The Cheap CNC3018 Gets A Proper Revamp

June 8, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 24 Comments

Many people have been attracted to the low price and big dreams of the CNC3018 desktop CNC router. If you’re quick, you can pick one up on the usual second-hand sales sites with little wear and tear for a steal. They’re not perfect machines by any stretch of the imagination, but they can be improved upon, and undoubtedly useful so long as you keep your expectations realistic.

[ForOurGood] has set about such an improvement process and documented their journey in a whopping eight-part (so far!) video series. The video linked below is the most recent in the series and is dedicated to creating a brushless spindle motor on a budget.

As you would expect from such a machine, you get exactly what you pay for. The low cost translates to thinner than ideal metal plates, aluminium where steel would be better, lower-duty linear rails, and wimpy lead screws. The spindle also suffers from cost-cutting, as does the size of the stepper motors. But for the price, all is forgiven. The fact that they can even turn a profit on these machines shows the manufacturing prowess of the Chinese factories.

We covered the CNC 3018 a while back, and the comments of that post are a true gold mine for those wanting to try desktop CNC. Warning, though: It’s a fair bit harder to master than 3D printing!

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Gamma Ray Spectroscopy The Pomelo Way

June 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Depending on the circumstances you find yourself in, a Geiger counter can be a tremendously useful tool. With just a click or a chirp, it can tell you if any invisible threats lurk. But a Geiger counter is a “yes or no” instrument; it can only tell you if an ionizing event occurred, revealing nothing about the energy of the radiation. For that, you need something like this gamma-ray spectroscope.

Dubbed the Pomelo by [mihai.cuciuc], the detector is a homebrew solid-state scintillation counter made from a thallium-doped cesium iodide crystal and a silicon photomultiplier. The scintillator is potted in silicone in a 3D printed enclosure, to protect the hygroscopic crystal from both humidity and light. There’s also a temperature sensor on the detector board for thermal compensation. The Pomelo Core board interfaces with the physics package and takes care of pulse shaping and peak detection, while a separate Pomelo Zest board has an ESP32-C6, a small LCD and buttons for UI, SD card and USB interfaces, and an 18650 power supply. Plus a piezo speaker, because a spectroscope needs clicks, too.

The ability to determine the energy of incident photons is the real kicker here, though. Pomelo can detect energies from 50 keV all the way up to 3 MeV, and display them as graphs using linear or log scales. The short video below shows the Pomelo in use on samples of radioactive americium and thorium, showing different spectra for each.

[mihai.cuciuc] took inspiration for the Pomelo from this DIY spectrometer as well as the CosmicPi.

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Use That One Port For High-Speed FPGA Data Export

June 1, 2024 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

There’s a good few options for exporting data out of FPGAs, like Ethernet, USB2, or USB3. Many FPGAs have a HDMI (or rather, sparkling DVI) port as well, and [Steve Markgraf] brings us the hsdaoh project — High-Speed Data Acquisition Over HDMI, using USB3 capture cards based on the Macrosilicon MS2130 chipset to get the data from the FPGA right to your PC.

Current FPGA-side implementation is designed for Sipeed Tang chips and the GOWIN toolchain, but it should be portable to an open-source toolchain in the future. Make sure you’re using a USB3 capture card with a MS2130 chipset, load the test code into your FPGA, run the userspace capture side, and you’re ready to add this interface to your FPGA project! It’s well worth it, too – during testing, [Steve] has got data transfer speeds up to 180 MB/s, without the USB3 complexity.

As a test, [Steve] shows us an RX-only SDR project using this interface, with respectable amounts of bandwidth. The presentation goes a fair bit into the low-level details of the protocol, from HDMI fundamentals, to manipulating the MS2130 registers in a way that disables all video conversion; do watch the recording, or at least skim the slides! Oh, and if you don’t own a capture card yet, you really should, as it makes for a wonderful Raspberry Pi hacking companion in times of need.

Quick & Capable WiFi For Your Nice-Power Supply

May 31, 2024 by Arya Voronova 13 Comments

Rejoice, those of us who have purchased a Nice-Power lab PSU from an Eastern source. Yes, the name might sound like a re-brand of a generic product, maybe you will even see this exact PSU on a shelf at a physical store near you, under a more local brand name and with a fair markup. Nevermind the circumstances, the most important part is that [Georgi Dobrishinov] found a way to add an ESP8266 to the PSU by tapping its internal UART control interface, and wrote a web UI for all your Internet-of-Lab-PSUs needs, called the PowerLinkESP project.

