Ingenious Indigenous Artful Screw Conveyor

June 4, 2022 by Anne Ogborn 27 Comments

Many of us have heard the name Archimedes’ screw — but not everyone knows the term screw conveyor. These folks (sadly, the videographer at [Breeze Media] doesn’t tell us their names, or the company name) has the process of building screw conveyors down to a fine art.

Screw conveyors are useful, but many folks shy away from them because they look hard to make. In this video, we see how it’s done. The crew in this video are doing it in metal for large equipment, but the same methods could be used in plastic sheet or paper on a small scale.

It starts with cutting washers and slitting radially. When they’re distorted into the final shape the hole will close up, so the hole is a bit larger than the pipe that forms the center. They’re then given a slight spiral (think a lock washer) by walloping with a sledgehammer. It works. The slit edges are welded together to make a ‘compressed’ spiral, and the end is welded to the pipe

Now for the ingenious bit. They have a tall gantry, just a couple of pipe poles with a crossbar, set up in the factory yard. Below it, they’ve drilled a well. The free end of the pipe goes down the well. The bottom of the spiral is clamped to a baseplate around the well. Next, the pipe is hoisted up to form the final shape. Finally, everything is welded in place.

In the video after the break, they’re making a screw feeder. It needs a lower pitch for the section under the hopper. So they clamp several turns, pull the main section out, weld it, then move the clamp and make the feeder section.

Hacks are partially art, and screws are visually interesting. This piggy bank has one. Put one in your next hack!

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Wooden Keycaps Minus The CNC

June 3, 2022 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

What’s the most important part of the keycap? The average user-who-cares might tell you it’s the look and feel, but a keyboard builder would probably say the mounting style. That’s where the rubber meets the road, after all. For anyone trying to make their own keycaps, ‘the mount itself’ is definitely the correct answer. Try printing your own keycaps, and you’ll learn a lot about tolerances when it comes to getting the mount right.

Conversely, you could use a subtractive process like a wood mill to make keycaps. Sounds easy enough, right? But what about all of us who don’t have access to one? [cbosdonnat], who has no CNC, has blazed a cellulose trail, combining hand-tooled wooden keycaps with 3D-printed mounts to create fully-customized keycaps. It’s a great project with concise how-to, especially when it comes to building the jigs needed to keep the keycaps consistently sized and shaped.

It makes a whole lot of sense to start by hollowing out the bottom instead of shaping the business side first or even cutting out the key shape, since the mount is mechanically vital. Why waste time on the look and feel if the foundation isn’t there yet?

Hardwood is a must for DIY keycaps, because the walls need to be thin enough to both fit over the switch and within the matrix, and be sturdy enough not to break with use. We love the look of the varnish-transferred laser-printed logo, and only wish there was a video so we could hear the clacking.

There are all kinds of ways to put legends on DIY keycaps, like waterslide decals for instance.

Learn By Doing: Turn Your Garage Into Your Perfect Workspace

May 16, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 32 Comments

Plenty of potential, but a cozy hacking space it is not

To us hackers and makers, the tools of our trade are often as important and interesting as the details of the hacks themselves, but what about the most important tool of all — the very space you use to make your magic happen? That may be your bedroom, a nearby hackerspace, and if you have the resources, you may even own a place of your own, and get to build your perfect workspace.

The latter situation is what [MichD] and partner [Brittany] found themselves in, having moved into their first place. Many couples focus on getting a hot tub in the garden or sorting the nursery, but these two are proper electronics nerds, so they converted a free-standing double wide garage into the nerdhub, learning as they went along, and documenting it in excruciating detail for your viewing pleasure.

Door fitted, framed up, and insulation in place. All ready for plasterboarding.

The building structurally is a single-skinned brick-built box, with a raw concrete floor. Pretty typical stuff for the UK (we’ve seen much worse), but not ideal for spending an extended amount of time in due to our damp, cold climate, at least in winter.

The first order of business was partitioning the front section for bike storage, and screeding the floor. Once the floor was solid, the walls and ceiling joists could be framed up, ready for fitting insulation material and covering with plasterboard.

Electrics were next in order, with the wires clipped to the brickwork, well away from where the plasterboard would be, therefore making it less likely to accidentally drill into a live cable when adding external fixtures.

Since the front part of the room was to be partitioned off, another access door was needed. This involved cutting out the bricks to fit a concrete lintel. With that installed, and the bricks above supported, the area below was cut out to the required shape. A somewhat nerve-wracking experience, if you ask us!

As any self-respecting hacker will tell you — no room build is complete without a decent amount of RGB bling, so the whole room was decked out with APA102 addressable LED strips. Control of these was courtesy of WLED running on an ESP32 module, with LedFX used on a nearby PC to perform music visualisation, just because.

Already got your space worked out, but need a little help with organisation? Not got much space, and need a portable solution? Check this out for (small) size!

