Hoverboard Grows Up, Becomes Magnetic Drill Press

February 4, 2020 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

If you need to drill metal in tight places, the magnetic drill press, or mag drill is your BFF. The idea here is that a drill press with an electromagnetic base can go anywhere, and even drill horizontally if need be. If you don’t need to use one often, but want one anyway, why not build one out of e-waste?

[DIY KING 00] built this mag drill starting with the motor from a hoverboard. While these three-phase brushless motors have a lot of torque to offer reuse projects like this, they’re not designed to be particularly fast.

He was able to make it about three times faster by cutting the windings apart and reconnecting them in parallel instead of series. He designed a simple PCB to neatly tie all the connections back together and added an electronic speed control (ESC) from an R/C car.

Reluctant to give up the crown, he made his own three-coil electromagnetic base, using a drill to wind magnet wire around temporary chuck-able cores. The coils are then potted in epoxy to keep out dust and drilling debris. Everything runs from two large LiPo batteries, and he can get about 15 minutes of high-torque drilling done before they’re dead. Can you feel the electromagnet pulling you past the break to check out the build and demo video?

Depending on what you’re doing, you might get away with a magnetic vise instead.

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Teardown And Analysis Of A Cheap Solar Lamp

January 26, 2020 by Jenny List 57 Comments

If you walk the aisles of a dollar store one constant that you will see worldwide is the Chinese solar lamp. Your dollar gets you a white LED behind plastic, mounted on a spike to stick into the ground, and with a solar cell on top. It charges in the sunlight during the day and then lights the LED for a few hours at nightfall. They are in gardens everywhere, and no doubt landfill sites are full of them because they do not last very long. [Giovanni Bernardo] had one that stopped working, so he subjected it to a teardown to find out what was up, and what made it tick (Italian, Google Translate link).

As expected, the culprit proved to be a leaking and corroded 1.2 volt NiMh cell, and its replacement with an AA cell brought the lamp back to life. But the interesting part of this tale comes from his teardown and analysis of the lamp’s components. It’s centered around a YX8016 battery charger and power management chip. The device has an amazing economy of design with only four components including the solar cell and the LED. The final component is a small inductor that forms part of the boost converter to keep the LED lit as the battery voltage falls. The chip switches at 580kHz, and produces a 3.2 volt supply.

If this is a subject that interests you, don’t forget to take a look at the power harvesting challenge we ran a while back.

Feel The Force With A Pocket Magnetometer

January 24, 2020 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

With the rise of affordable 3D printers, we just don’t see the projects in Tic Tac boxes that we used to. That’s kind of a shame. Not only are you upcycling existing plastic when you use one, they’re decently sized component vessels for pocket builds such as [rgco]’s portable magnetometer, especially if you can get the 100-count box. Best of all, they’re see-through!

Sure, you could get a magnetometer app for your phone to test out the strength of your Buckyballs, but this is more fun, and you can use it in more places. This build doesn’t take much — an Arduino Nano reads from a Hall effect sensor and outputs the magnetic flux density in militeslas (mT) on an OLED. Fortifying the sensor by mounting it inside the body of an old (also see-through!) ballpoint pen body is a nice touch.

In order to calibrate it, [rgco] made a solenoid by wrapping a length of PVC with magnet wire. The code for this very portable and low-cost magnetometer measures the magnetic field 2000 times in under three-tenths of a second, and outputs both the mean and the standard deviation of these measurements.

Magnetometers can ID all kinds of things from submarines to Suburbans. Here’s an ESP8266 magnetometer that opens a driveway gate when it detects the car.

Pi 4 Emulator In A Durable, Dumpstered Cabinet

January 23, 2020 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

We must be looking in the wrong Dumpsters, because we never find anything as cool as [Queen_Combat] did. It’s one of those Kidzspace kid-proof waiting room game systems, complete with the original TV and an XBOX 360 that hasn’t been updated since 2009. When life hands you a sturdy game console box, it’s almost your duty to turn it into an all-in-one Raspberry Pi 4 emulation station.

[Queen_Combat] relocated the speakers from the top to the inside, just behind the vent holes on the sides, and printed a couple of mountable custom enclosures to hold them there. These are driven with a little 5W amplifier board, and everything is run from the XBOX’s power supply.

