Plasma Etching In A Microwave

Deep inside your smartphone are a handful of interesting miniature electromechanical devices. The accelerometer is a MEMS device, and was produced with some of the most impressive industrial processes on the planet. Sometimes, these nanoscale devices are produced with plasma etching, which sounds about as cool as it actually is. Once the domain of impossibly expensive industrial processes, you can now plasma etch materials in a microwave.

Of course, making plasma in this way is nothing new. If you cut a grape in half and plop it in a microwave, some really cool stuff happens. This is just the 6th grade science class demonstration of what a plasma is, and really it’s only a few dissociated water, oxygen, and nitrogen molecules poofing in a microwave. To do something useful with this plasma, you need a slightly more controlled environment.

The researchers behind this paper used a small flask with an evacuated atmosphere (about 300 mTorr) placed into a microwave for a few seconds. The experiments consisted of reducing graphene oxide to graphene, with the successful production of small squares of graphene bonded to PET film. Other experiments changed the optical properties of a zinc oxide film deposited onto a glass microscope slide and changing a PDMS film from being hydroscopic to hydrophobic.

While the results speak for themselves — you can use a microwave to generate plasma, and that plasma can change the properties of any exposed material — this is far from a real industrial process. That said, it’s good enough for an experiment and another neat technique in the home lab’s bag of tricks.

The Forgotten Art Of Riveted Structures

If you are in the habit of seeking out abandoned railways, you may have stood in the shadow of more than one Victorian iron bridge. Massive in construction, these structures have proved to be extremely robust, with many of them still in excellent condition even after years of neglect.

A handsome riveted railway bridge, over the River Avon near Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.
A handsome riveted railway bridge, over the River Avon near Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.

When you examine them closely, an immediate difference emerges between them and any modern counterparts, unlike almost all similar metalwork created today they contain no welded joints. Arc welders like reliable electrical supplies were many decades away when they were constructed, so instead they are held together with hundreds of massive rivets. They would have been prefabricated in sections and transported to the site, where they would have been assembled by a riveting gang with a portable forge.

 

So for an audience in 2018, what is a rivet? If you’ve immediately thought of a pop rivet then it shares the function of joining two sheets of material by pulling them tightly together, but differs completely in its construction. These rivets start life as pieces of steel bar formed into pins with one end formed into a mushroom-style dome, probably in a hot drop-forging process.

A rivet is heated to red-hot, then placed through pre-aligned holes in the sheets to be joined, and its straight end is hammered to a mushroom shape to match the domed end. The rivet then cools down and contracts, putting it under tension and drawing the two sheets together very tightly. Tightly enough in fact that it can form a seal against water or high-pressure steam, as shown by iron rivets being used in the construction of ships, or high-pressure boilers. How is this possible? Let’s take a look!

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Restoring 100-year-old vice

Restoring A 100 Year Old Vice To Pristine Condition

We love our vices. They hold pipes for us to saw away at, wood while we carve, and circuit boards so that we can solder on components. So we keep them in shape by cleaning and greasing them every now and then, [MakeEverything] went even further. He found a 100-year-old vice that was in very rough shape and which was going to be thrown out and did a beautiful restoration job on it.

It was actually worse than in rough shape. At some point, one of the jaws had been replaced by welding on a piece of rebar where the jaw would normally go. So he made entirely new jaws from solid brass as well as the pins to hold them firmly in place. We applaud his attention to detail. After removing all the old paint and corrosion, he painted it with a “hammered” spray paint to give it a nice hammered look. Though when he made the raised letters stand out by applying gold paint to them using an oil-based paint marker, we felt that was just showing off. The result is almost too gorgeous to use, but he assures us he will use it. You can see his process, as well as have a good look at the newly revived vice in the video below.

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Bench Power Supply Packs A Lot Into A DIN-Rail Package

We’re not sure why we’ve got a thing for DIN-rail mounted projects, but we do. Perhaps it’s because we’ve seen so many cool industrial control cabinets, or maybe the forced neatness of DIN-mounted components resonates on some deep level. Whatever it is, if it’s DIN-rail mounted, chances are good that we’ll like it.

Take this DIN-mounted bench power supply, for instance. On the face of it, [TD-er]’s project is yet another bench supply built around those ubiquitous DPS switching power supply modules, the ones with the colorful displays. Simply throwing one of those in a DIN-mount enclosure isn’t much to write home about, but there’s more to this project than that. [TD-er] needed some fixed voltages in addition to the adjustable output, so a multi-voltage DC-DC converter board was included inside the case as well. The supply has 3.3, 5, and 12 volt fixed outputs along with the adjustable supply, and thanks to an enclosed Bluetooth module, the whole thing can be controlled from his phone. Plus it fits nicely in a compact work area, which is a nice feature.

We haven’t seen a lot of DIN-rail love around these pages — just this recent rotary phase converter with very tidy DIN-mounted controls. That’s a shame, we’d love to see more.

Every Shop Needs A Giant Wooden Utility Knife

Generally speaking, we don’t cover that many woodworking projects here at Hackaday. What’s the point? It’s bad enough that wood reminds us of the outside world, but it hardly ever blinks, and forget about connecting it to Wi-Fi. This doesn’t seem to bother you fine readers, so we have to assume most of you feel the same way. But while we might not always “get” large woodworking projects around these parts, we’re quite familiar with the obsession dedication required to work on a project for no other reason than to say you managed to pull it off.

On that note, we present the latest creation of [Paul Jackman], a supersized replica of a Stanley utility knife made entirely out of wood. All wooden except for the blade anyway, which is cut from 1/8″ thick knife steel. That’s right, this gigantic utility knife is fully functional. Not that we would recommend opening too many boxes with it, as you’re likely to open up an artery if this monster slips.

We can’t imagine there are going to be many others duplicating this project, but regardless [Paul] has done a phenomenal job documenting every step of the build on his site. From cutting the rough shape out on his bandsaw to doing all painstaking detail work, everything is clearly photographed and described. After the break there’s even a complete build video.

The most interesting part has to be all of the little internal mechanisms, each one carefully reproduced at perfect scale from different woods depending on the requirements of the component. For example [Paul] mentions he choose white oak for the spring due to its flexibility. Even the screw to hold the knife closed was made out of a block of wood on the lathe.

For whatever reason, people seem to enjoy building scaled up replicas of things. We’ve seen everything from LEGO pieces to gold bars get the jumbo treatment. We suppose it’s easier than the alternative: building very tiny versions of big things.

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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]