Remove Wall Plugs Fast With A Custom Tool

April 18, 2024 by Lewin Day 39 Comments

The best thing about buying your own home is that you can hang things on the walls. It’s a human right all too often denied to renters the world over. Regardless, five years later, when you’re doing the mandatory minimalist remodel, you’ll be ruing the day you put in all those wall anchors. At that point, consider removing them with this nifty tool from [XDIY with Itzik].

The design aims to remove wall anchors as cleanly as possible. It’s easiest to watch the video to get the idea of how it works.

The tool features a block which holds a bearing. That bearing acts as a rotating stop for a wood screw. The idea is that you place the block against the wall, and use a power drill to drive a wood screw into the anchor at high speed. The screw can’t move forward, so the threads basically yank the plug out of the wall, and relatively neatly at that. Once removed, there’s a little push stopper you can use to hold the old plug in place as you remove the wood screw from the device, ready to go again.

[Itzik] demonstrates the device by removing ten wall plugs in just 40 seconds. If you’ve got a lot to do, or it’s a job you do regularly, you might like to have this tool in your kit.

Oftentimes, having the right tool can make a job ten times faster, and this seems like one of those cases. Video after the break.

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Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints At More

April 18, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to hack the scope to play Breakout, sometimes plastic needs to be sacrificed.

Granted, the scope in question, a Fnirsi DSO152, only cost [David Given] from Poking Technology a couple of bucks. And while the little instrument really isn’t that bad inside, it’s limited to a single channel and 200 kHz of bandwidth, so it’s not exactly lab quality. The big attractions for [David] were the CH32F103 microcontroller and the prominent debug port inside, not to mention the large color LCD panel.

[David]’s attack began with the debug port and case mods to allow access, but quickly ground to a halt when he accidentally erased the original firmware. But no matter — tracing out the pins is always an option. [David] made that easier by overlaying large photos of both sides of the board, which let him figure out which buttons went to which pins, and mapping for the display’s parallel interface. He didn’t mess with any of the analog stuff except to create a quick “Hello, oscilloscope!” program to output a square wave to the calibration pin. He did, however, create a display driver and port a game of breakout to the scope — video after the hop.

We’ve been seeing a lot of buzz around the CH32xx MCUs lately; seeing it start to show up in retail products is perhaps a leading indicator of where the cheap RISC chips are headed. We’ve seen a few interesting hacks with them, but we’ve also heard tell they can be hard to come by. Maybe getting one of these scopes to tear apart can fix that, though.

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Fail Of The Week: Can An Ultrasonic Cleaner Remove Bubbles From Resin?

April 16, 2024 by Donald Papp 23 Comments

[Wendy] asked a very good question. Could putting liquid resin into an ultrasonic cleaner help degas it? Would it help remove bubbles, resulting in a cleaner pour and nicer end product? What we love is that she tried it out and shared her results. She purchased an ultrasonic cleaner and proceeded to mix two batches of clear resin, giving one an ultrasonic treatment and leaving the other untouched as a control.

Sadly, the test piece had considerably *more* surface bubbles than the untreated control, as well as a slight discoloration.

The results were interesting and unexpected. Initially, the resin in the ultrasonic bath showed visible bubbles rising to the surface which seemed promising. Unfortunately, this did not lead to fewer bubbles in the end product.

[Wendy]’s measurements suggest that the main result of putting resin in an ultrasonic bath was an increase in its temperature. Overheating the resin appears to have led to increased off-gassing and bubble formation prior to and during curing, which made for poor end results. The untreated resin by contrast cured with better color and much higher clarity. If you would like to skip directly to the results of the two batches, it’s right here at 9:15 in.

Does this mean it’s a total dead end? Maybe, but even if the initial results weren’t promising, it’s a pretty interesting experiment and we’re delighted to see [Wendy] walk through it. Do you think there’s any way to use the ultrasonic cleaner in a better or different way? If so, let us know in the comments.

This isn’t the first time people have tried to degas epoxy resin by thinking outside the box. We’ve covered a very cheap method that offered surprising results, as well as a way use a modified paint tank in lieu of purpose-made hardware.

Plasma Cutter On The Cheap Reviewed

April 15, 2024 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you have a well-equipped shop, it isn’t unusual to have a welder. Stick welders have become a commodity and even some that use shield gas are cheap if you don’t count buying the bottle of gas. But plasma cutters are still a bit pricey. Can you get one from China for under $300? Yes. Do you want one that cheap? [Metal Massacre Fab Shop] answers that question in the video below.

First impressions count, and having plasma misspelled on the unit (plasme) isn’t promising. The instructions were unclear, and some of the fittings didn’t make him happy, so he replaced them with some he had on hand. He also added some pipe tape to stop any leaking.