We particularly like the use of extenders in cigarette-lighter form factor, because we hadn’t seen those before. [Queen_Combat] printed a couple of adapters to make them fit nicely into the large holes on the front where the XBOX controllers were once attached — one has a volume knob, and the other has a USB3 port and a 3.5mm audio jack. [Queen_Combat] wanted to have HDMI audio out as well, so there’s an HDMI audio extractor in the mix, too, and another extender around back. Only thing missing is a paint job and some sweet vinyl graphics.

Yes, vinyl graphics would be sweet, but how? Not on the laser cutter, if that’s what you’re thinking. Don’t dismiss vinyl cutters out of hand, because they can do a whole lot more than that.

Via r/raspberry_pi

Nuclear Fusion At 100: The Hidden Race For Energy Supremacy

January 23, 2020 by Maya Posch 83 Comments

It’s hardly a secret that nuclear fusion has had a rough time when it comes to its image in the media: the miracle power source that is always ‘just ten years away’. Even if no self-respecting physicist would ever make such a statement, the arrival of commercial nuclear fusion power cannot come quickly enough for many. With the promise of virtually endless, clean energy with no waste, it does truly sound like something from a science-fiction story.

Meanwhile, in the world of non-fiction, generations of scientists have dedicated their careers to understanding better how plasma in a reactor behaves, how to contain it and what types of fuels would work best for a fusion reactor, especially one that has to run continuously, with a net positive energy output. In this regard, 2020 is an exciting year, with the German Wendelstein 7-X stellarator reaching its final configuration, and the Chinese HL-2M tokamak about to fire up.

Join me after the break as I look into what a century of progress in fusion research has brought us and where it will take us next.

Continue reading “Nuclear Fusion At 100: The Hidden Race For Energy Supremacy” →

See If Today’s Air Quality Will Conch You Out

January 20, 2020 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

Air quality is one of those problems that is rather invisible and hard to grasp until it gets bad enough to be undeniable. By then, it may be too late to do much about it. But if more people were interested in the problem enough to monitor the air around them, there would be more innovators bringing more ideas to the table. And more attention to a problem usually means more accountability and eventual action.

This solar-powered particulate analyzer made by [rabbitcreek] is a friendly way to take the problem out of the stratosphere of ‘someday’ and bring it down to the average person’s backyard. Its modular nature makes it fairly simple to build, and the conch shell enclosure gives it a natural look. That shell also cleverly hides the electronics, while at the same time allowing air and particulates to reach the sensor. If you don’t like the shell enclosure, we think the right type of bird feeder could protect the electronics while allowing airflow.

[rabbitcreek] attached a sizeable solar panel to the shell on a GoPro mount so it can be adjusted to face the sun. The panel charges a Li-Po battery that gets boosted to 5V. Every two hours, a low-power breakout circuit wakes up the Feather ESP32 and takes a reading from the particulate sensor. [rabbitcreek] can easily see the data on his phone thanks to the Blynk app he created.

Why limit this to your yard? Bare ESP32s are cheap enough that it’s feasible to build a whole network of air quality sensors.

Living At The Close Of The Multiway Era

January 9, 2020 by Jenny List 97 Comments

After over a decade of laptop use, I made the move a couple of months ago back to a desktop computer. An ex-corporate compact PC and a large widescreen monitor on a stand, and alongside them a proper mouse and my trusty IBM Model M that has served me for decades. At a stroke, the ergonomics of my workspace changed for the better, as I no longer have to bend slightly to see the screen.

The previous desktop PC was from an earlier time. I think it had whatever the AMD competitor to a Pentium 4 was, and if I recall correctly, its 512 MB of memory was considered to be quite something. On the back it had an entirely different set of sockets to my new one, a brace of serial ports, a SCSI port, and a parallel printer port. Inside the case, its various drives were served by a set of ribbon cables. It even boasted a floppy drive. By contrast the cabling on its successor is a lot lighter, with much less bulky connectors. A few USB plugs and a network cable, and SATA for its disk drive. The days of bulky multiway interconnects are behind us, and probably most of us are heaving a sigh of relief. Continue reading “Living At The Close Of The Multiway Era” →