While we hope you enjoyed our How-To: Etch a printed circuit board, toner transfer certainly isn’t the only way to get the job done. [Garrett] from macetech has recently been playing around with using an Epilog laser to etch PCBs. He started by applying a thin even coat of flat black spray paint to the copper board. The laser is used to remove paint in areas that you want the copper removed. Once that’s done, you proceed with etching as usual. He eventually removed the paint mask using acetone. The result has very fine, sharp traces, but most people that have tried this agree that using spray paint is less than ideal.
classic hacks2813 Articles
StickDuino, USB Stick Arduino Clone
The Arduino hardware clones keep rolling in. This weeks entry into the modern dev board’s roster is the StickDuino. The board is designed to be fully hardware compatible and plugs directly into your USB port. The StickDuino uses all SMD components. The creators know that this can make assembly more difficult so they’ve space the components out, opted for larger pads, and collected some links to SMD tutorials. The board feature two more analog inputs than the Diecimila and it has a jumper so you can switch it to 3.3V. All around it looks like a great product; frankly we love anything with full board layouts.
Electric Screwdriver Robot Hand
Here’s an interesting grabber hand built for use on an ROV. This grabber is a novel use of a very common and extremely cheap electric screwdriver, that is probably found in everyone’s toolbox. It is also a great way to reuse that small electric screwdriver you have kicking around that uses proprietary batteries that are not worth replacing. Many of the ROV’s covered previously could benefit from such a powerful device built from very common materials off his parts list. Because the screwdriver was extremely cheap the designer chose not to completely seal the housing.
It seems like this simple design that could be used in many robotic projects and by simply changing the jaws could yield other creative uses. The first thing that comes to mind is to upsize this hack into something bigger and stronger. Either way, you might not want to get your fingers in there.
Hacking Animatronic Elvis
[Scott] shot us a tip about some progress on hacking those creepy [Elvis] heads produced by Wowee. The head uses a flash cartridge to store all the data used for the motion/audio control. The cartridge uses NAND flash, so a quick solder job to an XD flash card reader yielded a useful dump of the memory cartridge – which happened to be fat32 formatted. There’s still plenty of work to do, but it seems that it’ll be trivial to replace the data with custom audio and motion commands.
Shell Case Your Flash Drive
[Aki] sent in his collection of projects. We like his bullet shell cased USB flash drive and his take on our friend, the simple parallel port based logic analyzer. The flash drive uses a B style USB connector, mounted inside a big freakin’ bullet shell. The logic analyzer is the classic version, but uses a rather nice unix compatible piece of software that supports up to 1mhz sampling rates.
The Liquid Display
[Nicolas] sent in his liquid display project.Think of it as the opposite of a fountain display. Instead of water, it releases bubbles into a flat panel filled with liquid. There aren’t many details on the site, but it’s a nice twist on an classic concept. He also created an odd sort of liquid interface. Touching the liquid in any of the three chambers in front causes changes in the reaction of the display.
Wiimoteless IR Whiteboard
[Eduard] sent in his IR webcam whiteboard project. He wanted something like the Wiimote version, but without the expense of a Wiimote. He added some film negative to the camera to reduce the amount of visible light picked up by the CCD. (He notes that you might need to pull the IR filter from your camera to get a decent signal.) The pen is the usual IR LED with a power supply. To do the actual work, he wrote a custom application in Java.
