3D Printed Desk Harnesses The Power Of Fusion 360 And McMaster-Carr

January 23, 2018 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Black pipe furniture is all the rage now, and for good reason — it has a nice industrial aesthetic, it’s sturdy, and the threaded fittings make it a snap to put together. But if you’ve priced out the fittings lately, you know that it’s far from cheap, so being able to 3D-print your own black pipe fittings can make desks and tables a lot more affordable.

Cheapness comes at a price, of course, and [Vladimir Mariano] takes pains to point out that his desk is a light-duty piece that would likely not stand up to heavy use. But since the flange fittings used to connect the plywood top to the legs and as feet would cost about $64 all by themselves from the local home center, printing them made sense. Together with custom pieces to mount stretchers between the legs, the 3D-printed parts made for a decently sturdy base.

But the end product isn’t the main point of the video below. Thanks to the ability to browse the McMaster-Carr catalog from within Fusion 360, [Mariano] was able to seamlessly import the CAD model of a suitable iron flange and quickly modify it to his needs. The power of this feature is hard to overstate; you can literally browse through a catalog of engineered parts and print usable replicas instantly. Sure, it’s not made of metal, but it’s a huge boon to designers to be able to see how the final product would look, especially in the prototyping phase of a project.

Not familiar with McMaster-Carr? It’s an engineer’s online playground, and we covered the ins and outs of doing business with McMaster a while back.

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ESP8266 Beacon Announces Your Arrival

January 21, 2018 by Tom Nardi 68 Comments

It used to be people were happy enough to just have to push a button in their car and have the garage door open. But pushing a button means you have to use your hands, like it’s a baby toy or something. We’re living in the 21st century, surely there must be a better way! Well, if you’ve got a home automation system setup and a spare ESP8266 laying around, [aderusha] may have your solution with MQTTCarPresence.

The theory of operation here is very clever. The ESP8266 is powered via the in-dash USB port, which turns on and off with the engine. When the engine is started, the ESP8266 is powered up and immediately connects to the WiFi network and pushes an MQTT message to Home Assistant. When Home Assistant gets the notification that the ESP8266 has connected, it opens the garage door.

When [aderusha] drives out of the garage and away from the house, the ESP8266 loses connection to the network, and Home Assistant closes the door. The same principle works when he comes home: as the car approaches the house it connects to the network and the garage door opens, and when the engine is shut off in the garage, the door closes again.

The hardware side of the setup is really just a WeMos D1 mini Pro board, though he’s added an external antenna to make sure the signal gets picked up when the vehicle is rolling up. He’s also designed a very slick 3D printed case to keep it all together in a neat little package.

We’ve covered automated entry systems based on the ESP8266 before, though usually the ESP stays at home. Be sure to check out the awesome series [Elliot Williams] has on the wonders of MQTT if you’re looking to setup your own automation system.

Cardboard Wall Is Surprisingly Well Built

January 18, 2018 by Adam Fabio 49 Comments

We all built cardboard forts when we were kids. [Paintingcook] has taken it into adulthood with a hand built cardboard wall. He and his wife leased a loft apartment. Lofts are great — one giant space to work with. Plans changed a bit when they found out they had a baby on the way. A single living, working, and sleeping space definitely wouldn’t be good for a newborn, so the couple set about separating a section of the room with a wall.

Sheetrock and steel or wood lumber would be the normal path here. They instead decided to recycle their cardboard moving boxes into a wall. The boxes were formed into box beams, which created the framework of the wall. The two pillars were boxed in and incorporated into the wall itself. The skin of the wall is a random patchwork of cardboard pieces. Most of the construction is completed with 3/8 ” screws and masking tape. Tape won’t last forever, but this is a temporary wall after all.

You might be wondering about fire hazards — sure, cardboard burns more readily than gypsum board, but the apartment is outfitted with sprinklers, which should help on this front. A few commenters on [Paintingcook’s] Reddit thread asked about formaldehyde and other gasses emitting from the cardboard. Turns out he’s an inorganic chemist by trade. He says any outgassing happens shortly after the cardboard is manufactured. It should be safe for the baby.

Cardboard is a great material to work in. You can build anything from robots to computers to guns with it. So get hop the couch, grab that Amazon box, and get hacking!

Solenoids And Servos For Self Actuated Switches

January 18, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

The new hotness in home automation is WiFi controlled light switches. Sure, we’ve had computer-controlled home lighting for literally forty years with X10 modules, but now we have VC money pouring into hardware, and someone needs to make a buck. A few years ago, [Alex] installed WiFi switches in a few devices in his house and discovered the one downside to the Internet of Light Switches — his light switches didn’t have a satisfying manual override. Instead of cursing the darkness for want of an Internet-connected candle, [Alex] did the only sensible thing. He installed electromagnets, solenoids, and servos behind the light switches in his house.

The exact problem [Alex] is trying to solve here is stateful wall switches. With an Internet-connected lamp socket, the wall switch no longer functions. Being able to turn on a light when your phone is out of charge is something we all take for granted, and the solution is, of course, to have Internet-connected switches.

Being able to read the state of a switch and send some data off to a server is easy. For this, [Alex] used a WeMos D1 mini, a simple ESP8266-based board. The trick here, though, is stateful switches that can toggle themselves on and off. This is a mechanical build, and although self-actuated switches that can flip up and down by computer command exist, they’re horrifically expensive. Instead, [Alex] went the DIY route, first installing electromagnets behind the switches, then moving to solenoids, and finally designing a solution around four cheap hobby servos. The entire confabulation stuffed into a 2-wide electrical box consists of two switches, four hobby servos, the D1 mini, and an Adafruit servo driver board.

