Human Powered Emergency Cell Phone Charger

March 7, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 36 Comments

Emergency-human-powered-cell-phone-charger

Power outage? For the average citizen it’s very easy to take electricity for granted. Go a few hours or more without it though, and you’ll suddenly be reminded just what a luxury it is. During an emergency situation, sometimes you have to come up with alternative methods to get the job done. This human powered cell phone charger is a great example.

Using just a few ordinary around the house items, [The King of Random] turned a cordless electric drill into a human powered electrical generator. If the drill is run in reverse and cranked by hand, the generated energy can be transferred through the battery terminals to a connected device. So, he cut a USB charger cable in half and wired it up to the terminals to be able to charge his cell phone. Some yarn, a salad fork, a mixing beater, a scrap 2″x4″, some aluminum foil, and scotch tape were the only other materials he used. Using this technique, a totally dead phone battery was charged in around 3 hours.

Remember that this method is only intended to be used in an emergency, not as every day practice. Using these methods could potentially overheat or damage your gear, so be careful.

Check out the MacGyver worthy video tutorial after the break.

[via Neatorama]

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Bending Materials With A Simple Hot Wire Forming Tool

February 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

bending-with-a-hot-wire-former

Regular reader [RoadWarrior222] has watched as we’ve featured several projects that show how to bend acrylic. But so far he hasn’t seen us cover his favorite technique developed by [Dale A. Heatherington] which uses a hot wire forming tool to make precise bends. The tool is simple to use plus it’s cheap and easy to build. It’s a great choice if you don’t have a heat gun, and it may be possible to make cleaner bends than other techniques.

The business end of the bending tool is the red-hot Nichrome wire running through the aluminum channel. That channel is used to protect the MDF and act as a spacer so that the wire doesn’t touch the acrylic. On the near side the wire is anchored with a screw, but on the far end it is kept taught by including a spring. The wire heats up as it is connected to a 12V battery, but since the heating is cause by the wire’s resistance it will only get red-hot in between the alligator clips providing power. To make sure your bends will be perpendicular to the edge of the acrylic there’s an aluminum guide strip on one side of the MDF platform.

You can salvage Nichrome wire from an old hair dryer. If you have any left over it’s great for other projects like building a CNC hot-wire cutter.

Taking The Pain Out Of Making Custom Eagle Parts

February 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

eagle

Cadsoft’s Eagle is a great tool for the independent maker. It’s a relatively easy to use PCB layout program with a ton of part libraries available for just about any project. If you’re using a part this isn’t included in these libraries, though, creating them by hand is a pain. [Dave] sent in a project he’s been working on that makes parts for Eagle with a Perl script, allowing for easy creation of custom parts that aren’t included in any library.

One thing that’s really convenient for custom Eagle parts is that most components are DIPs or some sort of leaded SMD component. [Dave]’s script takes the dimensional data from any chip’s datasheet and creates a custom outline for each part. The inputs and outputs can also be ripped directly from the datasheet and assigned to the footprint, making for a relatively automated process that creates custom parts in Eagle. Now for someone to use this script with a little OCR to make a ‘create Eagle part from PDF’ app…

Modifying A Printer For PCB Fabbing

February 25, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

ohgodmyeyes

The migraine-inducing image above is the product of [Rupert Hirst]’s attempts at home PCB fabrication. He’s using the toner transfer method – printing a circuit on a piece of transparency sheet with a laser printer, setting it on a piece of copper clad board, and sending the whole assembly through a laminator. It’s a fairly straightforward process, but if you can’t run a transparency sheet through a printer multiple times your etch resist won’t hold up too well. Of course the transparency sheet must be aligned each time it goes through the printer, so [Rupert] came up with a modification that ensures laser toner goes only where it’s supposed to.

[Rupert] picked up a Samsung ML-2165W laser printer for his PCB fab shop, but printing the same image multiple times on the same transparency sheet would result in unusable masks. This problem was fixed with a few plastic shims used to hang door frames and a card stock tray that ensures the transparency sheet goes through the printer the same way every time.

We saw [Rupert]’s homebrew PCB fabrication process a few weeks ago when he sent in his six channel floppy drive MIDI synth. In his build video, [Rupert] demonstrated what is possibly the cleanest toner transfer PCB we’ve seen to date. You can check out his etching process in the video after the break.

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Panelizing PCBs In Eagle

February 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

final_panel

A lot of the board houses out there including Seeed and ITead studios have a fixed size for circuit boards before the price goes up. A one-inch square board costs the same as a much larger 5cm x 5cm board, making panelized PCBs a great way to get more boards for the same amount of money. Trying to panelize a board in Eagle with copy and paste is a chore without the right tools, though, so we’re happy to see a great panelization tutorial from [Victor].

To panelize one of his boards for a PCB order, [Victor] used one of Eagle’s User Language Programs to duplicate the part names on the additional boards. After that, it was a simple matter of running a CAM job to generate the necessary Gerber files.

Of course once the boards arrive, you’ll have to cut them apart from each other. This can be done with everything from a Dremel to a hack saw to a metal shear, but we’re wondering what other Hackaday readers are using to cut up PCBs. Leave a note in the comments with your preferred method of depanelization.

Making Eagle Work With Circuits.io

February 21, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Ever so slowly, we’re inching towards a world of Internet-based electronic design tools. The state of these tools, including Upverter and other cloud-based solutions, hasn’t been all that great until now; with any new piece of schematic capture and PCB layout software, the libraries will be woefully inadequate in the beginning. This is about to change, because circuits.io is now allowing Eagle libraries to be imported.

As you may well be aware, Eagle is the de facto standard for homebrew and hobbyist schematic capture and board layout software. Even though Eagle isn’t open source and is limited to rather small PCBs with the free version, somehow Eagle has retained its popularity, most likely due to the huge number of component libraries available.

By allowing users and designers to import Eagle libraries, the folks at circuits.io are capitalizing on a huge amount of work done by designers and engineers over the years in creating custom Eagle parts for just about every component imaginable. It’s a great accomplishment for the circuits.io team and a boon for anyone wanting to move their PCB design tools over to the cloud.

The Perils Of Buying A Stereo Microscope Without A Stand

February 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

scope

[Steve] has wanted a stereo microscope in his lab for years now. Since his eyesight is becoming progressively worse, he figured it was time to look around on ebay and see what he could dig up. He ended up buying a very cheap microscope without a stand, figuring he could build one rather easily. Well, the articulated stand was rather easy to put together, but it did take a whole lot of time to build.

The main goal of [Steve]’s project was to have his microscope at the end of an articulated arm. With this setup, he could easily tuck the ‘scope against the back of his workbench when not in use and easily bring it out when necessary. This meant building a custom arm, though, and in the building process [Steve] used just about every machine tool he had at his disposal.

The end result is a fully articulated arm that can be moved to just about any point on his workbench and adjusted up and down for those really weird project. [Steve] says this may be a great introduction to home powder coating, and he really should build a small LED light source, but we’re loving the project so far.

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