If you have a motor and you’d like to know where the shaft position is, you are likely to turn to an optical encoder scheme. However, as [lingib] points out, you can also use a magnet and a magnetometer. You can see how it works in the video below.
The MLX90393 is a 3-axis hall effect device and, with a magnet on the shaft, the X and Y outputs of the spinning magnet will form a quadrature output that you can easily read.
Continue reading “Hall Effect Module Knows Where Your Motor Is”
CNC machines and 3D printers tend to have plenty of cabling which must be neatly managed while the machine moves. If not properly taken care of, wires can easily end up tangled in the moving bits leading to a dead machine at best, and some kind of raucous fire at worst. [Nikodem Bartnik] decided to create his own cable chains for his CNC build to keep everything in check.
The benefit of cable chains is that they stop cables splaying everywhere while still allowing them to move as needed with the axes of the machine. [Nikodem] created 20mm and 40mm chains for his build, affixed into the aluminium extrusion with bolts and T-nuts for easy assembly. The chains are assembled by hand, with 3D printed clips that hammer in place to hold the cables inside once inserted.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from buying cable chains off the shelf. But if you don’t want to wait for shipping in this era of cursed supply chains, or you want a cable chain you can customize to perfectly suit your machine, making your own could be the way to go.
Continue reading “Skip The Shipping, Print Your Own Cable Chains”
It’s not much of a stretch to assume that the majority of Hackaday readers are at least familiar with I2C. In fact, there’s an excellent chance that anyone who’s ever done more with an Arduino than blink the onboard LED has at one time or another used the serial communication protocol to talk to a sensor, display, or other external gadget. Of course, just because most of us have used it in a few projects doesn’t mean we truly understand it.
If you’re looking to brush up on your I2C knowledge, you could do worse than to follow the guide [András Tevesz] recently wrote up. With a title like Hardware Hacking 101: E01 I2C Sniffing, How to Listen to Your Arduino’s I2C Bus, you know you’re in for a good time. While the document is arguably geared more towards security researchers than electronic hobbyists, the concepts presented can be useful even if you’re just trying to debug your own projects. Continue reading “A Gaggle Of Boards Makes For An I2C Playground”
When reaching for a power supply design it’s normal here in 2022 to reach for a switching design. They’re lightweight, very efficient, and often available off-the-shelf at reasonable prices. Their benefits are such that it’s become surprisingly rare to see a traditional linear power supply with a mains-frequency transformer and rectifier circuit, so [ElectroBoy]’s dual voltage PSU board for audio amplifiers is worth a second look.
This type of linear power supply has an extremely simple circuit consisting of a transformer, bridge rectifier, and capacitors. The transformer isolates and steps down the AC voltage, the rectifier turns it into a rough DC, and the capacitors filter the DC to remove as much AC ripple as possible. In an audio power supply the capacitors have the dual role of filtering and providing an impulse reservoir for the supply in the event of a peak in demand imposed by the music being played. Careful selection is vital, with in this case a toroidal mains transformer and good quality capacitors being chosen.
The choice between a linear power supply such as this one and a switching design for high quality audio is by no means clear-cut, and may be something we’ll consider in our Know Audio series. The desirable properties are low noise and that impulse reservoir we mentioned, and it’s probably fair to say that while both types of power supply can satisfy them. With the extra expense of a toroidal transformer a linear supply is unlikely to be the cheaper of the two, but we suspect the balance tips in its favour due to a good linear supply being the easier to design.
YouTuber [Linguoer] has a knack, and it’s one that we don’t often see on the pages of Hackaday: rewinding and rebuilding dilapidated motors and generators. In the video below, you’ll see [Lin] take a hydroelectric turbine and generator that looks like it’s been sitting at the bottom of a lake, and turn it into a working unit, all while wearing her trademark blue and yellow denim jumpsuit.
Where as most makers would have used a MIG or TIG welder, [Linguoer] uses a simple (probably A/C) stick welder. Generator windings are calculated and wound by hand, and the carcass of what used to be the generator is sandblasted out in the open. Missing parts are fabricated from scratch using nothing more than an angle grinder. “Simple” is the order of the day.
[Linguoer] often refers to herself as “Village Girl”. Whatever specialty tools she uses, they are elementary. And whatever methods she uses, they are manual. You will get the idea very quickly that [Linguoer] isn’t just a person with a skill, but a person with a passion for getting things done no matter the circumstances. [Linguoer] is a hacker if there ever was one!
If hydroelectric hacks spin your pelton wheel, give this Impressive Off-Grid Hydroelectric Plant a whirl.
Continue reading “Rural Hacker De-Crufts And Rebuilds Hydroelectric Generator”
There was a time when we would start our electronic projects with integrated circuits and other components, mounted on stripboard, or maybe on a custom PCB. This is still the case for many devices, but it has become increasingly common for an inexpensive ready-built module to be treated as a component where once it would have been a project in its own right. We’re pleased then to see the work of [ElectroBoy], who has combined something of both approaches by reverse engineering the pinout of a Chinese Bluetooth audio chip with minimal datasheet, and making his own take on an off-the-shelf Bluetooth audio module.
The JL_AC6939B comes in an SOIC16 package and requires a minimum number of components. The PCB is therefore a relatively simple proposition and indeed he’s fitted all parts and traces on one side with the other being a copper ground plane. It’s dangerous to assume that’s all there is to a board like this one though, because many an engineer has come unstuck trying to design a PCB antenna. We’d hazard a guess that the antenna here is simply a wavy PCB line rather than an antenna with a known impedance and bandwidth, at the very least it looks to have much thicker traces than the one it’s copying.
It’s possible that it’s not really worth the effort of making a module that can be bought for relative pennies ready-made, but to dismiss it is to miss the point. We make things because we can, and not merely because we should.
In today’s episode of Diminutive Device Technology Overview, [Sprite_TM] is at it again – this time conquering the HC32L110. A few weeks ago, we have highlighted the small ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller, which is outstanding because of its exceptionally small size. We also pointed out a few hurdles, among them – hard-to-approach SDK and documentation, and difficulties making and assembling a PCB for such a small BGA. Today, we witness how [Sprite_TM] bulldozed through all of these hurdles for all of us, and added a few pictures to our collective “outrageous soldering” galleries while at it.
First, he figured out an example layout for this MCU that’s achievable for us even on a cheapest 2-layer board from JLCPCB, keeping distances within the generic tolerance standards by snubbing out a few pins. As a result, we only lose access to four GPIOs – those will have to be kept as inputs, so that nothing burns out. However, that’s the kind of tradeoff we are okay making if it helps us keep our PCB small and lightweight for projects where these factors matter. After receiving the resulting board, he also recorded a short tutorial on soldering such packages at home with a mere hot air gun and a few bare necessities like flux and tweezers – embedded below.
It doesn’t end there, however, as he decided to work around the GPIO fanout limitation in a non-intended way. Evidently, [Sprite_TM] decided to have some fun, taking a piece of regular 0.1″ spacing protoboard and deadbugging the chip with magnet wire, much to our amusement. The resulting contraption, pictured above, worked – and this is ever something you’d like to be able to achieve yourself in times of dire need, whether you make something work or simply to be entertained by making use of a cursed mounting technique, there’s an one-hour-long livestream recording of how this magnet wire contraption came to be. And, of course, that wasn’t the last thing to be shared.
Continue reading “Heroic Efforts Give Smallest ARM MCU A Breakout, Open Debugger”
