PID SMD Reflow Hot Plate

January 16, 2009 by Eliot 15 Comments

[mightyohm] put together a nice piece of lab kit. It’s a PID controlled hot plate. The plate is capable of reaching 500F, hot enough to do SMD reflow soldering. The large chunk of metal has a hole drilled through the center to contain a cartridge heater. A thermocouple is used to monitor the temperature of the plate. Ceramic standoffs separate the plate from the rest of the device, but he still needs to come up with a way to stop the radiant heating. The control box houses the surplus PID controller along with the power switch and solid state relay (SSR).

Tape Measure Generator

January 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

generator

[Dr. West] wanted to do his small part to help save the planet. He has built a small generator from a stepper motor and a tape measure. The tape part of the tape measure was replaced with some cord. The spring loading mechanism makes the string re-wind automatically, which is nice. He shows it attached to one leg, with the string tied to the other, generating power while he walks. This is cumbersome, but seems fairly effective. You can see him waking around in a video after the break. Would this benefit from a flywheel or friction drive to keep the motor spinning after each pull? How can he rig it to feed off of the motion of only one leg to avoid tripping hazards?

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Oomlout’s Guide To Kitting

January 14, 2009 by Eliot 14 Comments

oomlout

The team at oomlout has continued to post all the methods they use in their manufacturing process. This time around it’s the kitting process: how they actually packaged 30 identical SERB kits in an efficient fashion. We covered their wire cutting bot before, but they’ve got other dedicated machines like a sticker cutter. The stickers are used to remove all the cut acrylic pieces from the laser cutter as one unit. They’ve got some other tricks like using a scale to count bolt quantities, and an egg timer to keep track of the laser cutting. All of their envelopes are printed using a parallel port inkjet that has been modified to work with any thickness paper.

We love when hackers bother to post this much detail about their process. One of our favorites is [ladyada]’s full rundown of how the Minty Boost was created.

A History Of SparkFun Prototypes

January 13, 2009 by Eliot 3 Comments

sparkfuntoys

If you haven’t checked out SparkFun Electronics’ prototype collection yet, you’re missing out. They unearthed many of their old prototypes and published them to show what kind of mistakes could be made. You’ll see plenty of errors and get hints on what to look for while developing your own hardware. This pairs well with their Design for Manufacture post. Along with the pile of broken board iterations, they also walk through how the company developed. Finally, they specifically cover the individual iterations of the BlueSMiRF.

One of the interesting modules in the gallery that never saw full release was the SparkFun Toys line pictured above. The individual units used the standoffs as the power and data bus. The four posts were arranged so they could only be connected in one orientation: power, ground, TX, and RX. It’s an interesting idea that seems like it might be worth exploring further. SparkFun says that it worked fine, but didn’t feel they had the resources to market it to the intended audience.

DC Gearmotor Teardown

January 10, 2009 by Eliot 15 Comments

dcmotor

The RepRap project has made heavy use of the Solarbotics GM3 Gearmotor as part of their extruders. Unfortunately they’ve proven to be underpowered for the task and the plastic gears could cause future problems. [Zach] decided to investigate some other options. He bought a pile of motors from Kysan to try out. He posted a teardown of one of the motors on Flickr. He found it not only easy to disassemble, but the metal gears were also easy to put back together. Next up is testing it on the machine.

Robot That Shovels Snow Automatically

January 8, 2009 by Strom Carlson 58 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdEf60wcKcs]

Those of you that live in snowier climates will drool over the I-Shovel, a battery powered robot that shovels the snow off your driveway, saving you countless hours of backbreaking labor over the course of a single winter. Its inventors claim that, despite its relatively underpowered motor, it keeps the driveway clear even in heavy snowfall; the trick, apparently, is that the robot constantly monitors the amount of snow on the driveway and springs into action whenever a significant but manageable layer has built up. Unfortunately, the I-Shovel is still a prototype, but with any luck you’ll be able to actually buy one soon. If you’re impatient, of course, you could always try building your own.

[via Toolmonger]

Make A Plasma Cutter

January 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

plasma

For those unfortunate few of you who don’t already have a plasma cutter sitting around, [jandgse812] is here to help. He walks you through the process of building your own plasma cutter from scratch. Adding up the list of parts brings the total project to roughly $300. He has included visual diagrams for all the wiring as well as specific part numbers and where to get them. Be careful, this is potentially very dangerous, but also very cool. You may need to get a copy of the mission impossible theme to play whenever you use it. At least, that’s what [jandgse812] recommends. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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