Sneeze Into Your Hand, Not Your Elbow With This Nose-Shaped Sanitizer Dispenser

July 9, 2022 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

You’ve got to love a language like German, where not only is it possible for a word or two to stand in for a complex concept, but you don’t even need to speak the language to make a good guess at what it all means. Of course when your project is a giant nose that mock-sneezes sanitizer into your hands, it doesn’t really matter that you call it Der niesende Desinfektionsmittelspender. Humor based on bodily functions is, after all, the universal language.

Working knowledge of German or not, figuring out exactly what [Nina] is doing here isn’t too difficult. Judging by the video below and the build log, the idea is to detect the presence of a hand underneath the dispenser with a simple IR reflective sensor hooked to some kind of microcontroller — an ESP32 in this case. Audio clips of sneezes are stored on an SD card and played back through a small speaker, while a hobby servo pushes the button on an atomizer. It seems as if selecting the proper dispenser was the hardest thing about the project; [Nina] finally settled on a battery-operated mister that was just the right size to fit into the nose. Oh, didn’t we mention the giant, pink, 3D-printed nose that houses the whole thing? Sorry about that — it’s quite subtle and easy to miss.

Anyway, the whole project is a lot of fun and brought a genuine laugh when we saw it. It’s a clever way to poke gentle fun at the germaphobes who came up with other, less whimsical methods of dispensing hand sanitizer. But let’s face it, they ended up being proven pretty much on the mark about things.

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DIY Chicken McMansion Is A Real Hen House

July 6, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 9 Comments

You might recognize [Robert Dunn] from his YouTube channel Aging Wheels, where he hacks on all sorts of automotive delights. On his other channel, Under Dunn, [Robert] tends to focus on building things. In this case, his nine chickens grew a bit, and he needs a new coop for his twenty chickens, three turkeys, and two geese. The build, the video, and the outcome are all typical of [Robert Dunn]’s videos- that is to say fun, informative, and easy to follow along with.

Rather than building on to his existing coop that was designed for less than a dozen chickens, [Robert] decided to start from scratch. Using CAD to overcomplicate matters at every possible step, the build flies together with impressive speed- but never quite takes off until the very last moment.

The video highlights all the things we want to see: The CNC’ing, the fails (including one very large fall-flat-on-your-face moment), the recovery from the fails, routed butt joints, and screen door handles. It’s also got all of the overengineered goodness we’ve all come to love. You’ll also enjoy his solution to moving, then fixing, then finally installing the coop.

If you enjoyed this, and watching people fail, check out [Robert]’s Fail Of The Week that we featured a while back.

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Ride DIY Or Die This Badge-Less Suzuki

July 3, 2022 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

A few years ago, [Charles] picked up a sweet Suzuki motorcycle that checked all the boxen: it was in good shape, bore a few useful upgrades and a box of spare parts, plus the price was right. Though he assumed that he had pored over every picture on the classified site before buying, it wasn’t until later that [Charles] realized that something was indeed missing from the bike — a piece of chrome that does little more than to cover the tee in the brake line and bear the Suzuki brand. Once he saw the problem, he couldn’t un-see it, you know? And at that point, he just had to have that little piece, even if he had to make it himself.

That wasn’t the original plan, of course, but bike parts are expensive to begin with and only get worse as size, condition, and rarity increase. [Charles]’ quest to find this piece was halfway successful; he found a reasonable-but-rusty facsimile of the right part, although the emblem portion was long gone. Then he remembered the wife’s vinyl cutter.

Now, let’s stop right there. If you know anything at all about these vinyl cutters, you know that they are basically glorified 2D plotters with a knife attached where a pen would be. Send it any 2D file and you’re good? No, no; of course not. These things are locked down by the manufacturers.

Fortunately, [Charles] found inkscape-silhouette, which makes light work of sending SVGs to the machine. After much back and forth and maybe a bit of coin-flipping, [Charles] settled on the classy, stylized ‘S’ version rather than the full-on Suzuki badge. We think it looks great, and we’ll never tell anyone.

While this isn’t quite the type of badge we’d normally talk about, it’s a great project nonetheless, and it’s always nice to hear about projects that open up otherwise closed-source hardware.

Bluetooth 8-Track Adapters Are A Thing

July 3, 2022 by Lewin Day 33 Comments

When it comes to classic cars, the entertainment options can be limited. You’re often stuck with an old cassette deck and AM/FM radio, or you can swap it out for some hideous flashy modern head unit. [Jim] had a working 8-track deck in his Corvette, and didn’t want to swap it out. Thus, he set about building himself a simple Bluetooth to 8-track adapter.

The hack is straightforward, with [Jim] grabbing a Bluetooth-to-cassette adapter off the shelf. These simply take in audio over Bluetooth, and pipe the analog audio out to a magnetic head, which is largely similar to the head that reads the cassette. Pumping the audio to the magnetic coils in the adapter’s head creates a changing magnetic field essentially the same as the audio tape moving past the cassette reader head. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re working with an 8-track player or a regular cassette. Get the magnetic field in the right spot, and it’ll work.

