X-Ray Sleuthing Unveils The Fake In Your Adaptors

July 15, 2020 by Adil Malik 36 Comments

Lets face it, the knock-off variety of our favourite adaptors, cables and accessories are becoming increasingly challenging to spot. We would be the first to admit, to have at some point, been stooped by a carefully crafted counterfeit by failing to spot the tell-tale yet elusive indicators such as the misplaced font face, the strategically misspelled logo or perhaps the less polished than expected plastic moulding and packaging. When you finally come around to using it, if you are lucky the item is still more or less functionally adequate, otherwise by now the inferior performance (if not the initial cost!) would have made it pretty obvious that what you have is infact a counterfeit.

[Oliver] recently found himself in a similar situation, after acquiring a seemingly original Lightning to Headphone Adaptor. Rather than dismay, [Oliver] decided to channel this energy into an excellent forensic investigation to uncover just what exactly made this imitation so deceptive. He began by comparing the packaging, printed typeface and the plastic moulding, all of which gave very little away. [Oliver] concluded that atleast superficially, the clone was rather good and the only way to settle this was to bring out the X-ray, of course!

The resulting images of the innards make it blatantly obvious as to why the adaptor is indeed very fake. For a start, compared to the original adaptor, the clone hosts a far more thin BOM count! If you are really serious in getting some training to better spot counterfeits, check out a post we featured earlier on the subject!

Take Pottery For A Spin With A Pocket-Sized Wheel

July 14, 2020 by Kristina Panos 23 Comments

If 2020 can be remembered in any positive light, it would be that this has been the year of the hobby tryouts. Why not pottery? Sure, throwing pots won’t fill your belly like homemade bread. But we would bet you can see the value in having a bunch of expendable objects that are easily (and quite satisfyingly) smashed to smithereens. The best part is that between the workbench, junk box, and recycle bin, you can probably build [Jadem52]’s pottery wheel for ants with stuff you already have. Bonus!

Pottery wheels aren’t that complicated. They’re honestly kind of expensive for what they are — a motor and a belt driving a rotating platter. It’s like a record player, but less fussy. Where they really get you on expense is the kiln to heat-treat those pots into sturdy vessels. But you could always use air-dry clay, especially if you’re making these things just to smash them whenever you need to let off some steam.

So anyway, you don’t need much more than a motor, a jar lid for a wheel to throw on, and a bearing to make it spin smoothly. Store-bought pottery wheels have a foot feed to control the motor speed, but this pocket version is either spinning on nine volts or it isn’t. The great thing about a project like this is that once you have the general principle down and use the thing, you can iterate and upgrade to your heart’s content. Take it for a little spin after the break.

If you want to hack together a more conventionally-sized wheel, an old ceiling fan motor should be more than sufficient.

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Magnetic Couplings Make This Lego Submarine Watertight

July 7, 2020 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

Although you’d be hard-pressed to tell in some areas, it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, which always seems to bring out the projects that require a swimming pool for adequate testing. The [Brick Experiment Channel]’s latest build, a submersible made almost entirely from Lego, is one such project and has us pining for weather that makes a dip sensible rather than suicidal.

The sub featured in the video below is a significant improvement over the “Sub in a Jug” approach the [Brick Experiment Channel] favored for version 1. Rather than starting with a vessel specifically designed not to hold water, the hull for this vessel is an IKEA food container, with a stout glass body and a flexible lid with silicone seals. And instead of penetrating the hull for driveshafts and attempting to seal them, this time around he built clever magnetic couplings.

The couplings transmit torque from the motors on the inside to gears and props on the outside. And where the first version used a syringe-pump ballast tank to control the depth, this one uses vertical thrusters. The flexible lid proved to be a problem with that scheme, since it tended to collapse as the depth increased, preventing the sub from surfacing. That was solved with some Lego bracing and adjustment of the lead shot ballast used to keep the sub neutrally buoyant.

This looks like a ton of summer fun, and even if you don’t have Legos galore to work with, it could easily be adapted to other materials. There are a ton of other fun [BEC] Lego builds to check out, some of which we’ve covered, including a Lego drone and a playing card shooter.

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Bathymetric Map Uses Edge Lighting To Stunning Effect

July 5, 2020 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

A bathymetric map is one concerning the floor or bottom of a body of water. It’s the wet equivalent of a topographical map. Combine this with humanity’s inherent taste in seaside real estate, and they can be quite attractive when done correctly. We’d say this effort from [pubultrastar] hits the mark.

