Misc Hacks

4137 Articles

[Jimmy The Torch] Making Blown Glass

June 5, 2013 by 5 Comments

Skip to about 2:30 if you just want to see the action.

Blowing glass is always so pretty to watch. The warm glow of the glass mixed with the light playing through the cool parts makes for a stunning visual environment, especially when you stop to think about the fact that this is potentially a very dangerous thing as well.

In this video [Jimmy the torch] starts off very conversational. At about 2:30 things shift a bit. Some music starts up, the camera work gets a little more serious, and the real glass blowing begins.

Hackaday Retro Edition Roundup

June 4, 2013 by 17 Comments

Retro

The Hackaday retro edition hasn’t been updated in a while, and for that I am very sorry. Still, digging through my email reveals quite a lot of very cool retro computers that were able to load the retro edition over the Internet, and it would be a terrible shame to let these awesome submissions die in my inbox. Without further adieu, here are the best retro computers that have been sent in over the last few months:

[Scott] got his Mac SE to load up the retro edition. This was a chore; after getting a serial connection from his SE to the outside world, [Scott] realized he didn’t have a browser on his retro mac. 800k drives are a pain, it seems. He eventually got everything running in a terminal session, and the retro edition loaded beautifully.

How about another Mac? This one is [Raymond]’s Mac II, the first not-all-in-one Macintosh. NuBus Ethernet card, Netscape 2.02, and 26 years of history behind this machine.

Here’s a weird one: it’s a Siemens interactive display originally used for a building management display. It has a 10 inch touch screen display at 640×480 resolution and runs Windows CE 5.0. After fiddling with some files, [Nick] managed to get the networking running on this machine and tried to load Google. Anyone who has played around with the class of machines we seen for retro submissions knows what happened next (nothing), but luckily [Nick] remembered Hackaday has a retro site. The rest is history.

[Kyle] has a really cool box on his hands. It’s a Compaq 486SX overclocked from 25MHz to 33MHz. 20 Megabytes of RAM, network card, and a Soundblaster 16 make this computer from 1993 a very respectable box for old DOS gaming. It can also browse the web with Arachne.

Finally, [cnlohr], the guy who made his own electron microscope  never mind, he’s still awesome and can manufacture glass PCBs at home, found an old green screen CRT while cleaning out a friend’s place. He hooked it up to one of his glass PCB AVR microcontroller things and did the usual text terminal fare; ASCII Star Wars with telnet and using lynx to load up the retro site. It’s only a 48-column display, but the retro edition is surprisingly readable. Very cool.

Building A Miniature X-ray Tube

June 2, 2013 by 30 Comments

tube

We’ve seen homemade x-ray devices and we’ve seen people making vacuum tubes at home. We’ve never seen anyone make their own x-ray tube, though, and it’s doubtful we’ll ever see the skill and craftsmanship that went into this build again.

An x-ray tube is a simple device; a cathode emits electrons that strike a tungsten anode that emits x-rays. Most x-ray tubes, though, are relatively large with low-power mammography tubes being a few inches in diameter and about 6 inches long. In his amazing 45-minute-long video, [glasslinger] shows us how to make a miniature vacuum tube, a half-inch in diameter and only about four inches long.

For those of you who love glass lathes, tiny handheld spot welders and induction heaters, but don’t want your workshop bathed in x-rays, [glasslinger] has also built a  few other vacuum tubes, including a winking cat Nixie tube. This alternate cat’s eye tube was actually sealed with JB Weld, an interesting technique if you’d ever like to make a real home made tube amp.

Geiger Counter Tells You If Your Dishes Are Radioactive

May 13, 2013 by 47 Comments

geiger-counter-build

[Henrik] really turned out a nice little Geiger counter board based on a cold war era Geiger tube.

It works in much the same way as other projects along the same lines. It does run on batteries if needed, which is no small feat since the tube wants high voltage to operate correctly. And the video after the break shows it spitting out readings to a terminal window when connected to a computer via USB.

