Generating G-code With Common Lisp

February 1, 2009 by Eliot 10 Comments

gcode

Ruin & Wesen are a two person shop creating specialized music gear. As part of their recent MIDI Command development, they got into case manufacturing. They purchased a mini CNC mill to cut the aluminum cases. Unhappy with the software options provide [Wesen] decided to write his own G-code generator. G-code is part of the numerical control used to command CNC machines. He implemented his interpreter using the language he’s most familiar with: Common Lisp (not surprising if you notice the website’s backend). The post covers the design philosophy used and some of the problems that came up. We look forward to future releases since the interpreter can generate milling code using processing.org sketches and cut PCBs directly from Eagle.

You may remember Ruin & Wesen from when they shared their Eagle layout videos.

[Thanks fbz]

Surface Mount Soldering In Depth

January 31, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

smd

[doctek] wants to help ease any fear you may have of surface mount design. He has written this extremely in depth explanation of how to design and build an LED driver composed of surface mount parts. While there has been plenty of surface mount instruction floating around for a while, he feels that they skimp on the details, especially when it comes to really tiny parts who’s pads are unreachable with a soldering iron. The method he uses is the “hot plate” method we’ve seen before. There’s enough information to build your own tiny LED driver with pulse width modulation, as well as tons of references to explain how and why he does things the way he does. Great job [doctek].

If you’re going to be doing a lot of soldering, you should check out our soldering station how to.

AVR Light Controller

January 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

halogen

[Matthias] sent us this project where he builds an AVR light controller. He had a halogen bike light laying around, but was unsatisfied with its lead-acid battery. He wanted to use a lithium-polymer battery but found that they can’t be used directly with halogen lamps due to their voltage. His produced 8.5 volts at full charge and can’t be discharged to below 5 volts. He new a power controller would be necessary to try to flatten that out for his lamp, which needed to stay between 6-12 volts.

He used an ATtiny45 doing PWM to change the voltage. Some other cool features he added were the high and low settings and an LED status light for warnings. You can find pictures, schematics and source code on his page as well as tons of great information. Great job [Matthias].

LED Push Buttons

January 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

[pros] has come up with a very elegant way of making lighted buttons (translated). Using a bunch of small push buttons harvested from old CD players, he rigged this unique way of mounting LEDs. Each LED has two buttons under it. They are wired in parallel, so if either of them is pushed, the button works. The LED isn’t actually soldered where it passes through the board. The anode and cathode are bent around and soldered to allow the LED a little bit of travel. There’s a good picture of how he did this on the site. The rest of the details might be hard to decipher though, it looks to be in dutch.

[thanks Tom]

Wireless Bootloading

January 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

[vimeo= 2976417]

Tired of having to physically connect to your microprocessor to upload new code? Just do it over a wireless connection. [Nathan] takes us through the process of setting up a wireless bootloader for the ATmega168. He is using the XBee base and remote modules for the wireless communication. While people have been doing wireless bootloading with the Arduino already, [Nathan] found that it was common for them to have timeout issues. His remedy was to make his own custom one that is much faster. He’s asking for help though. At this point it is tested and working, but he needs someone with more programming knowledge to help him make it “drop-in” compatible with the Arduino IDE.

Don’t forget to submit projects to our tip line.

5 Cent Tilt Sensor

January 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

5cent

This is a 5 cent tilt sensor. We know it cost more than 5 cents, but it is in fact a tilt sensor that utilizes a 5 cent coin. We’ve all done quick hacks to make quick sensors for various projects. We’ve seen tons of them, from stealing springs out of pens and shoving a resistor through them for flexible contact switches, to tin foil touch sensors. This one is new to us though. The design is fairly simple, you insert 4 bits of wire to serve as contacts and the coin will make contact with only two at a time. It isn’t analog, it isn’t extremely precise, but it is super quick and easy. Thanks for sharing [ix].

Thermosonic Wedge Bonding

January 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

hot

In the past, if we’ve been doing smd soldering, we’ve used pretty basic hot plates. This project takes that idea a bit further. Since [kc6qhp] will be using parts that aren’t conducive to soldering, he has to use wire bonding. After locating a fairly cheap wire bonding machine and microscope, he built the heated stage to fit perfectly with his other tools. You’ll notice that he has machined a lip around the heat plate for small custom C-clamps as well as made it adjustable height. Very nice work [kc6qhp].