Created as a commission piece, the subject of the map is Tichigan Lake in Wisconsin, USA. Made on a Glowforge laser cutter, the design is built of layers of lasercut wood stacked up to represent the natural contours of the bottom of the lake. There’s also a layer of acrylic included, to which special standoffs are fitted. These standoffs hide blue LEDs inside, which allow the acrylic to be edge lit without the LEDs themselves being visible.

The final effect is impressive, with the blue water contrasting artfully with the laser-engraved wood front panel when the lights are turned on. It’s an excellent conversation piece, particularly for those with a waterfaring bent. It’s not the first bathymetric map we’ve featured, either, with this book serving as a particularly stunning example.

Digi-Key Hacks UV Into Conveyor Line To Protect Warehouse Staff

July 4, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 21 Comments

No doubt that every hacker has already heard of Digi-Key, the electronic component distributor that makes it just as possible to order one of something as it is to order a thousand of it. As an essential business, Digi-Key has been open during the duration of the lockdown since they support critical manufacturing services for virtually every industry on the planet including the medical industry.

Ensuring their workforce stays healthy is key to remaining open and as part of their efforts they hacked together a nice addition to their sanitation regime. They use around 8,000 plastic totes to transport components around the distribution center and devised a way to sanitize tote coming in from the receiving area using a UV light tunnel. From their sanitation plan we can see this is in addition to the fogging system (likely a vaporized hydrogen peroxide system) used to regularly sanitize the totes passing throughout the warehouse.

They developed a UV light tunnel that wraps around the conveyor rollers. The design includes a sensor and a timer to control when and how long the UV lights are on. The totes are a frequent touch point for employees, and running incoming shipments through the UV light tunnel helps decrease the chance of exposure.

Thinking of using UV as a sanitation tool? Make sure you do your research on the wavelengths you need and vet the source of critical components. [Voja] ran into UV lamps that were anything but germicidal.

Tidy Laser Cut Packaging For PCBs With KiCAD

July 1, 2020 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

A laser cutter is a useful tool to have in any workshop. While many hackers use them for their cutting abilities, it’s important to remember that they can be great as engravers, too. [Wrickert] was well aware of this when he set his to work, producing attractive packaging for his Tindie orders.

[Wrickert] sells a variety of small PCB-based devices on Tindie, and it’s nice to have something to package them up with, rather than just sending a bare board. To do this quickly and effectively, KiCAD is used to help generate the packaging from the original PCB geometry itself. The board outlines are exported as an SVG file, reopened in KiCAD, and then used to create the required cardboard parts. The laser can then also be used to engrave the cardboard too.

It’s a tidy packaging solution that requires no messy inks or printers, and can be designed in the same software as the device itself. We’ve covered this area before, talking about what it takes to go from a home project to a saleable kit. If you’re in the game, you might find [Wrickert]’s hack to be just the ticket!

Variable Mirror Changes Shape Under Pressure

June 27, 2020 by Dan Maloney 10 Comments

Unless you’re in a carnival funhouse, mirrors are generally dead flat and kind of boring. Throw in some curves and things get interesting, especially when you can control the curve with a touch of your finger, as with this variable surface convex mirror.

The video below starts off with a long but useful review of conic constants and how planes transecting a cone can create circles, parabolas, or ellipses depending on the plane’s angle. As [Huygens Optics] explains, mirrors ground to each of these shapes have different properties, which makes it hard to build telescopes that work at astronomical and terrestrial distances. To make a mirror that works over a wide range of distances, [Huygens Optics] built a mirror from two pieces of glass bonded together to form a space between the front and rear surface. The front surface, ground to a spherical profile, can be deformed slightly by evacuating the plenum between the two surfaces with a syringe. Atmospheric pressure bends the thinner front surface slightly, changing the shape of the mirror.

[Huygens Optics] also built an interferometer to compare the variable mirror to a known spherical reference. The data from the interferometer was fed to a visualization package that produced maps of the surface shape, which you can easily see changing as the pressure inside the mirror changes. Alas, a deeper dive into the data showed the mirror to be less than perfect, but it’s fascinating to think that a mirror can flex enough to change from elliptical to almost parabolic with nothing more than a puff of air.

We’ve seen a couple of interesting efforts from [Huygens Optics] before, including this next-level spirit level. He’s not all about grinding glass, though — witness this investigation into discriminating metal detectors.

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