CNC Router Frame Repurposed For Colorful String Art Bot

December 11, 2020 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Pandemic lockdowns have been brutal, but they’ve had the side-effect of spurring creativity and undertaking projects that are involved enough and complex enough to keep from going stir crazy. This CNC string art robot is a great example of what’s possible with a little imagination and a lot of time. (Video, embedded below.)

According to [knezuld11], the robot creates its art through mathematical algorithms via a Python program that translates them into nail positions and string paths. The modified CNC router frame, constructed of laser-cut plywood, has two interchangeable tool heads. The first places the nails, which are held in a small hopper. After being picked up by a servo-controlled magnetic arm and held vertically, a gear-driven ram pushes each nail into a board at just the right coordinates. After changing to a different tool, the robot is able to pick up one of nine different thread dispensers. A laser sensor verifies the thread nozzle position, and the thread starts its long journey around the nails. It’s a little mesmerizing to watch, and the art looks great, with a vibe that brings us right back to the 70s. Groovy, man.

This reminds us a little of a recent [Barton Dring] project that makes art from overlapping strings. That one was pretty cool for what it accomplished with just one thread color, while this one really brings color to the party. Take your pick, place your nails, and get stringing.

Continue reading “CNC Router Frame Repurposed For Colorful String Art Bot” →

A PCB Diary

December 9, 2020 by Chris Lott 8 Comments

[Gijs Gieskes] has made another eye-catching PCB wonder, this time a diary built from several circuit boards which are assembled into a book, not unlike a PC/104 system. But with [Gijs]’s system you can easily open the stack-up to access single boards without disassembling the whole thing. We don’t see brass piano hinges on PCB assemblies very often, but [Gijs]’s PCB designs are anything but conventional. Hint: if you wanted to recreate this technique using more ordinary hardware, you can find hinged PCB standoffs from various suppliers.

Bicycle, soccer ball, smoke on the “No no no no no…” PCB

Apparently it’s more than a passive piece of art. Each board has several circuits, some of which (all?) are functioning is ways not clearly described, which seems to be intentional. According to his build log, different things happen when you mix and match the inter-board ribbon cables in various ways. We are told in the instructions “to just try and see what happens”. No schematics are posted, but there is a partial description of the circuits in the manual and parts on the two-layer boards are well-labeled. Although after spot checking a few circuits board photos, we’d guess that no small number of traces, and perhaps some parts, are wild goose chases.

The project claims to be a diary for the years 2018 and 2019, but we will leave it as an exercise for the reader to interpret the messages that [Gijs] has embedded into this fascinating piece. We have written about several of his projects over the years, such as this crazy bent Casio SK-1 from all the way back in 2005. And before dismissing this “book” style of circuit board stack-up as only for artists, check out this teardown of a Soyuz clock we covered back in January.

How To Get Into Lost Wax Casting (with A Dash Of 3D Printing)

December 7, 2020 by Adam Zeloof 24 Comments

I’ve always thought that there are three things you can do with metal: cut it, bend it, and join it. Sure, I knew you could melt it, but that was always something that happened in big foundries- you design something and ship it off to be cast in some large angular building churning out smoke. After all, melting most metals is hard. Silver melts at 1,763 °F. Copper at 1,983 °F. Not only do you need to create an environment that can hit those temperatures, but you need to build it from materials that can withstand them.

Turns out, melting metal is not so bad. Surprisingly, I’ve found that the hardest part of the process for an engineer like myself at least, is creating the pattern to be replicated in metal. That part is pure art, but thankfully I learned that we can use technology to cheat a bit.

When I decided to take up casting earlier this year, I knew pretty much nothing about it. Before we dive into the details here, let’s go through a quick rundown to save you the first day I spent researching the process. At it’s core, here are the steps involved in lost wax, or investment, casting:

Make a pattern: a wax or plastic replica of the part you’d like to create in metal
Make a mold: pour plaster around the pattern, then burn out the wax to leave a hollow cavity
Pour the metal: melt some metal and pour it into the cavity

I had been kicking around the idea of trying this since last fall, but didn’t really know where to begin. There seemed to be a lot of equipment involved, and I’m no sculptor, so I knew that making patterns would be a challenge. I had heard that you could 3D-print wax patterns instead of carving them by hand, but the best machine for the job is an SLA printer which is prohibitively expensive, or so I thought. Continue reading “How To Get Into Lost Wax Casting (with A Dash Of 3D Printing)” →

Remoticon Video: Circuit Sculpture Workshop

December 3, 2020 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

Circuit Sculpture was one of our most anticipated workshops of Hackaday Remoticon 2020, and now it’s ready for those who missed it to enjoy. A beginning circuit sculptor could hardly ask for more than this workshop, which highlights three different approaches to building firefly circuit sculptures and is led by some of the most prominent people to ever bend brass and components to their will — Jiří Praus, Mohit Bhoite, & Kelly Heaton.

