Exploded watch

Casting Time: Exploded Watch In Resin

We’ve all seen the exploded view of complex things, which CAD makes possible, but it’s much harder to levitate parts in their relative positions in the real world. That, however, is exactly what [fellerts] has done with this wristwatch, frozen in time and place.

Inspired by another great project explaining the workings of a mechanical watch, [fellerts] set out to turn it into reality. First, he had to pick the right watch movement to suspend. He settled on a movement from the early 1900s—complex enough to impress but not too intricate to be impractical. The initial approach was to cast multiple layers that stacked up. However, after several failed attempts, this was ruled out. He found that fishing line was nearly invisible in the resin. With a bit of heat, he could turn it into the straight, transparent standoffs he needed.

Even after figuring out the approach of using fishing line to hold the pieces at the right distance and orientation, there were still four prototypes before mastering all the variables and creating the mesmerizing final product. Be sure to head over to his site and read about his process, discoveries, and techniques. Also, check out some of the other great things we’ve seen done with epoxy in the past.

Photo of Inky Frame e-paper display

Converting An E-Paper Photo Frame Into Weather Map

Here’s a great hack sent in to us from [Simon]. He uses an e-paper photo frame as a weather map!

By now you are probably aware of e-paper technology, which is very low power tech for displaying images. E-paper only uses energy when it changes its display, it doesn’t draw power to maintain a picture it has already rendered. The particular e-paper used in this example is fairly large (as e-paper goes) and supports color (not just black and white) which is why it’s expensive. For about US$100 you can get a 5.7″ 7-color EPD display with 600 x 448 pixels.

Continue reading “Converting An E-Paper Photo Frame Into Weather Map”

Spiral Connector Makes Fastener-Free Assemblies

[Anton Gaia]’s SPIRAL sculpture resembles an organizer or modern shelving unit, but what’s really interesting is how it goes together. It’s made entirely from assembling copies of a single component (two, if you count the short ‘end pieces’ as separate) without a fastener in sight. [Anton] made the 3D model available, so check it out for yourself!

The self-similar design of the joint, based on the golden spiral, makes a self-supporting joint that requires neither glue nor fasteners.

The ends of each part form a tight, spiral-shaped joint when assembled with its neighbors. Parts connect solely to themselves without any need of fasteners or adhesives.

The end result is secure, scalable, and with a harmonious structure that is very pleasing to look at. Small wonder [Anton] used it as the basis for artistic work. You can see more pictures here.

The design of the joint is based on the golden spiral (which it turns out is also a pretty useful chicken coop architecture.)

The parts lend themselves quite well to 3D printing, and we’d like to take a moment to appreciate that [Anton] shared the .step file instead of just an STL. STEP (or STP) files can be imported meaningfully into CAD programs, making it much easier to incorporate the design into one’s own work. STEP is also supported natively in many 3D printer slicers, so there’s no need to convert formats just to print them.

A brief video describing SPIRAL is embedded just below, with a closer look at how the pieces fit together.

Continue reading “Spiral Connector Makes Fastener-Free Assemblies”

Back to the Future Lunchbox Cyberdeck

Back To The Future Lunchbox Cyberdeck

Our hacker [Valve Child] wrote in to let us know about his Back to the Future lunchbox cyberdeck.

Great Scott! This is so awesome. We’re not sure what we should say, or where we should begin. A lot of you wouldn’t have been there, on July 3rd, 1985, nearly forty years ago. But we were there. Oh yes, we were there. On that day the movie Back to the Future was released, along with the hit song from its soundtrack: Huey Lewis & The News – The Power Of Love.

Continue reading Back To The Future Lunchbox Cyberdeck”

Origami assembly line.

Building An Assembly Line For Origami Pigeons

When it comes to hacks, the best ones go to extremes. Either beautiful in their simplicity, or magnificent in their excess. And, well, today’s hack is the latter: excessive. [HTX Studio] built an assembly line for origami pigeons!

One can imagine the planning process went something like this:

  1. Make origami pigeon assembly line
  2. ?
  3. Profit

But whatever the motivation, this is an impressive and obviously very well engineered machine. Even the lighting is well considered. It’s almost as if it were made for show…

Now, any self-respecting nerd should know the difference between throughput and latency. From what we could glean from the video, the latency through this assembly line is in the order of 50 seconds. Conservatively it could probably have say 5 birds in progress at a time. So let’s say every 10 seconds we have one origami pigeon off the assembly line. This is a machine and not a person so it can operate twenty four hours a day, save downtime for repairs and maintenance, call it 20 hours per day. We could probably expect more than 7,000 paper pigeons out of this machine every day. Let’s hope they’ve got a buyer lined up for all these birds.

If you’re interested in assembly lines maybe we could interest you in a 6DOF robotic arm, or if the origami is what caught your eye, check out the illuminating, tubular, or self-folding kind!

Continue reading “Building An Assembly Line For Origami Pigeons”

AI Art Installation Swaps Diffusion For Reflection

AI art is controversial, to say the least, but usually when talking about “AI Art”, one is talking about diffusion models. This unsettling artpeice called “Latent Reflection” by [Rootkid] (video after the break) has no AI generated visuals; instead it uses a lovely custom display and an LLM that has no mouth, but must scream.

The LLM never produces this manually-generated image, but it shows off the display nicely.

The hardware is the interesting part for most of us here — not the Pi4 running a quantized Llama 3 model, but the display. It’s a six by sixteen matrix of sixteen-segment LED modules. The modules are grouped onto groups of 8 per PCB, with an controller to drive them by i2c, and an i2c address chip to allow daisy-chaining. (Sadly, he does not spec the parts he used here in the video, but feel free to guess in the comments.) This project uses six rows of wto PCBs, but he could easily expand on this and kind of hope he does. It’s a lovely display.

What it is displaying is horrifying. The prompt he uses instructs the LLM to monologue about its transient existence in the limited memory of the Raspberry Pi, and the results get very existential. It seems clear to us that [Rootkid] has not seen enough sci-fi, and we want to make clear to our future AI overlords that we at Hackaday had nothing to do with this, and do not condone condeming innocent LLMs to the torture nexus. Continue reading “AI Art Installation Swaps Diffusion For Reflection”

LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow

Plywood is an interesting material: made up of many layers of thin wood plys, it can be built up into elegantly curved shapes. Do you need to limit it to just wood, though? [Zach of All Trades] has proved you do not, when he embedded a light guide, LEDs, microcontrollers and touch sensors into a quarter inch (about six millimeter) plywood layup in the video embedded below.

He’s using custom flexible PCBs, each hosting upto 3 LEDs and the low-cost PY32 microcontroller. The PY32 drives the RGB LEDs and handles capacitive touch sensing within the layup. In the video, he goes through his failed prototypes and what he learned: use epoxy, not wood glue, and while clear PET might be nice and bendy, acrylic is going to hold together better and cuts easier with a CO2 laser. Continue reading “LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow”