Giving A CNC Knitting Machine A New Brain

March 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

We’re all about big machines that build things for us – laser cutters, CNC mills, and 3D printers are the machines de rigueur for Hackaday. Too often we overlook the softer sides of fabrication that include textiles and knitting. [varvara] and [mar] are doing their best to bring us the softer side of things with their modification of a Brother knitting machine. They call their build Knitic, and it’s a great way to knit with computer control.

Instead of previous Brother knitting machine hacks we’ve seen, Knitic doesn’t bother with emulating the keypad or controlling the microprocessor already there; this build dispenses with the Brother brain and controls the solenoids and switches of the knitting machine directly with the help of an Arduino and a home-etched shield.

It’s not quite an automated knitting machine – someone still has to run the shuttle across the machine – but the patterns are controlled via a Processing app available on the Knitic github. You can check out [Varvara]’s demo of Kinitic after the break.

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Rigol WFM Viewer Ported For Non-Windows Users

March 25, 2013 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

rigol-wfm-parser-for-linux

[Matthias Blaicher] may think this isn’t a big deal when it comes to the amount of work he put into the hack. But for us, anything that extends the functionality of the versatile yet affordable Rigol DS1052E is a win. In this case he’s taken a previous hack and made it work for more people by extending the functionality of the WFM file format viewer.

[Dexter2048] pulled off the original hack which allows this oscilloscope to be used as a spectrum analyzer. [Matthias] didn’t want the tool to be limited to running only on Windows systems so he got to work. This isn’t quite as easy as sounds because the only part of the original code that was released is the parser itself. [Matthias] had to build everything up from that starting point. His software uses standard Python to parse the WFM file and reformat the data. The features included in the current version allow you to export data as a CSV file and even plot the waveform and FFT as seen above.

A Tiny Custom Table Saw

March 25, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

saw

If you’re working with small parts, even the smallest table saw available at Home Depot or Lowes is generally overkill. For cutting up small pieces of wood, metal, and copper-clad board, a micro table saw is a great investment. They’re actually pretty inexpensive, but why just buy one when you can make one that is better than any model on the market?

The bed is constructed out of 1/4″ aluminum plate with a 1/15 horsepower motor bolted to the underside. The fence clamps on to the table with a pair of delrin brackets, while the angle guide is made of delrin and a brass bar that fits into a slot in the table.

The actual blades came from a Proxxon micro table saw (a very good brand from our experience), but comparing this homemade saw to the commercial one provides a few surprises: The Proxxon has a more powerful motor, but the homebrew version has four times the cutting capacity. You can check out this saw cutting a 1/4″ aluminum bar in the video after the break.

Thanks [Hubert] for sending this one in.

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Fixing Tools With 3D Printers

March 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff No comments

saw

Over at the Manchester Hackerspace, [Bob] has been busy getting a 30-year-old bandsaw up and running. The saw worked great, but it was missing a fence, making straight cuts difficult to say the least. The solution, of course, was to build a new fence, and [Bob] decided to capitalize on his hackerspace’s workshop by making a new fence with a 3d printer.

[Bob] began by taking careful measurements of the saw’s table and the channel running down the length of it. These measurements were plugged into OpenSCAD, and after a few iterations, [Bob] had an extremely well-fitting profile a fence could be attached to.

With the profile down, [Bob] created a new part in OpenSCAD that would hold an aluminum angle piece. This was attached to the plastic parts with screws, and the entire assembly clamps down to the saw with the help of a few 5mm bolts. For a machine that is usually dedicated to making 3D printer parts and Yoda heads, [Bob] did a great job making good use of his 3D printer.

Printed Vacuum Pump Muffler Quiets The Lab

March 21, 2013 by Mike Szczys 46 Comments

printed-vacuum-pump-muffler

[Joel] made a brilliant improvement to his shop. If you think about it, most folks would hear a loud vacuum pump and either tolerate it or put in some ear plugs. But [Joel] heard a loud vacuum pump and thought: hey, I can fix that! His solution was to design and print his own muffler.

He did a bit of research on the topic and found that design complexity runs the gamut based on the application. For instance, you don’t want to affect the airflow of a vehicle’s exhaust too much or you will take a horsepower (and efficiency) hit for it. In this case the vacuum pump making all the noise has a relatively low airflow so that is not a concern. What he ended up doing is designing a baffle that will help cushion the vibrations in the airy by piping it through a maze of channels. The end result drops from about 92 dB to 82 dB. That might not seem like much, but decibel measurements aren’t linear so it ends up having a great effect. Hear for yourself in the video after the break.

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Testing Caps With A DIY ESR Meter

March 16, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

There’s a problem with collecting old tube amps and vintage electronics – eventually the capacitors in these machines will die. It’s not an issue of a capacitor plague that causes new electronics to die after a few years; with time, just about every capacitor will dry out, rendering antique electronics defective. The solution to getting old gear up and running is replacing the capacitors, but how do you know which ones are good and which are bad? With [Paulo]’s DIY ESR meter, of course.

An ideal capacitor has a zero equivalent series resistance, and failure of a capacitor can be seen as an increase in its ESR. Commercial ESR meters are relatively cheap, but [Paulo] was able to build one out of a 555 chip, a small transformer, and a few other miscellaneous components.

The entire circuit is built on stripboard, and if you’re lucky enough to find the right parts in your random parts bin, you should be able to build this ESR meter with components just laying around.

EEPROM Hack Unlocks Crippled Features In Agilent Multimeter And LCR Meter

March 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

u1241a-agilent-hack

[Gnif] was doing what any good hacker does… poking around the insides of one of his tools to see how it works. While in there, he discovered that an EEPROM hack could make the Agilent U1241A function like the U1242A.

If you’re into this kind of thing the Rigol 1052e hack should have already popped to mind. That was a firmware crippled device that, when unlocked, made the cheaper model behave the same ways as it’s $400 more expensive sibling. This doesn’t have quite the same impact, as the price difference is somewhere between $20-$100. Still, this stuff is just cool, right?

A few posts down in the thread linked above [Gnif] shares the story of how he found the hack. After shorting the i2c lines of the EEPROM while powering up the meter he was able to see that the device initializes a lot of its values to 0xFF when it can’t find the stored data. The next step was to use an STM32 board to dump the EEPROM contents. With the backup file stored safely he started changing values and reflashing the chip. Through this process he discovered that switching one byte from 0x01 to 0x02 enabled the higher model’s features. It also works for upgrading the U1732C to the U1733C feature set.