Thinnest Keyboard Uses Cherry DIY Doubleshot Method

May 10, 2022 by Kristina Panos 24 Comments

As with any other community, it takes all kinds to make the keyboard world go ’round. Some like them thicc — more backing for the clacking and all — but some like them sleek and prefer the slimmest possible keyboard. For now and the foreseeable future, the go-to method for making whisper-thin keebs is to use Kailh Choc switches, because that’s about all that’s out there.

But chocs aren’t for everyone, and there are plenty of die-hard Cherry fans out there that want it both ways. Being one among them, [Khmel] set about designing the lowest-profile possible keyboard (and caps) that uses standard Cherry-sized keyswitches. Shut up and take your money? Well, okay, but the case and keycap files are all available on Thingiverse, so.

The whole video is great, and at less than 2½ minutes long, it’s definitely worth your time. There are a few little gems of wisdom sprinkled throughout, like printing keycaps standing up on their backsides (like where they would have a little flash dot if they were factory-molded). This gives them a nice texture thanks to the layer lines. But the real reason we’re here today is this DIY method for making doubleshot keycaps with little fuss that [Khmel] just tosses out there toward the end.

Trust us, there’s a piece of glass there.

Traditionally, doubleshot keycaps are made with two layers of plastic — one for the legend, and one for the rest. This produces a quite durable keycap and (used to be the norm), but the expensive process gave way to laser-etched and pad-printed keycap legends in the ’90s. [Khmel] was able to fake the look by printing legends at 0.25 layer height and then fusing each one to its respective keycap by laying a thin piece of glass (think microscope slide) on top and applying a soldering iron for a few seconds. Classy!

Tweezing tiny legends not really your kind of tedium? Here’s a method for DIY waterslide decals instead.

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A vape pen, broken into parts, all laid out on a cutting mat

2022 Hackaday Prize: Disposable Vape Pens Turned Project Parts

May 5, 2022 by Arya Voronova 50 Comments

Disposable vape pens, a sub-genre of electronic cigarettes, have been a fad for a few years now – they’re small self-contained devices with a rechargeable battery and some vape liquid inside. As the battery discharges and the liquid runs out, the entire vape pen is typically thrown out. [Dimitar] wants to change that, however, and teaches us how to reuse as much of the vape pen as possible — as yet another underappreciated source for parts we can use in our projects.

In an extensive worklog, he breaks down and documents a vape pen’s inner workings, coupled with a video we’ve placed below the break showing ways to disassemble them. In these, he shows how we can reuse the casing and the plastic parts, should any of us be interested in a project that happens to fit the e-cig form factor. Attention is paid to the sensor that triggers the evaporation — it may look like a microphone, but is actually a purpose-built pressure-sensor with a high-side switch! He tears into one of these in a separate video, showing how to reuse it as a capacitive touch controller. He also aiming to assemble a small database of related resources on GitHub, currently, hosting the files for the protection circuit he developed as part of his recommendations for safely reusing vape pen Li-ion batteries.

[Dimitar]’s journey is ongoing, and we can’t wait to see some fun uses for these components that he will certainly stumble upon on his way! For instance, here’s a hacker using an e-cig battery to power a pair of RGB LED-adorned sunglasses, replacing the AAAA battery they originally came with. We’ve seen hackers make guides on reusing each and every part of microwave ovens, printers and laptops, and we ourselves have talked about reusing ATX power supplies and computer mice.

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Four jumper wires with white heatshrink on them, labelled VCC, SCL, SDA and GND

The Connector Zoo: I2C Ecosystems

May 4, 2022 by Arya Voronova 56 Comments

I2C is a wonderful interface. With four wires and only two GPIOs, you can connect a whole lot of sensors and devices – in parallel, at that! You will see I2C used basically everywhere, in every phone, laptop, desktop, and any device with more than a few ICs inside of it – and most microcontrollers have I2C support baked into their hardware. As a result, there’s a myriad of interesting and useful devices you can use I2C with. Occasionally, maker-facing companies create plug-and-play interfaces for the I2C device breakouts they produce, with standardized pinouts and connectors.

Following a standard pinout is way better than inventing your own, and your experience with inconsistent pin header pinouts on generic I2C modules from China will surely reflect that. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just plug a single I2C-carrying connector into an MPU9050, MLX90614 or HMC5883L breakout you bought for a few dollars, as opposed to the usual hurdle of looking at the module’s silkscreen, soldering pin headers onto it and carefully arranging female headers onto the correct pins?

As with any standard, when it comes to I2C-on-a-connector conventions, you would correctly guess that there’s more than one, and they all have their pros and cons. There aren’t quite fifteen, but there’s definitely six-and-a-half! They’re mostly inter-compatible, and making use of them means that you can access some pretty powerful peripherals easily. Let’s start with the two ecosystems that only have minor differences, and that you’ll encounter the most! Continue reading “The Connector Zoo: I2C Ecosystems” →