The software stack for this entire setup includes a NodeJS server connected to Orvibo Smart Sockets over UDP. Also on this server is a WebSocket server for browser-based clients that want to turn the lights on and off, a FauXMo server to turn the lights on and off via an Amazon Echo via WeMo emulation, and an HTTP server for other clients like [Alex]’ Pebble Watch.

This is, without question, the most baroque method of turning a lamp on and off that we’ve ever seen. Despite this astonishing complexity, [Alex] has something that is also intuitive to use and, to borrow an applhorism, ‘Just Works’. With a setup like this, anyone can flick a switch and turn a lamp on or off over the Internet, or vice-versa. This is the best Home Automation build we’ve ever seen.

You can check out [Alex]’ video demo of his build below, or his GitHub for the entire project here.

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Pi Weather Lamp Puts Lava Lamps To Shame

January 14, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 15 Comments

Representing the weather on an LED lamp in a manner that’s easy to interpret can be difficult, but [Gosse Adema]’s weather/matrix lamp makes it not only obvious what the weather is but also offers a very attractive display. For rain, drops of light move downward, and for wind, sideways. The temperature is shown using a range of colors from red to blue, and since he is situated in the Netherlands he needed snow, which he shows as white. A rainy, windy day has lights moving both down and sideways with temperature information as the background.

To implement it he mounted LED strips inside a 3D printed cylinder with reflectors for each LED, all of which fitted into a glass cylinder taken from another lamp purchased online. The brains of it is a Raspberry Pi Zero W housed in the bottom along with a fan. Both the LEDs and the fan are controlled by the Pi. He took a lot of care with power management, first calculating the current that the LEDs would draw, and then writing Python code to limit that draw. However upon measurement, the current draw was much lower than expected and so he resized the power supply appropriately. He also took care to correctly size the wires and properly distribute the power with a specially made power distribution board. Overall, we really like the thorough job he’s done.

But then again, what’s not to like about [Gosse]’s projects. In the area of lighting, he’s dazzled us with WiFi controlled Christmas tree ornaments, but he’s also delighted us with a Prusa i3 based LEGO 3D printer on which he printed LEGO parts and then made a special extruder for printing chocolate.

DIY Bookshelf Is More Than Meets The Eye

January 14, 2018 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

It might surprise you, Dear Reader, that not every project featured on Hackaday needs to pulsate with LEDs, or update the world about its goings-on over Twitter. They don’t even, contrary to what you may have heard, need to have an Arduino inside. No, sometimes you can pull off a pretty neat hack with nothing more than some wood, a couple of tools, and a unique idea which repurposes something that would otherwise be in a landfill.

Such is the case with the latest project from [Keith Decent], which uses plywood and the spines of old books to create a secret compartment “bookshelf”. The concept is probably best described as a roll-top desk on its side, and while the action does appear a little stiff, it scores extra points for how easy it looks to replicate.

Using a router, [Keith] cuts a channel into the top and bottom sheets of plywood, which the “books” will eventually ride in. This channel goes around the entire perimeter of the shelf, and it’s important to make it as straight as possible so nothing binds up. To make sure things move through as smoothly as possible, some sandpaper is used to clean-up the inside edges.

The next step is to rip some books apart and salvage their spines. Used books can be purchased for next to nothing at flea markets, so even if you don’t have a home library filled with vintage tomes to eviscerate, it should be easy enough to get your hands on some if you want to build your own version. For sanity’s sake it would seem that books with the same size spines are ideal, so keep an eye out for old sets of encyclopedias and the like.

When the spines are removed from the books, they get glued to individual wooden slats. These slats then have holes drilled in the top and bottom, and standard wood screws driven in to act as “rollers”. Real rollers would undoubtedly make for smoother action, but you can’t beat his method if you’re trying to get it done cheaply and quickly.

The slats are then glued onto a piece of fabric, creating what is referred to as a tambour. The fabric backing links all the slats together and makes it so that pushing and pulling one slat will move them all together as one. The book spine tambour is then inserted in the routed channel, and the back panel of the shelf can be installed to lock it all together.

At this point the project is essentially done, but [Keith] does take it the extra mile by sealing all the book spines and doing some finish work on the shelf to make it look more like a real vintage piece of furniture instead of some scrap plywood screwed together.

If this exercise in woodworking has gotten you interested in the wonderful world of dead trees, you’re in luck. We’ve covered several woodworking projects from the hacker perspective, so you won’t be completely lost.

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3D Print A Home Automation Switch

January 13, 2018 by Al Williams 15 Comments

If you are the kind of person who won’t use cheap Sonoff modules to control AC powered devices, we don’t blame you and you should probably stop reading now. However, if you don’t mind a little exposed AC wiring and you have a 3D printer, you might be interested in the second generation of [530 Project’s] in-wall light switch.

The 3D printed switch fits a standard box and uses the guts of a Sonoff controller. These work with all the popular ecosystems such as Alexa and Google Home. And they are cheap. Like, really cheap. If you already have a 3D printer, even counting the cost of the filament these are going to be a small fraction of the cost of a commercial switch. You can see a video about the device, below.

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