and a port allowing the connection of a Raspberry Pi Zero for off-board processing. Coupled with a rather attractive case from the designer of the original Sinclair model, and it has become something of an object of desire. But it’s still an all-in-one a desktop unit like the original, they haven’t made a portable. [Dan Birch has changed all that, with his extremely well designed Spectrum Next laptop.

He started with a beautiful CAD design for a case redolent of the 1990s HP Omnbook style of laptop, but with some Spectrum Next styling cues. This was sent to Shapeways for printing, and came back looking particularly well-built. Into the case went an LCD panel and controller for the Next’s HDMI port, a Raspberry Pi, a USB hub, a USB to PS/2 converter, and a slimline USB keyboard. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a battery included, though we’re sure that with a bit of ingenuity some space could be found for one.

The result is about as good a Spectrum laptop as it might be possible to create, and certainly as good as what might have been made by Sinclair or Amstrad had somehow the 8-bit micro survived into an alternative fantasy version of the 1990s with market conditions to put it into the form factor of a high-end compact laptop. The case design would do any home-made laptop design proud as a basis, we can only urge him to consider releasing some files.

There is a video of the machine in action, which we’ve placed below the break.

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Ancient Insect Scales Analyzed With Help Of Nose Hair

January 21, 2018 by 15 Comments

Scientists working to advance the frontier of knowledge frequently also need to invent their tools along the way. Sometimes these are interesting little hacks to get a job done. Recently some researchers found ancestors of moths and butterflies older than any previously known by analyzing tiny scales found alongside ancient pollen. They needed a tool to manipulate these scales: separating them from surrounding debris, transferring them to microscope slides. The special tool was a needle tipped with a single human nostril hair.

As ancient insects were the published paper‘s focus, their use of nose hair tipped needle was only given a brief mention in the “Materials and Methods” section. Interviews by press quoted researchers’ claim that nose hair has the right mechanical properties for the job, without further details. Not even a picture of the tool itself. What properties of insect scales made them a good match with the properties of nose hair? Was there a comprehensive evaluation of multiple types of hair for the task? Would we regret asking these questions?

Novel approaches to fine-tipped tools would be interesting to examine under other contexts, like the tweezers we use to build surface-mount electronics. As SMD parts continue to shrink in size, will we reach a point where hair-tipped tools are the best DIY alternative to an expensive pick-and-place machine? It would be another creative approach to deal with the challenges of hand-built SMD. From simple but effective mechanical helpers, to handy 3D printed tools, to building hybrid Manual + CNC pick-and-place more affordable than their fully automated counterparts.

[via Washington Post]

Space Escape: Flying A Chair To Lunar Orbit

January 19, 2018 by 56 Comments

In the coming decades, mankind will walk on the moon once again. Right now, plans are being formulated for space stations orbiting around Lagrange points, surveys of lava tubes are being conducted, and slowly but surely plans are being formed to build the hardware that will become a small scientific outpost on our closest celestial neighbor.

This has all happened before, of course. In the early days of the Apollo program, there were plans to launch two Saturn V rockets for every moon landing, one topped with a command module and three astronauts, the other one containing an unmanned ‘LM Truck’. This second vehicle would land on the moon with all the supplies and shelter for a 14-day mission. There would be a pressurized lunar rover weighing thousands of pounds. This wouldn’t exactly be a Lunar colony, instead, it would be more like a small cabin in the Arctic used as a scientific outpost. Astronauts and scientists would land, spend two weeks researching and exploring, and return to Earth with hundreds of pounds of samples.

With this, as with all Apollo landings, came a risk. What would happen if the ascent engine didn’t light? Apart from a beautiful speech written by William Safire, there was nothing concrete for astronauts consigned to the deepest of the deep. Later in the Apollo program, there was a plan for real hardware to bring stranded astronauts home. This was the Lunar Escape System (LESS), basically two chairs mounted to a rocket engine.

While the LESS was never built, several studies were completed in late 1970 by North American Rockwell detailing the hardware that would return two astronauts from the surface of the moon. It involved siphoning fuel from a stricken Lunar Module, flying to orbit with no computer or really any instrumentation at all, and performing a rendezvous with an orbiting Command Module in less than one Lunar orbit.

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