Track Everything, Everywhere With An IoT Barcode Scanner

I’ve always considered barcodes to be one of those invisible innovations that profoundly changed the world. What we might recognize as modern barcodes were originally designed as a labor-saving device in the rail and retail industries, but were quickly adopted by factories for automation, hospitals to help prevent medication errors, and a wide variety of other industries to track the movements of goods.

Medication errors in hospitals are serious and scary: enter the humble barcode to save lives. Source: The State and Trends of Barcode, RFID, Biometric and Pharmacy Automation Technologies in US Hospitals

The technology is accessible, since all you really need is a printer to make barcodes. If you’re already printing packaging for a product, it only costs you ink, or perhaps a small sticker. Barcodes are so ubiquitous that we’ve ceased noticing them; as an experiment I took a moment to count all of them on my (cluttered) desk – I found 43 and probably didn’t find them all.

Despite that, I’ve only used them in exactly one project: a consultant and friend of mine asked me to build a reference database out of his fairly extensive library. I had a tablet with a camera in 2011, and used it to scan the ISBN barcodes to a list. That list was used to get the information needed to automatically enter the reference to a simple database, all I had to do was quickly verify that it was correct.

While this saved me a lot of time, I learned that using tablet or smartphone cameras to scan barcodes was actually very cumbersome when you have a lot of them to process. And so I looked into what it takes to hack together a robust barcode system without breaking the bank.

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Failed Tool Turned Exploded Wall Art

Few things hit a hacker or maker harder than when a beloved tool goes to that Big Toolbox In The Sky. It can be hard to trash something that’s been with you through countless repairs and teardowns, made all the worse by the fact most employers don’t recognize “Tool Bereavement” as a valid reason to request time off. Maybe next time one of your trusty pieces of gear gives up the ghost, you can follow the example set by [usuallyplesent] and turn it into a piece of art to hang up on the shop wall.

The shop had gotten years of daily service out of this air powered angle die grinder (not bad for a $14 Harbor Freight tool), and he thought they should immortalize it in their waiting room by turning it into an interesting piece of art. After all, it’s not everyday that some folks see the insides of the sort of tools the more mechanically inclined of us may take for granted.

After taking the grinder apart and cleaning everything up, [usuallyplesent] decided to simplify things a bit by tossing out the assorted tiny components like seals and washers. By just focusing on the larger core components, the exploded view is cleaner and reminds us of a light saber cutaway.

Using a piece of scrap cardboard, [usuallyplesent] made templates for all of the major pieces of the grinder and used that to sketch out the placement and spacing on the white background. He then cut out each shape so the parts would be partially recessed into the board. This gives the effect that each piece was cut down the middle lengthwise but without all the hassle of actually cutting everything down the middle lengthwise.

We’ve previously seen similar displays made out of dissected consumer electronics, but there’s something rather personal about doing the same thing for a well-used tool. If any of our beloved readers feel inspired to enshrine a dead multimeter into a shadow box over the bench, be sure to let us know.

[via /r/justrolledintotheshop]

Hackaday guide to Lathes

Lathe Headstock Alignment: Cutting A Test Bar

Let’s say you’ve recently bought a lathe and set it up in your shop. Maybe you’ve even gone and leveled it like a boss. You’re ready to make chips, right? Well, not so fast. As real machinists will tell you, you can use all the levels and lasers and whatever that you want, but the proof is in the cut. Precision leveling gets your machine in the ballpark (machinists have very small ballparks) but the final step to getting a machine to truly perform well is to cut a test bar. This is a surefire way to eliminate any last traces of twist in the bed.

There are two types of test bars. One is for checking headstock-to-ways alignment, which is what we’re doing here. There’s another type used for checking tailstock alignment, but that’s a subject for another day.

