3D-Printed Strain Wave Gear Needs Your Help

January 17, 2017 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

In most mechanical systems, metal gears that bend are a bad thing. But not so for strain wave gearing, which is designed to take advantage of a metal gear flexing to achieve an action much like planetary gears. The fun isn’t limited to metal anymore, though, if you 3D print a strain wave gear like this.

Strain-wave gearing is nothing new – it was invented in 1957 and has traveled to the moon on the lunar rover. And you may recall [Kristine Panos]’ recent article on a LEGO strain wave gear, which makes it easy to visualize how they work. She also has a great description of how the flex spline, wave generator, and circular spline interact, so we’ll spare those details here. [Simon Merret]’s interpretation of the strain wave gear is very simple and similar to other 3D-printed versions, except that he uses an inside-out timing belt as the flex spline. The wave generator is just an arm with a roller bearing at each end, and despite needing a few tweaks the gear does an admirable job.

Simon is reaching out for help in getting this gear ready for use where the industrial versions see frequent application – the first and second degrees of freedom of robotic arms. If you’ve got any ideas, head over to his project page on Hackaday.io and pitch in.

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Microfluidics “Frogger” Is A Game Changer For DIY Biology

January 16, 2017 by Dan Maloney 30 Comments

See those blue and green dots in the GIF? Those aren’t pixels on an LCD display. Those are actual drops of liquid moving across a special PCB. The fact that the droplets are being manipulated to play a microfluidics game of “Frogger” only makes OpenDrop v 2.0 even cooler.

Lab biology is mainly an exercise in liquid handling – transferring a little of solution X into some of solution Y with a pipette. Manual pipetting is tedious, error prone, and very low throughput, but automated liquid handling workstations run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This makes [Urs Gaudenz]’s “OpenDrop” microfluidics project a potential game changer for the nascent biohacking movement by offering cheap and easy desktop liquid handling.

Details are scarce on the OpenDrop website as to exactly how this works, but diving into the literature cited reveals that the pads on the PCB are driven to high voltages to attract the droplets. The PCB itself is covered with a hydrophobic film – Saran wrap that has been treated with either peanut oil or Rain-X. Moving the droplets is a simple matter of controlling which pads are charged. Splitting drops is possible, as is combining them – witness the “frog” getting run over by the blue car.

There is a lot of cool work being done in microfluidics, and we’re looking forward to see what comes out of this open effort. We’ve covered other open source efforts in microfluidics before, but this one seems so approachable that it’s sure to capture someone’s imagination.

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Vintage IBM Daisywheel Prints Again After Reverse Engineering

January 14, 2017 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Just before the dawn of the PC era, IBM typewriters reached their technical zenith with the Wheelwriter line. A daisy-wheel printer with interchangeable print heads, memory features, and the beginnings of word processing capabilities, the Wheelwriters never got much time to shine before they were eclipsed by PCs. Wheelwriters are available dirt cheap now, and like many IBM products are very hackable, as shown by this simple Arduino interface to make a Wheelwriter into a printer.

[Chris Gregg] likes playing with typewriters – he even got an old Smith Corona to play [Leroy Anderson]’s The Typewriter – and he’s gotten pretty good with these largely obsolete but lovable electromechanical relics. Interfacing a PC to the Wheelwriter could have been as simple as scrounging up an original interface card for the machine, but those are like hen’s teeth, and besides, where’s the sport in that? So [Chris] hooked a logic analyzer to the well-labeled port that would have connected to the interface card and reverse engineered the somewhat odd serial protocol by banging on keys. The interface he came up with for the Wheelwriter is pretty simple – just a Light Blue Bean Plus and a MOSFET to drive the bus high and low for the correct amount of time. The result is what amounts to an alphanumeric printer, but with a little extra code some dot-matrix graphics are possible too.

Having spent a lot of time reverse engineering serial comms, we can appreciate the amount of work this took to accomplish. Looking to do something similar but don’t have the dough for a logic analyzer? Maybe you can free up $22 and get cracking on a similarly impressive hack.

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Custom Sensor Head Turns 3D Printer Into Capacitive Scanner

January 13, 2017 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

The best thing about owning a 3D printer or CNC router may not just be what you can additively or subtractively create with it. With a little imagination you can turn your machine into a 3D scanner, and using capacitive sensors to image items turns out to be an interesting project.

[Nelson]’s scanner idea came from fiddling with some capacitive sensors at work, and with a high-resolution capacitance-to-digital sensor chip in hand, he set about building a scan head for his printer. In differential mode, the FDC2212 sensor chip uses an external LC tank circuit with two plain sensor plates set close to each other. The sensor plates form an air-dielectric variable capacitor, and the presence of an object can be detected with high sensitivity. [Nelson]’s custom sensor board and controller ride on a 3D-printed bracket and scan over the target on the printer bed. Initial results were fuzzy, but after compensating for room temperature variations and doing a little filtering on the raw data, the scans were… still pretty fuzzy. But there’s an image there, and it’s something to work with.