The first test was a piece of quarter-inch steel at 35 amps. The machine itself is rated to 50 amps. Sparks ensued, and with a little boost in amperage, it made a fair-looking cut. At 50 amps, it was time to try a thicker workpiece. It made the cut, although it wasn’t beautiful. The leaking regulator and the fact that he can’t run the compressor simultaneously as the cutter didn’t help.

From the look of it, for light duty, this would be workable with a little practice and maybe some new fittings. Unsurprisingly, it probably isn’t as capable as a professional unit. Still could be very handy to have.

It is possible to convert a welder into a plasma cutter. A handheld unit like this probably won’t benefit from a Sharpie.

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Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring

April 15, 2024 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

Last time, we looked into using a logic analyzer to decode SPI signals of LCD displays, which can help us reuse LCD screens from proprietary systems, or port LCD driver code from one platform to another! If you are to do that, however, you might find a bottleneck – typically, you need to capture a whole bunch of data and then go through it, comparing bytes one by one, which is quite slow. If you have tinkered with Pulseview, you probably have already found an option to export decoded data – all you need to do is right-click on the decoder output and you’ll be presented with a bunch of options to export it. Here’s what you will find:

2521888-2521888 I²C: Address/data: Start 2521896-2521947 I²C: Address/data: Address write: 22 2521947-2521954 I²C: Address/data: Write 2521955-2521962 I²C: Address/data: ACK 2521962-2522020 I²C: Address/data: Data write: 01 2522021-2522028 I²C: Address/data: ACK 2522030-2522030 I²C: Address/data: Start repeat 2522038-2522089 I²C: Address/data: Address read: 22 2522089-2522096 I²C: Address/data: Read 2522096-2522103 I²C: Address/data: ACK 2522104-2522162 I²C: Address/data: Data read: 91 2522162-2522169 I²C: Address/data: NACK 2522172-2522172 I²C: Address/data: Stop

Whether on the screen or in an exported file, the decoder output is not terribly readable – depending on the kind of interface you’re sniffing, be it I2C, UART or SPI, you will get five to ten lines of decoder output for every byte transferred. If you’re getting large amounts of data from your logic analyzer and you want to actually understand what’s happening, this quickly will become a problem – not to mention that scrolling through the Pulseview window is not a comfortable experience.

The above output could look like this: 0x22: read 0x01 ( DEV_ID) = 0x91 (0b10010001). Yet, it doesn’t, and I want to show you how to correct this injustice. Today, we supercharge Pulseview with a few external scripts, and I’ll show you how to transfer large amounts of Sigrok decoder output data into beautiful human-readable transaction printouts. While we’re at it, let’s also check out commandline sigrok, avoiding the Pulseview UI altogether – with sigrok-cli, you can easily create a lightweight program that runs in the background and saves all captured data into a text file, or shows it on a screen in realtime! Continue reading “Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring” →

Waveform Generator Teardown Is Nearly Empty

April 15, 2024 by Al Williams 26 Comments

We always enjoy [Kerry Wong]’s insightful teardowns, and recently, he opened up a UTG1042X arbitrary waveform generator. Getting inside was a bit of a challenge since there were no visible screws. Turns out, they were under some stickers. We always dislike that because it is very difficult to get the unit to go back together.

Once open, the case reveals it is almost completely empty. The back panel has a power supply, and the front panel has all the working circuitry. The box seems to be for holding the foot and preventing the device from getting lost on your bench.

The power supply is unremarkable. There are a few odd output voltages. The main board is a bit more interesting, especially after removing the heat sink. There are two channels, but the board isn’t laid out, with a lot of segregation between the two channels. That makes sense with the output sections clustered together and the digital section with the CPU, FPGA, and the DAC in close proximity.

The other side of the board connects to a very simple display board. It would be interesting to compare this to a circa-1980s AWG, which would have been far more complicated.

Making a waveform generator with a microprocessor and a DAC isn’t hard. The hard part is the output stages and maximizing the operating speed.

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No Lathe? Build Your Own

April 12, 2024 by Al Williams 16 Comments

If you need to make round things, you probably need a lathe. Can you build one as nice as one you can buy? Probably not. But can you build one that will work and allow you to do more things than having no lathe at all? [Mikeandmertle] say absolutely! You can see the contraption in operation in the video below.

The build is decidedly functional-looking and only requires a few parts. Most of the components are unremarkable, save for a threaded bar, a metal pipe, some bearings, and a few threaded inserts. Well, there’s also a drill chuck and two lathe centers. Those don’t have to be very expensive, but they may well be the bulk of what you have to spend to make this project.

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