Make Your Own Nuclear Battery

December 1, 2016 by Manuel Rodriguez-Achach 73 Comments

miami_nano — A commercial nuclear battery from City Labs.

A Betavoltaic cell is a device that uses a radioactive source of beta particles and a semiconductor p-n junction to generate electricity. Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, is often used as the radioactive element. You may think that tritium is hard to obtain or even forbidden, however, recently you can find tritium in self-lightning key chains, and it is also used in watches and firearm night sights. The beta particles (electrons) from the tritium radioactive process causes phosphors in the device to glow, giving a light that can last for years.

[NurdRage] has just created a nuclear battery using tritium vials from key chains. After getting rid of the plastic containers, he sandwiches the vials between two small solar panels. That’s all! Instant power for the next 15 years. Of course, the amount of power you can get from this device is on the order of microwatts. The battery produces around 1.6 volts at 800 nano amps. He gets 1.23 microwatts, not much, but it is in fact more than the output of commercial units at 0.84 microwatts, for a ten percent of the cost. That minuscule amount of power is actually not easy to measure, and he does a great job explaining the circuit he used to measure the current.

Continue reading “Make Your Own Nuclear Battery” →

Craziest Pin-Saving LCD Trick Ever!

December 1, 2016 by Elliot Williams 93 Comments

We love squeezing every last bit of silicon goodness out of a tiny chip, or at least we delight in seeing it done. Today’s analog/digital hack is one of the sweetest we’ve seen in a while. And it’s also a little bit of a puzzle, so don’t scroll down to the answer until you’ve given the schematic a good think-over.

Continue reading “Craziest Pin-Saving LCD Trick Ever!” →

Tesla Coil Powered Film Canister Gatling Gun

November 30, 2016 by Manuel Rodriguez-Achach 22 Comments

What do you get when you combine a Tesla coil, 315 film canisters and a fortune wheel? The answer is of course a film canister Gatling gun. [ScienceBob] has taken the simple film canister cannon hack to a whole new level. The idea is simple, the film canister has a lid that fits tight and allows pressure to build up, so if you fill it with alcohol vapor and ignite it with a spark gap, you get a small explosion that sends the can flying away.

[ScienceBob] uses 21 rows of fifteen canisters each around the wheel. There is a spark gap for each canister, and all the spark gaps in the same row are in series. You need a lot of volts to turn on fifteen spark gaps, and that is why the Tesla coil is part of the game. When the outer end of the wire in one row passes near the Tesla coil, a spark jumps and fires all the spark gaps, igniting the alcohol vapor and fifteen cans are expelled from the wheel. The wheel rotates until all rows are fired.

While this nice piece of artillery is sure a lot of fun to fire, but don’t ask us to reload it! If you want more power, check this Gatling gun that fires crossbow bolts, or the Gatling water pistol.

Continue reading “Tesla Coil Powered Film Canister Gatling Gun” →

Silicon Wafer Transfer Machine Is Beautifully Expensive

November 30, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 31 Comments

There’s nothing more freeing than to be an engineer with no perceptible budget in sight. [BrendaEM] walks us through a teardown of a machine that was designed under just such a lack of constraint. It sat inside of a big box whose job was to take silicon wafers in on one side and spit out integrated circuits on the other.

[BrendaEM] never really divulges how she got her hands on something so expensive that the engineer could specify “tiny optical fiber prisms on the end of a precision sintered metal post” as an interrupt solution for the wafer. However, we’re glad she did.

The machine features lots of things you would expect; pricey ultra precise motors, silky smooth linear motion systems, etcetera. At one point she turns on a gripper movement, the sound of it moving can be adequately described as poetic.

It also gives an unexpected view into how challenging it is to produce the silicon we rely on daily at the ridiculously affordable price we’ve come to expect. Everything from the ceramic plates and jaws that can handle the heat of the silicon right out of the oven to the obvious cleanliness of even this heavily used unit.

