cnc hacks

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Art Installation Plots Every Game Of Lunar Lander That Is Played

November 23, 2012 by 7 Comments

This art installation makes a video game from the 1970’s popular again. It can be found at the Dublin Science Gallery’s GAME exhibition. Museum goers step up to the coin-op style game cabinet and the onlookers will see how they’re doing as the landing is plotted on this board.

Hardware details are a bit hard to come by but we hear that there will me more on the build posted soon. For now the Flickr set is the best source of information. From reading the captions we know that a set of three Mac minis run everything. There are also a few close-ups and a video overview of the drive hardware which you can see mounted on the upper left of the image above. We can tell you that this is a string plotter similar to builds we’ve seen in the past. The telemetry data from the Lunar Lander game is converted to instructions and fed directly to that device. See it in action in the clip after the break.

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Pick And Place That Can’t Pick Or Place… But It Looks Very Promising

November 20, 2012 by 10 Comments

This sexy piece of CNC can really fly. It’s a pick and place machine which [Danh Trinh] has been working on. The thing is, so far it lacks the ability to move components at all. But the good news is the rest of the system seems to be there.

He posted a demo video of his progress so far which you can see embedded after the break. He starts of by showing off his computer vision software which he wrote in C#. The demonstration includes the view from the gantry-mounted camera, as well as the computer filtering which seems to accurately locate the solder pads and silk screen on the PCB. The second half of the video looks at the hardware seen above. It’s just executing some static code but the whine of those stepper motors is music to our ears. [Danh] reports that the movements of the needle that will eventually serve as the tip of the vacuum tweezer seem to be very accurate.

These home-built pick and place projects are quite a challenge, but we’ve seen a lot of really awesome work on them lately.

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Cutting Styrofoam With A CNC Machine And Turning It Into Aluminum

November 20, 2012 by 17 Comments

One of the most popular ways of turning an object trapped inside the world of a computer into a real, metal object is the art of lost wax, or lost foam casting. In this process, a full-scale model of the object to be made in metal is crafted in either foam or wax, placed in a pile of sand, and burned away by molten metal.

[ptflea] over at the Bamberg, Germany hackerspace Backspace came up with a very clever build that automatically cuts foam into the desired shape, ready to be taken out to the backyard foundry. The build is based around an old flatbed scanner and a hot wire cutter. The old scanner conveniently had  an equal number of steps per axis, so attaching an Adafruit motor shield and replacing the old control electronics was just an issue of finding the correct resistors.

Software control is provided by a Processing app [ptflea] whipped up and is able to carefully cut very delicate shapes that even the steadiest hand would have trouble with.

Making stuff out of styrofoam is cool and all, but the real goal for this project was setting things on fire and melting old heatsinks. The styrofoam molds were placed in a bucket full of sand, and the furnace – a few ytong bricks, a crucible, and a propane burner – started to melt some aluminum. The molten aluminum was poured onto the mold and after cooling, the makers of Backspace had a few very cool aluminum trinkets.

A nice build that is able to produce some very nice metal objects. We suspect, though, that a higher-density foam (something along the lines of blue or green insulation sheets, if they have those in Germany) could produce an even higher level of detail if you’d like to build your own.

Videos after the break.

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Desktop Mill Built As A High School Project

October 10, 2012 by 43 Comments

This desktop mill would be impressive coming from anyone, but we’re really excited that it was made as a high school project. [Praneet Narayan] built it during his design and technology class. As his build log shows, he worked with a range of different tools to make sure he had a rock-solid platform on which to mount the motors and cutting head.

The uprights of the frame are made from two steel plates. After hacking them to rough shape with a plasma cutter he finished the edges with a mill. The two parts were then tack welded together so that the mounting holes could be drilled in one step, ensuring alignment between the two sides. The rest of the frame parts are built from extruded rails but he did machine a set of mounting plates to pull it all together. You can see the finished machine milling a message in MDF in the clip after the break.

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CNC Jacquard Loom Will Weave Anything

September 30, 2012 by 14 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osCPWMyJOj8&w=470]

The Jacquard loom, invented in the early 1800s, used punched cards to manufacture relatively complex textiles such as damask and brocade. These punched cards were eventually used by census workers, mechanical calculators, early analog computers, the earliest digital computers, and even the humble Arduino.

That doesn’t mean the Jacquard loom was left in the 17th century, though. This one made it to the Open Hardware Summit in New York last week and it was so cool the organizers of the Maker Faire graciously found space for it.

The entire loom is controlled by computer – no punched cards required – and is build out of inexpensive aluminum extrusion. It can also make any two color graphic into a textile (yes, even the Hackaday logo). The loom wasn’t quite operational during the one day it spent at Maker Faire, but we’ve been promised updates in the future.

New And Improved DIWire Bender

September 29, 2012 by 9 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrr4peibbNI&w=470]

The DIWire bender we saw last summer made its way to Maker Faire this year with a new and improved version that is now able to bend steel even more accurately than the previous aluminum-bending version.

I chatted up [Marco Perry] (above, obviously), and he explained a new feature of the DIWire bender that makes soldering or welding creations made out of CNC bent wire even easier. The new machine features a sharpie that precisely marks where the wire should be welded.

The folks behind the DIWire – Pensa – have a ton of really cool wire sculptures at their booth at Maker Faire, quite incidentally within spitting distance of Hackaday’s Red Bull booth. Be sure to check them out if you’ve got a chance.

Fitting A CNC Machine, 3D Printer, And Vinyl Cutter In A Suitcase

September 29, 2012 by 25 Comments

Maker Faire NY is awash with new and interesting computer controlled tools, but the most unusual so far appears to be Popfab, a combination router, 3D printer, and vinyl cutter able to collapse down into a suitcase.

Popfab is the brainchild of [Nadya Peek] and [Ilan Moyer] of the MIT CADLAB. With interchangeable heads for routing PCBs, 3D printing, and vinyl cutting. A conventional machine of this capabilities would have motors all over the place, but [Ilan] used a CoreXY system to make the stepper motors stationary relative to the frame of the machine.

The electronics are standard Printrboard and Pronterface fare, but it’s still a remarkable build that also fits into a suitcase.

Pictures of the machine, the XY system (good luck wrapping your head around that, but I can tell you it relies on the differential movement of the two motors) and the lovely [Nadya] holding up the plastic extrusion head. We’ll get a video up tomorrow. after the break

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