Batarangs For The Dark Knight Rises

July 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

The Dark Knight Rises is out now, and [Christian] over at MakeIt Labs decided to show up everyone at this year’s Halloween party with these custom made Batarangs.

After the Batarangs were plasma cut out of 11-gauge steel, [Rob] beveled the trailing edges of the wing, powder coated them, and sharpened them with a grinder and a diamond stone. Yes, these Batarangs are probably much better weapons than the on-screen logo shaped shuriken, but it’s questionable how useful they are compared to perfectly balanced CGI weaponry. They’re a really awesome looking build perfect for this year’s Halloween costume.

One small word of warning for all the commentors: We know a few of you have already seen the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, but posting any spoilers will result in a member of the Hackaday team hunting you down and savagely beating you. Also, given the shooting at the premier in Aurora, Colorado you probably don’t want to bring weapons – even prop ones – to a movie theatre.

You can check out the making of video for [Christian]’s Batarangs after the break.

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Drag And Drop Images For 3D Printing

July 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

This piece of software called OmNomNom works with OpenSCAD to turn 2D images into 3D models. It’s literally a drag-and-drop process that renders almost instantly.

Here the example is a QR code, which is perfect for the software since it’s a well-defined black and white outline in the source image. But the video after the break shows several other examples that don’t rely on this simplicity. For instance, the Superman logo, which uses four different colors, is converted quite easily. There’s also a depth map of [Beethoven’s] bust that is converted into a 3D object. The same technique can be used to create terrain from topographic source images.

Once the file has been converted to a model it can still be tweaked like normal. This allows you to customize size and depth to suit your needs. This is where OpenSCD comes into play, but if you don’t use that program you can still export an STL file directly from OmNomNom for use on your 3D printer.

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Printing A Boat Made Out Of Milk Jugs

July 14, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Today, groups from all over the Pacific Northwest will take up their oars and head over to Green Lake for the 42nd annual Seafair Milk Carton derby. The team who builds the fastest boat made out of milk cartons wins the regatta (and $10,000). This year, we’d put our money on the 3D printer group from the University of Washington; they printed a boat large enough to carry a person using crushed melted milk jugs.

After building a huge extruder to feed shredded HDPE plastic through a nozzle, the team repurposed an old plasma cutter to serve as an 8-foot-long 3D printer. There were a number of problems the team ran into – getting layers to fuse together, finding a suitable printing surface, and perfecting the art of squeezing melted milk jugs through a heated metal tube – but the final result is impressive, to say the least.

As far as how lake-worthy the UW team’s boat is, we have no idea. The milk jug regatta will be held later today, and if you have an update of how the team fared, send us a tip.

3D Printing With A Delta Robot That Seems To Simplify The Concept

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 61 Comments

This 3d printing delta robot really seems to solve a lot of the hurdles faced by previous offerings. With other delta printers we’ve looked at the motor control of the three arms is usually a it complicated. On this build the motors can just be seen in this image at each corner under the build platform. Each motor has a belt that loops from the bottom to the top for the machine, driving an arm along two precision rods.

It’s also interesting to note that the printer head doesn’t have a motor mounted on it for feeding the filament. Instead, the motor is mounted remotely. You can see it above the soda can in this image. It feeds the filament through a hollow tube spanning the gap between the extruder and the motor. This acts as a Bowden cable. With less mass to move this may make it easier to control the location of the print head.

After the break you can catch a clip of the team showing off the speed and dexterity of the delta bot, followed by a printing demo.

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RA 3D Printer Controller Board Does Everything, Has Disco Lights

July 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

3D printers are getting far, far more complicated than a 4-axis, plastic-squirting CNC machine. These days, you really haven’t earned your geek cred unless you’ve hacked an LCD and SD card interface into your 3D printer, or at least experimented with multiple extruders. There’s a problem with the controller boards everyone is using, though: most boards simply don’t have enough output pins, greatly reducing the number of cool things a 3D printer can do.

Enter RA. It’s a new 3D printer controller board with IO for any imaginable setup. Going down the feature list of RA, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen some of these features before. A 24-pin ATX power header is soldered directly to the board, giving RA users a stupidly easy way to power their printer. Of course there are outputs for LEDs, camera triggers (printer time-lapse movies are really cool), light rings, buzzers, an LCD/rotary encoder/SD card control panel, and support for two heated beds for gigantic printers. If printing in one color isn’t good enough for you, RA has support for three extruders

Compared to other 3D printer boards such as RAMPS or the Sanguinololu, the number of outputs on this board is simply amazing. If you’re planning to build a huge, feature-laden 3D printer, you probably couldn’t do much better than what RA is offering.

Simple Solution Makes Rocket Fin Alignment A Breeze

July 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

If you’re building model rockets you want to make sure they fly straight, and most of that is dependent on the stabilizer fins. It has long been a problem come assembly time. How can you make sure that they’re being aligned without any variation? [Rrix] mentioned that one technique is to use a square to position them perfectly perpendicular to the bench on which the rocket is being assembled. But this is still prone to error. His method uses a couple of precision jigs made out of cardboard.

He designed this pair of jigs in Inkscape, then used the files to fabricate them out on a laser cutter. It worked like a charm, but led him to another issue that can be solved in a similar way. Model rockets have rail guides that travel along a rod attached to the launch pad as the craft accelerates to a point where the fins have enough effect to keep it going in a straight line. If those guides aren’t straight, your fin alignment will be all for naught. His second version of the jigs includes a cut out for these guides.

Tearing Through Floppy Drives To Build A Small-format Dot Matrix Printer

July 9, 2012 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

The accuracy which [Mario] achieved in his pen plotter dot matrix printer is very remarkable. He tore through a pile of floppy drives to get the parts he wanted, and chose to go with a fine-point Sharpie marker as a print head. In the video after the break he flatters us with a printout of the Hackaday logo, but you also get a look at one problem with the build. The ink doesn’t always flow from the felt tip and he has to coax it (almost like priming a pump) with a piece of scrap paper.

He was inspired by the pen printer we featured back in June. This rendition features a printing area of 1.5×1.5 inches that can accommodate 120×120 black and white pixels. He’s not a microcontroller type of guy and is driving the printer from the parallel port of his computer.

The best printing technique puts the pen down and moves it around just a bit (helps prevent the ink flow problem we mentioned earlier) and produces images like one in the lower right. We love the 8-bit nature of the result and would use this all the time to make our own greeting cards.

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