The electronics from the cassette adapter are simply placed inside an old 8-track tape, with holes cut in the chassis for the charge port and on switch. Then, all you need to do is pop the adapter into the 8-track deck, pair with it over Bluetooth, and you can get the tunes pumping.

Others have had success with hilarious Rube Goldberg methods, too. [Techmoan] took a classic cassette-to-8-track adapter, which is actually self-powered by the deck, and simply popped a Bluetooth cassette inside. That worked surprisingly well, and it was interesting to see how it all worked on the inside. We even saw a 3D-printed device on TikTok.

Thus, if you’ve got an old Corvette, particularly of that era with the Doug Nash 4+3 transmission, this might just be the hack for you. Alternatively, you can hack Bluetooth in to just about any classic stereo; we’ve got a guide on how to do just that. Video after the break.

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Dual Power Supply In A Pinch

July 2, 2022 by Chris Lott 14 Comments

Recently I needed a dual voltage power supply to test a newly-arrived PCB, but my usual beast of a lab power supply was temporarily at a client’s site. I had a FNIRSI programmable power supply which would have been perfect, but alas, I had only one. While digging around in my junk box I found several USB-C power-delivery “trigger” boards which I bought for an upcoming project. These seemed almost too small for the task at hand, but after a little research I realized they would work quite well.

The ones I had used the Injoinic IP2721 USB-C power delivery chip, commonly used in many of these boards. Mine had been sold pre-configured for certain output voltages, but they were easy to re-jumper to the voltages I needed, +5 VDC and +20 VDC. The most challenging aspect was physically using them — they are the size of a fingernail. This version had through-hole output pads on 0.1″ centers, so I decided to solder them to the base of a standard MTA pin header. A few crimps later and I was up and running, along with the requisite pair of USB-C cables and power adapters.

For just a few dollars each, these trigger boards are useful to have in your toolbox, both for individual projects and for use in a pinch. We reviewed these modules a couple of years ago, and check out the far more flexible PD Micro that we covered last year.

This Arduino Pen Plotter Is Built For Speed

June 19, 2022 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

We see a lot of simple pen plotter projects around here, and while we appreciate them one and all, most of them are a little on the slow side. That’s OK — a glacial pace is sometimes all that’s needed, as long as it gets the job done. But there’s nothing wrong with putting the pedal to the metal, so to speak. And that’s exactly what this super-fast Arduino-based plotter is all about.

As the story goes, [IV Projects] felt the need for speed after building an earlier pen plotter project that worked, but failed to excite. With the additional goal of keeping the plotter easy to build with cheap parts, the design centers on a “grit roller drive” for the Y-axis — the one that actually moves the paper back and forth. And move it does, using Dremel tool sanding drums on a lightweight shaft to maximize acceleration. In fact, all the moving parts are kept as lightweight as possible, and the results really show — the three steppers really sing when this plotter is in action.

There are some really clever details in [IV Projects]’ design. We particularly like the way the pen lift mechanism works, and the surprise appearance of a clothespin spring as a belt tensioner was a real treat. Judging by the pile of rejected prototype parts, it took quite a bit of work to get this design right. If you’d like to build your own, STLs are available for the printed parts.

If you’re interested in what the other end of the speed scale looks like, check out this bare-minimum pen plotter.

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Laser Brings Autofocus To Tricked-Out Large Format Film Camera

June 17, 2022 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

You can’t argue with the results of large-format film cameras — picture the boxy bellows held by a cigar-chomping big-city press photographer of the 1940s — but they don’t really hold a candle to the usability and portability of even the earliest generations of 35mm cameras. And add in the ease-of-use features of later film and digital cameras, and something like a 4×5 Graflex seems like a real dinosaur.

Or maybe not. [Aleksi Koski] has built a large-format camera with autofocus, the “Conflict 45.” The problem with a lot of the large-format film cameras, which tend to be of a non-reflex optical design, is that it’s difficult or even impossible to see what you’re shooting through the lens. This makes focusing a bit of a guessing game, a problem that [Aleksi] addresses with his design. Sadly, the linked Petapixel article is basically devoid of technical details, but from what we can glean from it and the video below, the Conflict 45 is a 4″x5″ sheet-film camera that has a motorized lens board and a laser rangefinder. A short video has a through-viewfinder view showing an LCD overlay, which means there’s some kind of microcontroller on board as well, which is probably used for the calculations needed to compensate for parallax errors during close focusing, as well as other uses.

The camera is built from 3D printed parts; [Aleksi] says that this is just a prototype and that the finished camera will have a carbon-fiber body. We’d love to see more build details, but for now, we just love the idea of an easy-to-use large-format camera. Just maybe not that big.

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