Need a slightly more approachable project to get your feet wet with capacitive sensors? Maybe you should use your phone’s touchscreen as a 2D-capacitive scanner.

[via r/electronics]

Old Motor Donates Rotor For Coaxial Wind Vane And Anemometer

January 12, 2017 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Problem: build a combined anemometer and wind vane where the pivots for both sensors are coaxial. Solution: turn an old universal motor into a step-wise potentiometer for the wind vane, and then pull a few tricks to get the whole thing assembled.

We have to admit that when we first saw [Ajoy Raman]’s Instructables post, we figured that he used a universal motor to generate a voltage from the anemometer. But [Ajoy]’s solution to the coaxial shafts problem is far more interesting than that. A discarded universal motor donated its rotor and bearings. The windings were stripped off the assembly leaving nothing but the commutator. 1kΩ SMD resistors were soldered across adjacent commutator sections to form a series resistance of 22kΩ with taps every 1k, allowing 0 to 2.2V to be read to the ADC of a microcontroller depending on the angle of the vane.

As clever as that is, [Ajoy] still had to pull off the coaxial part, which he did by drilling out the old motor shaft from one end to the other using just a drill press. The anemometer shaft passes through the hole in the shaft and turns a small DC motor to sense wind speed.

There might have been other ways to accomplish this, but given the constraints and the low cost of this solution, our hats are off to [Ajoy]. We’re a little concerned with that motor used for the anemometer, though. It could result in drag when used as a generator. Maybe a better solution would be a Hall-effect sensor to count rotations of a hard drive rotor.

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Friday Hack Chat: Eagle PCB Design With Matt Berggren

January 11, 2017 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Eagle is a household name for all Hackaday regulars. Here’s your chance to learn about upcoming features, get your ‘how do I do this in Eagle?’ questions answered, and get your wishlist items heard. Join us on Friday at 12:00 PST for a live Hack Chat about the Eagle PCB Design software.

Hosting this week’s discussion is [Matt Berggren], also known on Hackaday.io as technolomaniac. Matt is the Director of Autodesk Circuits and with Autodesk’s acquisition of Eagle last summer, the popular schematic design and PCB layout software falls under his purview. He has an extensive background in designing printed circuit boards — if you can do it in EDA software he knows how — this is an excellent opportunity to get answered the questions that have been stumping you.

Don’t miss this Hack Chat! Here’s a handy web tool to help convert 1/13/17 at 12:00 PST to your local time.

Here’s How to Take Part:

join-project-team-message-buttons — Buttons to join the Hacker Channel and enter Hack Chat

Hack Chat are live community events that take place in the Hackaday.io Hacker Channel. Visit that page (make sure you are logged in) and look for the “Join this Project Button” in the upper right. Once you are part of the Hacker Channel, that button will change to “Team Messaging” which takes you to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait for Friday, join Hack Chat whenever you like and see what the community is currently talking about.

Join Us Next Week Too for KiCad!

Are you more of a KiCad person than an Eagle person? You should still drop by this week to see if Matt changes your mind. But block out your calendar next week when [Wayne Stambaugh], one of the lead developers of KiCad will join us for a Hack Chat on Friday, 1/20/17.

Pulsed Power And Its Applications

January 11, 2017 by Manuel Rodriguez-Achach 43 Comments

Pulsed power is a technology that consists in accumulating energy over some period of time, then releasing it very quickly. Since power equals energy (or work) divided by time, the idea is to emit a constant amount of energy in as short a time as possible. It will only last for a fraction of a second though, but that instantaneous power has very interesting applications. With this technology, power levels of more than 300 terawatts have been obtained. Is this technology for unlimited budgets, or is this in reach of the common hacker?

Consider for example discharging a capacitor. A large 450 V, 3300 uF electrolytic capacitor discharges in about 0.1 seconds (varies a lot depending on capacitor design). Since the energy stored in it is given by 1/2 CV², which gives 334 Joules of energy, the power delivered will be 3340 watts. In fact a popular hacker project is to build large capacitor banks. Once you have the bank, and a way to charge it, you can use it to power very interesting devices such as:

untitled1 — A portable, 1.25 kJ coilgun by [Jason Murray]

Railguns in particular are subject to serious research. You may have read about the navy railgun, capable of reaching a muzzle speed of more than 4,600 mph (around Mach 6), more than any other explosive-powered gun. Power is provided by a 9-megajoule capacitor bank. The capacitors discharge on two conducting rails, generating an electromagnetic field that fires the projectile along the rails. The rail wear due to the tremendous pressures and currents, in the millions of amperes range, is still a problem to be solved.

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