CNC-PBDU (pancake Batter Dispenser Unit)

July 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Flapjacks taste infinitely better when they’re machine-made. Well, that’s true for [Mexican Viking] who built an automatic pancake maker to the delight of his family.

Obviously, the building material of choice is Lego. The machine consists of a base with two linear gears on either side. A gantry is held high above this base, travelling upon geared towers to either side. The writing nozzle, fashioned out of ketchup bottles, can move back and forth along this gantry for a full range of motion along the X and Y axes. Lego pneumatic pumps supply pressurized air which forces the batter out of the bottle reservoir. This dispensing system is extremely clever and worth reading a bit more about. But if you just want us to make with the good stuff, you can see it grilling up pancakes in the video after the break.

The only thing missing is automatic flipping.

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Gigantic 555 Footstool

June 30, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

The team at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories needed a footstool. Obviously not content with buying one, they came across the idea of building a 555 footstool.

After finding some dimension drawings of the 555 timer IC, the team scaled everything up 30 times. While a normal DIP-8 555 is around 0.4 inches long, the footstool is over a foot long and eight inches high. The stool was cut on a CNC mill out of 1/2″ plywood, glued together, and finally panted with the correct date code and the logo of Evil Mad Scientist Labs. The finished product is amazing. We’ve been looking for a nice table, and the idea of an 8 foot long wooden 64-pin Motorola 68000 is pretty appealing.

While there’s no electronics in the footstool, it’s not hard to imagine fabricating some aluminum pins and a hollow body so a huge, functional 555 could be built. It would be possible to use discreet components following the block diagram of the 555 to build a huge Atari Punk Console; the gigantic capacitors are fairly easy to build in any event.

Selective Solar Sintering With Sand

June 25, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 54 Comments

[Markus Kayser] built an amazing solar powered SLS printer, but instead of using lasers and powdered plastics his machine uses the power of the sun to heat sand into complex shapes.

[Markus]’ printer uses the same concept as his earlier solar cutter – burning things with a magnifying glass. Interestingly, the printer isn’t controlled with stepper motors and reprap electronics – it’s completely cam driven. The solar panels only power the motor attached to the frame moving on bearings made from skateboard wheels.

We’d guess that [Markus] is using a little more than 2 square meters of Fresnel lenses in his project. Since solar irradiance is about 120 W/m² (PDF warning), [Markus] is concentrating a lot of energy onto a point the size of a quarter, which would be necessary to heat up sand to its 1500° C melting point. The resolution isn’t what you could get with a laser, but [Markus] was able to print an amazing bowl along with other complex 3d shapes.

Check out [Markus]’ video of the solar sinter printer after the break. There’s also a video of his previous experiment with the solar cutter.

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A Pick And Place Machine For Under $1k

June 24, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Pick and place machines are marvels of modern technology. They the can lift, orient, align and drop tiny electronic components onto a circuit board that is headed for the reflow oven. On an industrial scale they move so fast it’s a blur in front of your eyes, and they use imaging to ensure proper placement. But that kind of specialized equipment is going to cost a real bundle of money. [Bootstrap] is working on a design that will still be feature-rich, but will allow you to purchase your own pick-and-place machine for under $1000.

The design calls for a two-headed beast. One head is a vacuum tweezers which is capable of moving the parts. The other is a digital microscope that is used for precise positioning. The two heads pivot in and out of place, but it’s the table which holds the PCB that is responsible for positioning the parts. Although there’s nothing built yet, the depth of information that [Bootstrap] published in his post is impressive. He’d like your help making sure there’s no errors in the design before he builds the first three prototypes. If you’re a Solidworks guru he’ll even send you the files upon request.

We’ve seen a couple of different pick and place machines lately so take another look if you missed them the first time.

[via Adafruit]

3 Axis Plotter Made From Spare Parts

June 23, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 15 Comments

The plotter featured above was, according to the author, made almost entirely of salvaged parts. In addition to what he had accumulated, only $20 in parts was needed to complete this build. Pretty good considering the thousands of dollars that a new plotter goes for.

Control of all axes is accomplished using unipolar stepper motors. In this case only one unipolar motor was available along with two bipolar motors. [Lovro] actually hacked these into a unipolar setup to save costs on the build.

Mach3 control software along with a parallel port is used to control the steppers. A similar “junk” setup could be used to power a CNC mill or laser engraver, so think twice before tossing that old printer in the trash! Check out the video of this plotter in action after the break! Also, see this hack for a similar laser engraving machine using Mach3 control software. Continue reading “3 Axis Plotter Made From Spare Parts” →

Automated Scanning For A Pile Of Documents

June 22, 2011 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

The Gado project is part of the Johns Hopkins University Center for African Studies. It has been tasked with archiving documents having to do with the East Baltimore Oral Histories Project. In short, they’ve got a pile of old pictures and documents that they want digitized but are not easily run through a page-fed scanner because they are fragile and not standard sizes. The rig seen above is an automated scanner which picks up a document from the black bin on the left, places it on the flat-bed scanner seen in the middle, and moves it to the black bin on the right once it has been scanned. It’s not fast, but it’s a cheap build (great if you’ve got a tight budgt) and it seems to work.

The machine is basically a three-axis CNC assembly. Above you can see one motor which lifts the lid of the scanner. You can’t see the document gripper in this image, but check the video after the break which shows the machine in action. A vacuum powered suction cup moves on a gantry (y-axis) but is also able to adjust its height (z-axis) and distance perpendicular to the gantry (x-axis) in order to grab one page at a time.

The pictures on the build log have captions to give you an idea of how this was built. We didn’t see any info about post-processing but let’s hope they have an auto-crop and auto-deskew filter in place to really make this automatic.

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Tripod CNC Plotter

June 16, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 26 Comments

Although some may have heard of a machine like this, the CNC tripod remains an unknown machine to many in the engineering word. This particular machine is set up as a plotter, drawing incredibly straight lines, shapes, and letters.

The machine appears to have 6 servo motors, 3 working as pairs. This would simplify control and allows the pen to be held at a perpendicular angle to the paper. Once could envision this being used with, instead of a pen, a spindle and mill. Instead of the traditional movement of a CNC mill or router, this could be used to cut out complex shapes.

Additionally, if the servos were not driven in 3 tandem pairs, but were all controlled independently, it should be possible to twist the tool in a controlled angular direction. This would add an extra axis of control to an already robust CNC setup. It will be exciting to see how this technology develops in the future. Until then, check out the video after the break: Continue reading “Tripod CNC Plotter” →