Parts

780 Articles

3D Printed Sorter Separates Spare Hex Nuts With A Shake

October 13, 2022 by 14 Comments

Got a pile of mixed hex nuts? Sort them in no time by printing [jonafriendj]’s nut sorter, which has options for pretty much any nut size you’d be after (it’s labeled metric, but actually includes Imperial sizes as well.)

Something to admire about the design is the handy little raised labels on each of the sieves, and the fact that all the parts print entirely without supports. Designing a part to play to a manufacturing method’s strengths (and avoid its weaknesses) is good DFM, or Design for Manufacturing.

With 3D printing being the boon that it is to workshops and hobbyists everywhere, it certainly pays to strive for good DFM, especially for designs meant to be shared with others. Sometimes good DFM takes a page from other manufacturing methods like injection molding, and we end up with things like using crush ribs on printed parts.

Want to see a demonstration of [jonafriendj]’s nut sorting design? Check out the short video embedded below the page break. If that leaves you wanting, take a look at a motorized, automated DIY solution.

Continue reading “3D Printed Sorter Separates Spare Hex Nuts With A Shake” →

A tiny CRT showing an eye, inside a plexiglass enclosure

This Eye Is Watching You From Its Tiny CRT

October 9, 2022 by 25 Comments

The days of cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, are firmly behind us, and that’s generally a good thing. Display tubes were heavy, bulky and fragile, and needed complicated high-voltage electronics in order to work. But not all of them were actually large: miniature display tubes were also produced, for things like camcorder viewfinders, and [Tavis] from Sideburn Studios decided to turn one of those into a slightly creepy art project.

The heart of this build is a one-inch CRT that was salvaged from an RCA video camera. [Tavis] mounted the tiny tube inside an acrylic box on a 3D printed base. Inside that base sits a Raspberry Pi along with a high-voltage driver and a power management board. The Pi continuously plays a video that shows a human eye blinking and looking in various directions. Just an eye, floating in space, looking at the world around it.

The magic is briefly lost when the Pi starts up, because it then shows a microscopic version of the Pi’s standard bootup sequence, but once the thing is running it adds a weird vibe to a room. It actually looks like something you’d find in an avant-garde art exhibition — in the video (embedded below) it’s accompanied by eerie music that gives it an even more unsettling feel. Electronic eyes are always a bit scary, especially when they’re actually looking at you.

Continue reading “This Eye Is Watching You From Its Tiny CRT” →

Magnetic Gearbox Design Improvements Are Toothless But Still Cool

October 8, 2022 by 9 Comments

Any project that contains something called a “flux modulator” instantly commands our attention. And while we’re pretty sure that [Retsetman] didn’t invent it after hitting his head on the toilet, this magnetic gearbox is still really cool.

Where most gearboxes have, you know, gears, a magnetic gearbox works by coupling input and output shafts not with meshing teeth but via magnetic attraction. [Retsetman]’s version has three circular elements nested together on a common axis, and while not exactly a planetary gear in the traditional sense, he still uses planetary terminology to explain how it works. The inner sun gear is a rotor with four pairs of bar magnets on its outer circumference. An outer ring gear has ten pairs of magnets, making the ratio of “teeth” between the two gears 10:2. Between these two elements is the aforementioned flux modulator, roughly equivalent to the planet gears of a traditional gearbox, with twelve grub screws around its circumference. The screws serve to conduct magnetic flux between the magnets, dragging the rotating elements along for the ride.

This gearbox appears to be a refinement on [Retsetman]’s earlier design, and while he provides no build files that we can find, it shouldn’t be too hard to roll your own designs for the printed parts.

Continue reading “Magnetic Gearbox Design Improvements Are Toothless But Still Cool” →

I’ll See Your Seven-Segment Mechanical Display And Raise You To 16 Segments

October 8, 2022 by 6 Comments

Mechanical multi-segment displays have become quite a thing lately, and we couldn’t be more pleased about it. The degree of mechanical ingenuity needed to make these things not only work but look good while doing it never ceases to amaze us, especially as the number of segments increases. So we submit this over-the-top 16-segment mechanical display (Nitter) for your approval.