All you need is a Wemos D1 development board, or any other ESP8266 board that has UART pins exposed and handles 5 V input. [Georgi] brings everything else, from pictures showing you where to plug it in and where to tap 5 V, to extensive instructions on how to compile and upload the code, using just the Arduino IDE. Oh, and he tops it off with STLs for a 3D printed case, lest your Wemos D1 board flop around inside.

With [Georgi]’s software, you can monitor your PSU with interactive charts for all readings, export charts in both PNG and CSV, and access a good few features. Your ESP8266’s network uplink is also highly configurable, from an STA mode for a static lab config, to an AP mode for any on-the-go monitoring from your phone, and it even switches between them automatically! The firmware makes your PSU all that more practical, to the point that if you’re about to build an interface for your PSU, you should pay attention to [Georgi]’s work.

Lab PSUs with WiFi integration are worth looking into, just check out our review of this one; smart features are so nice to have, we hackers straight up rewrite PSU firmware to get there if we have to. Oh, and if you ever feel like standardizing your work so that it can interface to a whole world of measurement equipment, look no further than SCPI, something that’s easier to add to your project than you might expect, even with as little as Python and a Pi.

Schematic of the Pi Pico wireup, showing the various outputs that the firmware will generate on the GPIOs

A Scope Test Tool You Can Build With Just A Pico

May 31, 2024 by Arya Voronova 24 Comments

Ever wanted to see how well your oscilloscope adheres to its stated capabilities? What if you buy a new scope and need a quick way to test it lest one of its channels its broken, like [Paul Wasserman] had happen to him? Now you only need a Pi Pico and a few extra components to make a scope test board with a large variety of signals it can output, thanks to [Paul]’s Sig Gen Pi Pico firmware.

Despite the name it’s not a signal generator as we know it, as it’s not flexible in the signals it generates. Instead, it creates a dozen signals at more or less the same time — from square waves of various frequencies and duty cycles, to a PWM-driven DAC driving eight different waveforms, to Manchester-encoded data I2C/SPI/UART transfers for all your protocol decoder testing.

Everything is open source under the BSD 3-Clause license, and there’s even two PDFs with documentation and a user manual, not to mention the waveform screenshots for your own reference.

It’s seriously impressive how many features [Paul] has fit into a single firmware. Thanks to his work, whenever you have some test equipment in need of being tested, just grab your Pico and a few passive components.

A person holds a glass jar in their left hand and a spark plug in their right atop a white cylindrical canister. The jar and canister are sitting on top of a green cutting mat.

Spark Plug Becomes Glass Cutter

May 28, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 15 Comments

Sometimes a hack doesn’t need to be rocket science to be useful. Take for instance [MofigoDIY] using an old spark plug to build a glass cutter.

Sure, going to grab a glass cutter at the hardware store might be easy, but there’s something satisfying about going the DIY route. [MofigoDIY]’s version of this classic hack is a bit more refined than the quick and dirty route of smashing the spark plug alumina and hot gluing it into a tube.

After using a rotary tool to cut off the threads and expose the narrow part of the ceramic, [MofigoDIY] grinds it down to a fine point. This lets the spark plug itself become the handle, so you don’t need any additional parts to make the cutter. Toward the end of the video, a heated wire is used to break a glass jar apart after it was scored which might be of interest even if you already have a glass cutter. Once you’re finished making your glass cutter, make sure you dispose of any chips left over, since ceramic spark plug fragments are considered burglary tools in some areas.

Would you rather just build the glass up additively? How about using a laser cutter to sinter glass or 3D printing fused silica using a polymerized composite precursor?

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Locate Faults With The Leakseeker-89R

May 24, 2024 by Lewin Day 29 Comments

Have you ever needed to hunt down a short circuit, but you’ve had no idea where it is or how it’s happening? As it turns out, there are tools to help in that regard. Enter the Leakseeker-89R.

The device is able to help hunt down short circuits that measure anywhere from 0 to 300 ohms. The device is typically used with two leads on a given pair of traces, and it has a display made up of red, yellow and green LEDs. As the leads are moved closer or farther from the short circuit, the display changes to indicate if you’re getting hotter or colder. There’s also a third lead that can be used to allow testing under more challenging conditions when there is a large capacitance in-circuit with the traces you’re testing.

Fundamentally, it’s basically a very accurate resistance meter, finely honed for the purpose of hunting down short circuits. We’ve featured similar tools before. They can be of great use for troubleshooting. Meanwhile, if you’re building your own test tools in your home lab, don’t hesitate to let us know! We’re always dying for hot tips on the best DIY lab equipment for saving time, frustration, and money.