For starters, you’ll learn the different tools and techniques that each of them uses to create their sculptures. For instance, Kelly likes to use water-based clay to hold components in specific orientations while forming the sculpture and soldering it all together. Jiří and Mohit on the other hand tend to use tape. The point is that there is no right or wrong way, but to instead have all of these tips and tricks under your belt as you sculpt. And that’s what this workshop is really about.

Continue reading “Remoticon Video: Circuit Sculpture Workshop” →

Escape Tunnel In Your Living Room: A Different Take On The Infinity Mirror

November 23, 2020 by Danie Conradie 26 Comments

Most infinity mirrors are just minor variations on the same old recipe. Take a frame, add a normal mirror in the back, a one-way mirror on the front, and put some LEDs between them. [Stevens Workshop] took a slightly different approach and built an escape tunnel coffee table that really caught our attention.

To create the tunnel and ladder illusion, [Steven] kept the mirrors, but made a deeper wood frame, installed a light bulb in an industrial-looking socket instead of the usual LEDs, and added a single ladder rung. The end result makes for a very interesting conversation piece, and some of us prefer it to the multicolored LED look. Though he added his own touches, the idea was actually borrowed from from [asthhvdrt36] and [BreezleSprouts] on Reddit who used slightly different light and ladder designs.

While there’s nothing groundbreaking here, it’s certainly a case of “why didn’t I think of that”. Sometimes the old and familiar just needs a different perspective to create something fascinating. One of the advantages of the classic infinity mirror is the thin profile, which we’ve seen integrated into everything from guitars to coasters.

Prism Lighting – The Art Of Steering Daylight

November 9, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 33 Comments

The incandescent light bulb was one of the first early applications of electricity, and it’s hard to underestimate its importance. But before the electric light, people didn’t live in darkness — they thought of ways to redirect sunlight to brighten up interior spaces. This was made possible through the understanding of the basic principles of optics and the work of skilled glassmakers who constructed prism tiles, deck prisms, and vault lights. These century-old techniques are still being applied today for the diffusion of LEDs or for increasing the brightness of LCD displays.

Semantics First!

People in optics are a bit sloppy when it comes to the definition of a prism. While many of them are certainly not geometric prisms, Wikipedia defines it as a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces of which at least one is angled. As can be seen in the pictures below some of the prisms here do not even stick to this definition. Browsing the catalog of your favorite optics supplier you will find a large variety of prisms used to reflect, invert, rotate, disperse, steer, and collimate light. It is important to point out that we are not so much interested in dispersive prisms that split a beam of white light into its spectrum of colors, although they make great album covers. The important property of prisms in this article is their ability to redirect light through refraction and reflection.

A Safe Way to Bring Light Under Deck

A collection of deck lights used to direct sunlight below deck in ships. Credit: glassian.org

One of the most important uses of prism lighting was on board ships. Open flames could have disastrous consequences aboard a wooden ship, so deck prisms were installed as a means to direct sunlight into the areas below decks. One of the first patents for deck lights “THE GREAT AND DURABLE INCREASE OF LIGHT BY EXTRAORDINARY GLASSES AND LAMPS” was filed by Edward Wyndus as early as 1684. Deck prisms had typical sizes of 10 to 15 centimeters. The flat top was installed flush with the deck and the sunlight was refracted and directed downward from the prism point. Because of the reversibility of light paths (“If I can see you, you can see me”) deck prisms also helped to spot fires under deck. Continue reading “Prism Lighting – The Art Of Steering Daylight” →

Sharpie Mount Brings Some Color To Your 3D Prints

November 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

The average cost of a desktop 3D printer has dropped like a stone over the last few years. They went from a piece of equipment you had to wait your turn to use at the hackerspace to something you can pick up on Prime Day, which has definitely been a good thing for our community. But to get the price down, these printers are almost exclusively running single extruder setups with no provision for multi-material printing other than swapping the filament manually.

From a practical standpoint, that’s not much of a problem. But wanting to add a little visual flair to his prints, [Devin Montes] came up with a simple 3D printed mount that holds the tip of up to three Sharpie permanent markers against the filament as it enters the top of the extruder. When used with white or translucent filaments, these markers can give the final print an interesting splash of color. Obviously it’s not true multi-color 3D printing, but it can certainly make for some attractive decorative objects.

The mount is designed for the Snapmaker 3-in-1 3D printer, which is relatively well suited to such a contraption as it has a direct drive extruder and there’s plenty of clearance for the markers to stick up. The concept could certainly be adapted to other printers, but it might be a little trickier in the case of a Bowden extruder or an i3 clone that has frame components running over the top. It sounds like [Devin] is working on a generic version of the marker holder that can work on other printers, so it should be interesting to see how he addresses these issues.

Technically this isn’t a new concept, as makers were pulling off similar tricks back in the earliest days of desktop 3D printing. But this is an especially well-implemented version of the idea, and if [Devin] can really come up with a mount that will work on a wider array of hardware, we could certainly see it becoming a popular way to make printed projects a bit more exciting.