EmuDroid 4: Completed!

March 8, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

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[Tony Huang] is checking in with his EmuDroid 4 gaming controller. After tons of redesigns — it is now finished!

We first started following this project back in November, when it was in an early prototype stage. What he has done is crammed a 4″ Android tablet, the guts of a USB SNES controller, a USB OTG adapter and inductive charging unit into a custom designed 3D printed housing.

What we really like about this project is the level of documentation [Tony] has gone into during his many… many… many iterations of the 3D printed housing. For those of you who aren’t engineers or designers, it’s a great insight into what goes into prototyping a product before release. Now just imagine what it was like when we didn’t have 3D printers! Continue reading “EmuDroid 4: Completed!” →

Mathematical! 3D Printed BMO Has A Full Range Of Emotions

March 8, 2014 by James Hobson 2 Comments

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Big fan of Adventure Time? Then you’re going to love this adorable 3D printed BMO robot!

Adventure-what? Adventure Time is a “kids” TV show about Finn (the human) and Jake (the dog), and their personal computer, BMO, a quirky little robot Game Boy. It’s one of the shows that adults can enjoy as well — sometimes wondering how it even is a kids show compared to other stuff on TV!

Anyway, [Noé] and [Pedro] are big fans of the show and they have decided to try making their own 3D printed BMO. It makes use of an 8×8 LED matrix to display BMO’s full range of emotions, which is controlled by a Gemma — a tiny 1″ diameter Attiny85 platform board programmable with the Arduino IDE over USB. They’ve even found a super handy animation tool for the LED matrix, which allows you to very easily add your own expressions and animations — simply copy the output code, replace anim.h, and you’re in business!

Stick around to see how it’s done!

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Solving Endstop Woes With A Simple Analog Filter

March 7, 2014 by Nick Conn 19 Comments

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You know what’s cool? Using your engineering knowledge to solve problems that you have while building something. This is exactly what [Reinis] did when his 3D printer’s endstop wasn’t working.

Many of us automatically go to a microcontroller when we run into a problem with a sensor, but often a simple analog filter will do the trick. The endstop in [Reinis’s] RepRap style 3D printer was giving off an unusual amount of noise when closed. When he hooked the endstop up to his oscilloscope, he was shocked to see how much noise there really was. In comes the low-pass filter. Unhappy with the response time of his low-pass filter, [Reinis] solved the problem using a pullup resistor. Two resistors and a capacitor was all that he needed to fix the problem. A great solution!

How have you used analog filters in your projects? Send us a tip and let us know!

3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day!

March 3, 2014 by James Hobson 20 Comments

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[Amr] recently built a 3D printer and came across his first practical application for it — his jacket’s zipper broke!

What we like about this project is [Amr] goes through the entire design process to finished product in his video. He starts by showing us the failed zipper, explaining where and why it failed, and then identifies the design features he needs to keep in order to make a functional replacement. To help accomplish this he checks out the Wikipedia article on zippers which shows an excellent animation of what happens inside of the zipper.

Now confident in his knowledge of all things zipper, he begins to model his replacement using SolidWorks, which is an industry standard among 3D CAD packages — for more information on how to use SolidWorks, we’ve been covering it in our 3D Printering articles! Continue reading “3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day!” →

The Stepper Driver Driver

March 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

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The Stepstick and Pololu motor drivers are the heart of just about every Reprap electronics board, but they can go bad. The usual way of testing these things is to rig up a microcontroller on a breadboard, grab some cables, and wire something up. [Ken]’s Easy Stepper Motor Controller is a much simpler solution to the problem of testing these drivers and could, with a bit of practice, be constructed on a single-sided homebrew PCB.

The Easy Stepper Motor Controller is a very simple board with connections to a motor, a power supply, and headers for a single Pololu or Stepstick motor driver. Two buttons and a pot control the rotation of the motor with the help of an ATtiny10, and jumpers for up to 16x microstepping are right there on the board.

There’s a video after the break showing what this stepper motor driver driver can do. It’s not much, but if you’re just testing a driver, it’s all you need.
Continue reading “The Stepper Driver Driver” →

3D Printing Metal Structures With A 6-axis Robot

February 24, 2014 by James Hobson 23 Comments

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[Joris Laarman] is working on a project called the MX3D-Metal which uses an ABB industrial robot arm and a welding machine to create strong metal structures on any working surface and in any direction.

He started last year with the MX3D Resin printer, which is the exact same concept, but instead of metal, it uses a two-part epoxy that bonds instantly upon mixing. Their lab is located in Amsterdam, and they work closely with IAAC (the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) — Autodesk provides funding for the research.

[Joris] has successfully printed complex structures using steel, stainless steel, bronze, copper, and even aluminum. Poking around their website you can find many examples of different things they have printed, including intricate matrices of multiple curved lines which end up looking more organic than mechanical. It uses mostly the same concept as the Rostock Welding robot we covered a few months ago, which is open source and fairly cheap to make at home!

Stick around for a video of both the MX3D-Metal and Resin robot printers in action!

Continue reading “3D Printing Metal Structures With A 6-axis Robot” →

3D Printed RGB LED Bracelet

February 23, 2014 by Marsh 3 Comments

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[Marcus’s] 3D-printed LED bracelet has moved through a number of revisions recently, but each iteration is impressive in both simplicity and functionality. Inspired to experiment with his print of [nervoussystem’s] Diagrid Bracelet, [Marcus] took the opportunity to add some LEDs with his first build, which combined a strip of RGB LEDs, a small battery, and an Adafruit Trinket microcontroller.

A second build soon followed, which overhauled the bracelet’s design into a more solid form and managed to double the amount of LEDs by upgrading to a different strip. The bracelet is currently in its third revision, cycling through the spectrum for around 3.5 hours on a single charge. This build also sports a 3-axis accelerometer: when the wearer shakes the bracelet, the colors skip around. If shaken long enough, the bracelet will enter a dazzling flurry of color flickering. Stick around after the break for a few demonstration videos. If you want to print your own, head over to [Marcus’s] Thingiverse file.

Continue reading “3D Printed RGB LED Bracelet” →