But what really caught our eye is the radioactive source material he used for testing. Since he didn’t have anything on hand he had to order something, and ended up going with a couple shards from a dinner plate. A radioactive dinner plate to exact and it’s a brand name you’ve probably heard of before. Red Fiesta Ware apparently used to be radioactive. It’s even mentioned in the intro to the Wikipedia article. Go figure!

One other thing we noticed was [Henrik’s] method of interfacing his multimeter with a breadboard. One of the project photos shows the probe with thin wire wrapped around the tip. We assume this is to make it easy to plug into the breadboard.

Despite this little digression away from the main project we did really enjoy learning about his build. And you can see him showing it off in the clip after the break.

Continue reading “Geiger Counter Tells You If Your Dishes Are Radioactive” →

Hand Placing Flash Die To Make USB Drives

April 27, 2013 by 34 Comments

SONY DSC

It’s a stretch to call this one a hack, but USB thumb drives are around us constantly and we always assumed that the boards inside were machine populated (like with a pick and place machine). [Bunnie] tells us otherwise. He recently had the chance to tour a factory where USB flash drives are made.

The image above shows a worker populating a set of boards with the flash memory dies. The waffle-grid to the right holds the dies. Each is a tiny glint of a component. The worker is not in a clean room, and is using a bamboo tool to pick up the pieces. [Bunnie] explains that he’s seen the tools before but doesn’t fully comprehend how they work. He figures that the hand-cut manipulator has just the right amount of grab to pick up the die, but will also release it when it touches down on the dot of glue applied to the landing zone on the board.

If you’re into this sort of thing you should check out the PCB factory tour we saw a couple of years back. The article link is dead but the embedded tour video still works.

[Thanks pl]

High Speed Circuit Design For Quantum Physics Light Sensing

April 4, 2013 by 17 Comments

high-speed-sensor-sampling

[Limpkin] designs circuits for a living. This board is one of his recent projects, and although his skills are light years ahead of our own experiences, he did a pretty good job of explaining how he put this board together.

He was tasked with measuring the light intensity of two photodiodes. The expected impulses picked up by those components will be less than a nanosecond in duration, putting some special design constraints upon him. To register this signal he’s using three cascading op-amps per input. To ward off false readings from RF interference he also designed in the shielding which you see surrounding the majority of the circuit.

His package choice for the THS3202 op-amps is quite interesting. He didn’t go with the footprint that includes a thermal pad to dissipate heat because he didn’t want to interrupt the ground plane on the underside of the board. To keep the parts from melting he added an aluminum spacer that contacts the top of the package, then a heat sink that covers the entire shield frame. In a future revision he figures he’ll move to a four-layer board so that the can opt for the MSOP package that does the work for him.

Gamma-ray Scintillation Probe In A Paint Can

March 22, 2013 by 5 Comments

gamma.ray.scintillation.probe.in.paint.can

The [Prutchi] family sounds pretty cool. [David], the father, is a well educated engineer, has 70 patents, and has written two books. On his off time, he has a passion for making experimental physics accessible to the average Joe. His daughter [Shanni] is a high school student who co-authored one of those same books, and helps conduct research in the fields of Radio-Astronomy and Quantum Physics. Together, they came up with an affordable, yet very sensitive, gamma-ray scintillation probe for their customized Civil Defense V-700 radiation survey meter. Sweet.

They decided to use parts that were low cost and readily available so others could easily follow in their footsteps. A Philips XP5312/SN photomultiplier tube (PMT) and scintillation plastic are the main components.  The enclosure for the probe is a standard paint can, lined with polyurethane foam inserts to help protect the assembly and hold everything in place.

[David] says that since the probe is very portable and has a high level of sensitivity, it is an ideal candidate for radioactive mineral surveying and scouting miscellaneous gamma-ray sources. They documented the whole process and have compiled a handy PDF file for those who are interested in creating their own.