The original tweet by [Kango Suzuki] doesn’t have a lot of detail, especially if you can’t read Japanese, but we did a little digging and found the video shown below. It shows a lot more detail on how this mechanism works, as well as some of the challenges that cropped up while developing it. Everything is 3D printed, and flipping the state of each of the 16 segments is accomplished with a rack-and-pinion mechanism, with the pinions printed right into each two-sided cylindrical segment. The racks are connected to pushrods that hit a punch card inserted into a slot in the rear of the display. The card has holes corresponding to the pattern to be displayed; when it’s pushed home, the card activates a mechanism that slides all the racks that line up with holes and flips their segments.

This isn’t the first multi-segment mechanical masterpiece from [Kango Suzuki] that we’ve featured, of course. This wooden seven-segment display works with cams rather than punch cards, but you can clearly see the hoe the earlier mechanism developed into the current work. Both are great, and we’re looking forward to the next segment count escalation in the mechanical display wars.

Continue reading “I’ll See Your Seven-Segment Mechanical Display And Raise You To 16 Segments” →

A sliced digital file of a marker light enclosure. Background is a white and grey grid and object itself is a series of print path lines in red, orange, and green.

3D Printing Hard-To-Find Vintage Vehicle Parts

October 7, 2022 by 52 Comments

When I was growing up, my dad and I restored classic cars. Combing junkyards for the pieces we needed was a mixture of interesting and frustrating since there was always something you couldn’t find no matter how long you looked. [Emily Velasco] was frustrated by the high price of parts even when she was able to find them, so she decided to print them herself. She wrote an excellent tutorial about designing and 3D printing replica parts if you find yourself in a similar situation.

All four marker lights on [Velasco]’s 1982 Toyota pickup were on their way to plastic dust, and a full set would run her $160. Instead of shelling out a ton of cash for some tiny parts, she set out to replicate the marker lamps with her 3D printer. Using a cheap marker lamp replacement for a more popular model of pickup as a template, she was able to replace her marker lamps at a fraction of the cost of the options she found online. Continue reading “3D Printing Hard-To-Find Vintage Vehicle Parts” →

Seven Segments, But Not As We Know Them

October 6, 2022 by 11 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of clever re-imagining of the classic 7-segment display, and proving there is still room for something new is [Jack]’s 7-segment “DigiTag” display.

This 3D printable device has a frame into which is slotted three sliders. These sliders can be adjusted individually, mixing and matching the visibility of colored and uncolored areas, to create digits 0-9. We’ve seen some unusual 7-segment-inspired displays before, using from one motor for the whole digit to ones that need one motor per segment, but nothing quite like this approach.

While this particular design relies on the user to manually “dial in” each digit, the resulting key-like assembly (and unique shape for each digit) seems like it could have some interesting applications — a puzzle box design comes to mind.

If you have any ideas of your own on how this could be used, don’t keep them to yourself! Let us know in the comments, below.

The assembled switch PCB in the palm of its creator's hand

TTP223 Brings Simple Touch Controls To A LED Lamp

October 4, 2022 by 7 Comments

You can buy small modules with capacitive touch detection ICs — most often it’s the TTP223, a single-button capacitive model with configurable output modes. These are designed to pair with a microcontroller or some simple logic-level input, but [Alain Mauer] wanted was to bring touch control to a simple LED strip. Not to be set deterred, he’s put together a simple TTP223-based switch board.

Initially, he made a prototype using one of the regular TTP223 boards as a module, but then transferred the full schematic onto a single PCB. The final board uses an NPN transistor capable of handling up to 3 amps to do the switching job, and Zener-based regulation to provide 5 V for the TTP223 itself from the 12 V input. [Alain] shares the schematic, as well as BOM together with Gerber files for a 2×3 panel in case you’re interested in adding a few of these handy boards to your parts bin.

The TTP223 is a ubiquitous and quite capable chip – we’ve seen it used for building a mouse with low actuation force buttons, a soft power switch, and even a UV-sensing talisman that’s equal parts miniature electronics and fascinating metalwork.

Continue reading “TTP223 Brings Simple Touch Controls To A LED Lamp” →