A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

Continue reading “1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar” →

RC Car Gets Force Feedback Steering

August 6, 2024 by 8 Comments

Remote-controlled cars can get incredibly fast and complex (and expensive) the farther into the hobby you get. So much so that a lot of things that are missing from the experience of driving a real car start to make a meaningful impact. [Indeterminate Design] has a few cars like this which are so fast that it becomes difficult to react to their behavior fast enough through sight alone. To help solve this problem and bridge the gap between the experience of driving a real car and an RC one, he’s added force feedback steering to the car’s remote control.

The first thing to tackle is the data throughput required to get a system like this working wirelessly. Relying heavily on the two cores in each of a pair of ESP32s, along with a long-range, high-speed wireless communications protocol called ESP-NOW, enough data from the car can be sent to make this possible but it does rely on precise timing to avoid jitter in the steering wheel. Some filtering is required as well, but with the small size of everything in this build it’s also a challenge not to filter out all of the important high-frequency forces. With the code written, [Indeterminate Design] turned to the 3D printer to build the prototype controller with built-in motors to provide the haptic feedback.

The other half of the project involves sensing the forces in the RC car which will then get sent back to the remote. After experimenting with a mathematical model to avoid having to source expensive parts and finding himself at a deadend with that method, eventually a bi-directional load cell was placed inside the steering mechanism which solved this problem. With all of these pieces working together, [Indeterminate Design] has a working force feedback steering mechanism which allows him to feel bumps, understeer, and other sensations, especially while doing things like drifting or driving through grass, that would be otherwise unavailable to drivers of RC cars. The only thing we could think of to bring this even more into realistic simulation territory would be to add something like a first-person view like high-speed drones often have.

Continue reading “RC Car Gets Force Feedback Steering” →

Benchy In A Bottle

August 6, 2024 by 20 Comments

Making something enjoyable often requires a clever trick. It could be a way to cut something funny or abuse some peripheral in a way it was never designed for. Especially good tricks have a funny way of coming up again and again. [DERAILED3D] put a 3d printed benchy in a bottle with one of the best tricks 3d printing has.

The trick is stopping the print part way through and tweaking it. You can add manual supports or throw in some PTFE beads to make a generator. The benchy isn’t the print being paused; the bottle is. The benchy is a standard print, and the bottle is clear resin. Once halfway through, they paused the print, and the benchy was left suspended in the bottle with a bit of wire. Of course, [DERAILED3D] moved quickly as they risked a layer line forming on the delicate resin after a minute or two of pausing. The difficulty and mess of tweaking a gooey half-finished resin print is likely why we haven’t seen many attempts at playing with the trick, but we look forward to more clever hacks as it gets easier.

The real magic is in the post-processing of the bottle to make it look as much like glass as possible. It’s a clever modern twist on the old ship in the bottle that we love. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Benchy In A Bottle” →

Hack On Self: Sense Of Time

August 6, 2024 by 48 Comments

Every now and then, a commercial product aims to help you in your life journey, in a novel way, making your life better through its presence. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by such products far more often than I have been reassured, seeing each one of them rendered unimaginative and purposeless sometimes even despite the creator’s best intentions. The pressures of a commercial market will choke you out without remorse, metal fingers firmly placed on your neck, tightening with every move that doesn’t promise profit, and letting money cloud your project’s vision. I believe that real answers can only come from within hacker communities, and as we explore, you might come to see it the same way.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a decade-long project that I hope to demonstrate in a year or two. I’d like to start talking about that project now, since it’s pretty extensive; the overall goal is about using computers to help with human condition, on a personal level. There’s a lot of talk about computers integrating into our lives – even more if you dare consult old sci-fi, much of my inspiration.

Tackling a gigantic problem often means cutting it down into smaller chunks, though, so here’s a small sub-problem I’ve been working on, for years now, on and off: Can you use computers to modify your sense of time?

Continue reading “Hack On Self: Sense Of Time” →

Creating 1 Um Features The Hacker Way

August 6, 2024 by 9 Comments

[Breaking Taps] has done some lithography experiments in the past, including some test patterns and a rudimentary camera sensor. But now, it’s time to turn it up a notch with 1µm garage semiconductor ambitions.

The e-beam lithography he’s done in the past can achieve some impressive resolutions, but they aren’t very fast; a single beam of electrons needs to scan over the entire exposure area, somewhat like a tiny crayon. That’s not very scalable; he needed a better solution to make 1µm semiconductors.

Test patterns from the first attempt

In his quest, he starts by trying to do maskless photolithography, using a literal projector to shine light on the target area all at once. After hacking a projector devkit apart, replacing blue with ultraviolet and adding custom optics, it’s time for a test. The process works for the most part but can’t produce fine details the way [Breaking Taps] needs. Unfortunately, fixing that would mean tearing the whole set-up apart for the umpteenth time.
Continue reading “Creating 1 Um Features The Hacker Way” →

The 555 As A MOSFET Driver

August 5, 2024 by 25 Comments

To drive a MOSFET requires more than merely a logic level output, there’s a requirement to charge the device’s gate which necessitates a suitable buffer amplifier. A variety of different approaches can be taken, from a bunch of logic buffers in parallel to a specialised MOSFET driver, but [Mr. T’s Design Graveyard] is here with a surprising alternative. As it turns out, the ever-useful 555 timer chip does the job admirably.

It’s a simple enough circuit, the threshold pin is pulled high so the output goes high, and the PWM drive from an Arduino is hooked up to the reset pin. A bipolar 555 can dump a surprising amount of current, so it’s perfectly happy with a MOSFET. We’re warned that the CMOS variants don’t have this current feature, and he admits that the 555 takes a bit of current itself, but if you have the need and a 555 is in your parts bin, why not!

This will of course come as little surprise to anyone who played with robots back in the day, as a 555 or particularly the 556 dual version made a pretty good and very cheap driver for small motors. If you’ve ever wondered how these classic hips work, we recently featured an in-depth look.

Continue reading “The 555 As A MOSFET Driver” →

A rough cut piece of wood sits on a workbench. A light and a tumbleweed are mounted on top so that the light shines through the tumbleweed. A woman in a ball cap and white tank top is crouched in the background smiling.

Cisco Ball Is The Tumbleweed Opposite Of A Disco Ball

August 5, 2024 by 8 Comments

Inspiration can strike a maker at any moment. For [Laura Kampf], it happened in the desert when she saw a tumbleweed.

Tumbleweeds roll through the western United States, hitting cars on the interstate and providing some background motion for westerns. [Kampf] found the plant’s intricate, prickly structure mesmerizing, and decided to turn it into a piece of contemplative kinetic art.

[Kampf] attached the tumbleweed to a piece of wood using epoxy and mounted it to what appears to be a worm drive motor nestled inside an interestingly-shaped piece of wood. As the tumbleweed turns, a light shines through it to project a changing shadow on the wall to “create silence, it creates calmness, it takes away from the noise that surrounds it.” While [Kampf] has some work to do to get the sculpture to its finished state, we can get behind her mantra, “The most important thing about the phase of execution is to get started.”

Are you looking for some projects of your own to help you find calm? How about some ambient lighting, a sand drawing table, or a music player that keeps things simple?

Continue reading “Cisco Ball Is The Tumbleweed Opposite Of A Disco Ball” →