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DSO Nano 3 Review: A 20 MHz Pocket ‘Scope For Not A Lot

The oscilloscope is an essential tool of any electronics bench, and it is also an instrument whose capabilities have expanded exponentially over the decades. Your entirely analogue CRT ‘scope of a few decades ago has now been supplanted by a digital device that takes on many of the functions of both an expensive multimeter a frequency counter, and more. At the top end of the market the sky is the limit when it comes to budget, and the lower end stretches down to low-bandwidth devices based upon commodity microcontrollers for near-pocket-money prices.

These super-cheap ‘scopes are usually sold as kits, and despite their very low bandwidth are surprisingly capable instruments with a useful feature set due to well-written software. I  reviewed a typical model last year, and came away lamenting its lack of an internal battery and a decent quality probe. If only someone would produce an inexpensive miniature ‘scope with a decent bandwidth, decent probe, and an internal battery!

As it happens, I didn’t have long to wait for my wish to be satisfied, with news of the release of the DSO Nano 3. Let’s see what you can do with a portable scope for less than $50.

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Rolling Out A Slick Rotary Phase Converter

Home machinists can often find great deals on used industrial equipment, and many a South Bend lathe or Bridgeport milling machine has followed someone home. Then comes the moment to plug it in, and the new owner discovers that the three-phase plug needed to power the new beast is nowhere to be found in the shop. Thus commences the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

Luckily, [Handmade Extreme] is ahead of the curve in terms of shop power, and built a rotary phase converter to power his machines. Industry generally runs on three-phase AC systems, mainly because three-phase electric motors are so much more efficient and compact than the equivalent single-phase motor. But residential electrical service is either split-phase or, in the UK where [Handmade Extreme] is based, single phase. A rotary phase converter is an electromechanical device that can generate the missing phases – in essence a three-phase motor that can run on one winding and generate the missing phases across the other windings. It needs some supporting control circuitry to do so, such as timers and contactors to switch the winding connections once the motor starts, plus capacitors for motor starting and for balancing the voltage across the phases. The control gear is DIN-rail mounted and neatly wired to a smart-looking control panel. Everything is housed in a sturdy enclosure that’s big enough to serve as a mobile tool cart. It’s a really nice job – watch the whole build in the video below.

If you’re interested in power distribution, we’ve got a primer that covers the basics. And if you’re in the market for machine tools, [Quinn]’s machine tool buyer’s guide will let you decide if a three-phase machine is worth the extra effort.

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How Much Current Does That Thing Draw?

If you ask us how to measure the current draw from something, we’ll break a power lead and put a multimeter in series with the power supply. If that’s not handy, we’ve been known to take the fuse out of the power supply and replace it with the meter. Crude, but effective. But if you have about $8,000 sitting around, you could go grab a Keithley 2460 SourceMeter.

What’s a SourceMeter? Well, as far as we can tell it is a power supply with very accurate built-in current monitoring and a microprocessor that can display lots of interesting statistics and graphs. In all fairness, this looks like a souped up model, but they start at about half the price which is still a lot more than most hacker budgets.

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Measuring Energy Consumption

You would think that measuring a lot of sophisticated AC power parameters such as active and reactive power, RMS voltage and current, and line frequency would be a big job. As it turns out in so many cases, there’s a chip for that. The Microchip MCP39F511 can do all of that, but needs a little help from a few transformers. [Boris Landoni] has a two-part post that not only shows such a meter built with the chip but also has a very detailed description of the operation of the IC and how it works. The set-up takes two transformers. One to step the voltage down and another to measure the current.

Maybe it was just us, but we found the two schematics to be a little confusing. The schematic with two ICs on it is the actual board with the MCP39F511 (the other IC is a voltage regulator). The schematic with the transformer on it appears to have a single IC, U1, but that’s not really the case at all. U1 on that schematic is the entire circuit board from the first schematic. The “IC” pin numbers on the second schematic are the CN2 pins on the first schematic. The CN1 and CN2 on the two schematics are not related at all other than U1 is the actual board from the first schematic.

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