Plus Size Watch With A Pair Of Tiny Nixies

January 20, 2017 by 10 Comments

When you stuff a pair of Nixie tubes into a wristwatch the resulting timepiece looks a little like Flavor Flav’s necklace. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your taste and if you’re comfortable with the idea of wearing 200 volts on your wrist, of course.

As a build, though, [prototype_mechanic]’s watch is worth looking into. Sadly, details are sparse due to a computer issue that ate the original drawings and schematics, but we can glean a little from the Instructables post. The case is machined out of solid aluminum and sports a quartz glass crystal. The pair of IN-16 tubes lives behind a bezel with RGB LEDs lighting the well. There’s a 400mAh LiPo battery on board, and an accelerometer to turn the display on with a flick of the wrist.

It may be a bit impractical for daily use, but it’s a nicely crafted timepiece with a steampunk flair. Indeed, [prototype_mechanic] shows off a few other leather and Nixie pieces with four tubes that certainly capture the feel of the steampunk genre. For one with a little more hacker appeal, check out this Nixie watch with a 3D-printed case.

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[Dave’s] Not Just A Member Of The Air Club For Tweezers

January 14, 2017 by 9 Comments

We are always surprised how much useful hacking gear is in the typical craft store. You just have to think outside the box. Need a hot air gun? Think embossing tool. A soldering iron? Check the stained glass section. Magnification gear? Sewing department.

We’ve figured out that people who deal with beads use lots of fine tools and have great storage boxes. But [Dave] found out they also use vacuum pickup tweezers. He had been shopping for a set and found that one with all the features he wanted (foot pedal, adjustable air flow, and standard tips) would run about $1000.

By picking up a pump used for bead makers and adding some components, he put together a good-looking system for about $200. You can see a video of the device, below, and there are several other videos detailing the construction.

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Paper Airplane Machine Gun V2.0

January 10, 2017 by 40 Comments

A little over two years ago we posted an amazing contraption that holds a stack of paper sheets, folds them into paper planes, and launches them. There’s now a newer version — the PFM A5 v2.0. It is over a meter long, weighs about 10 kilograms, and features a mind-boggling number of gears and moving parts. Video is embedded below.

In one end travels one sheet of paper after the next. At each stage in the process the paper is folded (symmetrically) and creased by a vertical wheel to make up the keel of the finished plane before launching out the other end. Amazing, and not a jam or “PC Load Letter” error message in sight!

This, of course, has a purpose… junk ads from the sky!

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Air Conditioner Speaks Serial, Just Like Everything Else

January 6, 2017 by 26 Comments

Like so many other home appliances, it’s likely that even your air conditioner has a serial interface buried inside it. If you’re wondering why, it’s because virtually every microcontroller on the planet has a UART built in, and it’s highly useful for debugging during the development process, so it makes sense to use it. Thus, it was only a matter of time before we saw a hacked airconditioner controlled by a Raspberry Pi.

[Hadley] was growing frustrated with the IR remote for his Mitsubishi air conditioner; it can issue commands, but it’s a one way interface – there’s no feedback on current status or whether commands are received, other then the occasional beep or two. Deciding there had to be a better way, [Hadley] grabbed a Saleae Logic Analyser and started probing around, determining that the unit spoke 5 V TTL at 2400 bps with even parity. The next step was to start talking back.

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A Thoroughly Modern Sinclair ZX80

January 5, 2017 by 60 Comments

At the end of the 1970s, the 8-bit home computer market had been under way for several years. Companies like Apple and Commodore had produced machines that retain a cult following to this day, and there was plenty for the computer enthusiast to get to grips with. As always though with a new technology, the trouble was that an Apple II or a Commodore Pet wasn’t cheap. If you didn’t have much cash, or you were a young person with uncomprehending or impoverished parents, they were out of reach. You could build a computer from a kit if you were brave or technically competent enough, but otherwise you were out of luck.

As you might imagine, the manufacturers understood that there was an untapped market for cheaper hardware, so as we entered the new decade a range of budget machines that appeared to satisfy that demand. Gone were internal expansion slots, dedicated monitors and mass storage, for cheap keyboards, domestic TV monitors, and home cassette recorders. 1980s teenagers would have computers of their own, their parents safe in the knowledge they were educational while the kids themselves were more interested in the games. Continue reading “A Thoroughly Modern Sinclair ZX80” →

Repairing Flex Circuits By Accident

December 22, 2016 by 14 Comments

A while ago, [drygol] was asked to repair a few old Amiga keyboards. The key switches worked fine, but in the past decade or two, the flexible PCB ribbon connector has been mistreated, and was in an unworkable, nonfunctional state. The fragile traces underneath the green epoxy coating were giving way, but [drygol] found a few cool ways to repair these flex cables.

The end of this keyboard cable was beyond repair, but the Commodore engineers were gracious enough to leave a bit of slack in this keyboard connector. After cutting off the most damaged section, [drygol] had a strip of plastic, a few copper traces, and a green coating that had to be removed. The first attempt to remove this green covering used methanol, but that didn’t work. The next chemical attempt was with an epoxy solvent that contained nasty chemicals. This was applied to the end of the flex cable, with the remainder of the cable masked off by Kapton. It worked remarkably well.

In removing the Kapton masking tape, [drygol] discovered this green film sticks better to Kapton than it does to copper and plastic. A mechanical solution was found, allowing these keyboard cables to be easily repaired.

Of course, this was only half of the problems with these flexible circuits. Over the years, a few cracks appeared in the traces. To repair these broken traces, [drygol] turned to silver glue and a few laminations of Kapton to make this keyboard cable whole again. It worked, and the ancient keyboard was returned to service. Great work, and a fantastic observation for anyone with one of these keyboards sitting around: just grab a roll of Kapton to repair these circuits. It can’t get any easier than that.

Clear The Air Around Your CNC Router With A Custom Dust Shroud

December 18, 2016 by 11 Comments

Using a CNC router is a dusty business if your material of choice is wood. Sure, you can keep things tidy by chasing the cutter around the table with a shop vac, but that sort of takes the fun out of having a machine that can make cuts without you. The big boy machines all have integrated dust collection, and now you can too with this 3D-printed CNC router dust shoe.

Designed specifically for the X-Carve with a DeWalt 611 router, [Mark Edstrom]’s brush is a simple design that’s almost entirely 3D printed. The shroud encloses the router body and clamps to the mounting bracket, totally surrounding the business end of the machine. The cup is trimmed with a flexible fringe to trap the dust and guide it to the port that fits a small (1-1/4″ diameter) shop vac hose. The hose is neatly routed along the wiring harness, and the suction is provided by a standard shop vac.

Files for the cup are up on Thingiverse; we suspect it’d be easy to modify the design to work with other routers and dust collectors. You might even find a way to shroud a laser cutter and capture the exhaust with a DIY filter.

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