It’s a rare look into an expensive world most of us peasants aren’t invited to. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Silicon Wafer Transfer Machine Is Beautifully Expensive” →

LEGO Technics Machine Produces True Braided Rope

November 28, 2016 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

We love a good LEGO build as much as anyone, but Technics takes it to the next level in terms of creating working mechanisms. And nobody takes Technics as far as [Nico71], as evidenced by his super-fast Technics rope braiding machine.

The last time we saw one of [Nico71]’s builds, it was also a LEGO Technics rope-making machine. At the time, we called it a “rope-braiding machine” and were taken to task in the comments since the strands were merely twisted to make the final product. [Nico71] must have taken that to heart, because the current build results in true braided cordage. That trick is accomplished by flying shuttles that are not attached to either of the two counter-rotating three-spoked wheels. The shuttles are transferred between the two wheels by a sweeper arm, each making a full revolution with one wheel before being transferred to the other. Each shuttle’s thread makes an intertwining figure-eight around the threads from the two fixed bobbins, and the result is a five-strand braided cord. The whole machine is mesmerizing to watch, and the mechanism is silky smooth even at high speeds. It seems like a much simpler design than the previous effort, too.

You’ve got to hand it to builders like [Nico71] that come up with fascinating machines while working within the constraints of the Technics world. And those that leverage the Technics platform in their builds can come up with pretty neat stuff, like this paper tape reader for a music machine.

Continue reading “LEGO Technics Machine Produces True Braided Rope” →

Contribute To Open Source On #OpenCyberMonday

November 28, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Today is Cyber Monday, the day when everyone in the US goes back to work after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday is a celebration of consumerism, and the largest online shopping day of the year. Right now, hundreds of thousands of office workers are browsing Amazon for Christmas presents, while the black sheep of the office are on LiveLeak checking out this year’s Black Friday compartment syndrome compilations.

This is the season of consumption, but there’s still time to give back. We would suggest #OpenCyberMonday, an effort to donate to your favorite Open Source foundations and projects.

It’s not necessary to explain how much we all rely on Open Source software, but it goes even further than the software powering the entire Internet. Hackaday is built on WordPress, and the WordPress Foundation is responsible for very important, very widely used Open Source software. The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to the compilation of all knowledge. The Internet Archive is a temporal panopticon, preserving our digital heritage for future generations. The Open Source Hardware Association is doing their best to drag physical objects into the realm of Open Source – a much more difficult task than simply having the idea of Copyleft.

While everyone else is busy buying Internet-connected toasters and wearable electronics, take a few minutes and give a gift everyone can enjoy. Make a donation to the Open Source initiative of your choice A list of these foundations can be found on opensource.org. This isn’t a comprehensive list of worthy Open Source initiatives, so if you have any other suggestions, put it out on the Twitters.

A Next-Level Home-Built Flight Simulator

November 26, 2016 by Dan Maloney 30 Comments

Every hobby needs to have a few people who take it just a little too far. In particular, the aviation hobbies – Radio control flying, FPV multicopter racing, and the like – seem to inspire more than their fair share of hard-core builds. In witness whereof we present this over-the-top home-brew flight simulator.

His wife and friends think he’s crazy, and we agree. But [XPilotSimPro] is that special kind of crazy that it takes to advance the state of the art, and we applaud him for that. A long-time fan of flight simulator games, he was lucky enough to log some time in a real 737 simulator. That seems to be where he caught the DIY bug. The video after the break is a whirlwind tour of the main part of his build, which does not seek to faithfully reproduce any particular cockpit as much as create a plausibly awesome one. Built on a PVC pipe frame with plywood panels, the cockpit is bristling with LCD panels, flight instruments, and bays of avionics that look like they came out of a cockpit. The simulator sits facing a wall with an overhead LCD projector providing views of the outside world. An overhead panel sporting yet more LCD panels and instruments was a recent addition. The whole thing is powered by a hefty looking gaming rig running X-Plane, allowing [XPilotSimPro] to take on any aviation challenge, including landing an Embraer 109 on the deck of the USS Nimitz Aircraft Carrier.

What could be next for [XPilotSimPro]’s simulator? How about adding a little motion control with pneumatics? Or better still, how about using a real 737 cockpit as a simulator?

Continue reading “A Next-Level Home-Built Flight Simulator” →