Kinetic Sculpture Intermittently Lights Up The Night

September 16, 2023 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

We absolutely love the impetus of this project, as it definitely sounds like something a Hackaday reader would go through. After finally deciding between a CNC router and a laser cutter, [Eirik Brandal] was planning to “Hello, World” the CNC with something quick and simple, like maybe a few acrylic plates with curves and some electronics. Instead, feature creep took over, “things escalated out of control”, and [Eirik] came up with this intriguing and complicated kinetic sculpture.

As you’ll see in the demo video below, this is a motor-driven sculpture with sound and intermittent light. It has an Arduino Nano Every, two motors, and eight gears with various cog counts to accommodate the project. The light comes from LEDs that are attached to the DIY gears with their legs bent and their little feet sliding around homemade slip rings in order to alight.

But what about the sound? There’s an affixed piezo disk that picks up the gears’ vibrations and chafing, and this gets amplified to augment the acoustic sounds of the sculpture. Be sure to check out the quite satisfying demo video after the break, and stick around for the build video.

Are you as fascinated by kinetic sculptures as we are? Here’s on that uses machine learning in order to bring balance to itself.

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Photography Goes Leaf Green

August 28, 2023 by Jenny List 4 Comments

Something that haunts film photographers is the prospect of a film shortage. This won’t replace film in that event, but [Applied Science] demonstrates photography using leaves. That’s right, a plant can record an image on its leaves.

Anyone with a high-school level of education can tell you that the leaf is a solar energy harvester, with the green chlorophyll using CO2 scavenged from the air to make sugars in the presence of light. It stands to reason that this light sensitivity could be used to capture images, and indeed if you place a leaf in the dark for an extended period of time its chlorophyll fades away where there is no light. The technique described in the video below the break is different though, and much more sensitive than the days-long exposures required to strip chlorophyll. It relies on starch, which the leaf uses to store energy locally when it has an excess of light. Continue reading “Photography Goes Leaf Green” →

Kitchen Steganography With Turmeric

August 26, 2023 by Al Williams 12 Comments

It is a classic rite of passage for nerdy kids to write secret messages using lemon juice. If you somehow missed that, you can’t see the writing until you heat the paper up with, say, an old-fashioned light bulb. If you were a true budding spy, you’d write a boring normal letter with wide spacing and then fill in the blanks between the lines with your important secrets written in juice. This is a form of steganography — encoding secret messages by hiding them in plain sight. [Randomona] shares a different technique that seems to be way cooler than lemon juice using, of all things, turmeric. This isn’t like the invisible ink of our childhood.

That’s probably a good thing. We doubt an LED bulb makes enough heat to develop our old secret messages. [Ranomona’s] ink doesn’t use heat, but it uses a developer. That means you must make two preparations: the ink and the developer. The results are amazing, though, as shown in the video below.

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A wooden frame with 64 green LEDs running a Game of Life simulation

Wooden CNC Sculpture Displays Conway’s Game Of Life

August 24, 2023 by Robin Kearey 1 Comment

Conway’s Game of Life has been the object of fascination for computer hobbyists for decades. Watching the generations tick by is mesmerizing to watch, but programming the data structure and implementing the rules is also a rewarding experience, especially if you’re just getting acquainted with a new computing platform. Just as rewarding can be creating a nice piece of hardware to run the game on, as [SandwichRising] has just done: check out his beautiful wooden Game of Life implementation.

The main part of his Game is a piece of poplar wood that was CNC routed to produce an 8×8 display adorned with neat chain-like shapes. The display consists of standard 5 mm green LEDs, but they’re not the things you see poking out the front of the wooden frame. Instead, what you’re seeing are 64 lenses made out of epoxy. [SandwichRising] first covered the holes with tape, then poured green epoxy into each one and waited for it to harden. He then took off the tape and applied a drop of UV-cured epoxy on top to create a lens.

All the LEDs are mounted on PCB strips that are hooked up to a central bus going to the main ATmega328P microcontroller sitting on a separate piece of PCB. Whenever the system is powered on, the game is set to a random state determined by noise, after which the simulation begins. On such a small field it’s pretty common for the game to end up in a stable state or a regular oscillation, which is why the ATmega keeps track of the last few dozen states to determine if this has happened, and if so, reset the game to a random state again.

The source code, as well as .STL files for the PCBs and the frame, are available in the project’s GitHub repository. If woodworking isn’t your thing, there’s plenty of other ways to make neat Game of Life displays, such as inside an alarm clock, with lots of LEDS under a coffee table, or even with a giant flip-dot display.

3D Printing With Clay, Thanks To Custom Extruder

August 22, 2023 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

When it comes to 3D printing clay, there are a lot of challenges to be met. An extruder capable of pushing clay is critical, and [davidsfeir] has an updated version suitable for an Ender 3 printer. This extruder is based on earlier designs aimed at delta printers, but making one compatible with an Ender 3 helps keep things accessible.

Lightly pressurized clay comes in via the clear tube. Air escapes out the top (motor side) while an auger homogenizes the clay and pushes it out the nozzle.

What’s special about a paste extruder that can push clay? For one thing, clay can’t be stored on a spool, so it gets fed into the extruder via a hose with the help of air pressure. From there, the clay is actually extruded with the help of an auger that takes care of pushing the clay down through the nozzle. The extruder also needs a way to deal with inevitable air bubbles, which it does by allowing air to escape out the narrow space at the top of the assembly while clay gets fed downward.

[davidsfeir] was greatly inspired by the work of clay-printing pioneers [Piotr Waśniowski] and his de-airing clay extruder, and [Jonathan Keep], who has documented 3D printing with clay comprehensively in a freely-available PDF. You can check out more of [david]’s designs on his Instagram page.

There are so many different aspects to printing with clay or clay-like materials that almost every part is ripe for innovation. For example, we’ve seen wild patterns result from sticking a thumping subwoofer under a print bed.

A Speaker With Dancing Ferrofluid

August 14, 2023 by Al Williams 2 Comments

A speaker project isn’t usually very different, but we couldn’t help but notice [Electronoob’s] latest speaker not for its audio performance but because it features dancing ferrofluid and is an unusual work of art. The housing is 3D printed and includes some translucent portions for LEDs.You can see and hear the speaker at work in the video below.

Apparently, not all ferrofluid is created equal. You can get just the fluid, but then you have to work up some sort of carrier fluid. You can also get the material already in a glass with a carrier fluid, which is a better option. Apparently, you can also get cheap material that is little more than iron filings suspended in a liquid. That’s not really ferrofluid.

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Hacking Fake Food

August 8, 2023 by Al Williams 24 Comments

Ever seen a restaurant where they display fake models of the food on the menu? We never thought much about how shokuhin sampuru — the Japanese name — were made until we watched [Process X]’s video showing a 71-year-old artist creating food models. We aren’t sure what we — or you — would do with this information, but it is a striking process, and there must be something you could do with it. We suggest turning on the English captions, but you’d probably enjoy watching the unusual craftsmanship even with no words.

In years past, the food models were primarily made from wax, but since the 1980s, it is more common to use polyvinyl chloride, silicone, and resin. While some factories produce items, sometimes with a mold, single craftsmen like the one in the video still make up the largest part of the market.

We aren’t sure, but we think the material in the video is wax. We couldn’t help but think that some of this could have been 3D printed, but even with the finest resins and resolution, it probably wouldn’t be quite as artistic. We think wax is mainly underutilized in today’s tech. But there are some places it still shows up.

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