Building A Foundry In Your Backyard

June 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

[th3BadWolf] has been wanting to build a foundry for some time now. Done right, it’s a very neat tool; it’s fairly easy to do aluminum castings, and if you’re clever enough a foundry can lead to building large machine tools such as a lathe or a mill. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, so [BadWolf] is designing his foundry to melt 150 pounds of aluminum every 45 minutes.

The build began with a humble oil barrel. [th3BadWolf] cut the top off of the barrel and began lining the inside of the barrel with a ceramic blanket and refractory bricks. To hold this somewhat precarious assemblage of blanket and brick together, [BadWolf] is holding everything together with 3000° F cement.

The body of the furnace is nearly complete, but [BadWolf] still has to drill a few holes for the burner system. He’s going to start each burn with Propane, then move over to engine oil when the furnace gets hot enough. Truly an awesome project, and we can’t wait to see the results.

Talking Resistor Calculator Speaks Component Values

June 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

If there’s one thing that will surely blind us, its reading resistor color bands. It doesn’t help that red looks exactly like orange, brown and black are indistinguishable, and different component manufacturers – for some reason – don’t use identical paints for coding their resistors. [Jeff] over at Gadget Gangster has been having the same problem, so he built a talking resistor calculator to speak resistor values to him.

The electronics part of the build is extremely simple with just an MCP3208 ADC providing 12 bits of resolution. The software side is where this project really shines. [Jeff] used a Gadget Gangster QuickStart board housing a Parallax Propeller. With 8 cores running in parallel the Propeller is more than enough to run [Phil Pilgrim]’s software speech synthesizer. When a resistor is connected to the two alligator leads, the Propeller goes through a lookup table and finds a resistor value matching the number coming from the ADC. From there, it’s just sending a string of phonetic text to the speech synthesizer object.

Even though text-to-speech chips have been around for decades now, [Jeff] chose to build his speech synthesis tool with software. It may just be a testament to the power in the Propeller microcontroller, but anything that keeps us from squinting at resistor color bands is alright by us.

Book Scanner Kits Now Available

June 4, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

[Daniel Reetz] wants you to be able to scan books. This has been a goal of his for quite some time, and now he’s bringing a kit into play. We’ve always liked book scanners here, many of us have extensive libraries or even peculiar selections we would like to share. [Daniel] is starting off with a short run of these scanners. Once all the bugs are worked out, there should be plenty available for everyone. The kit includes the frame, LED lighting, bicycle levers, and cables. You have to add glass, books, and a camera.

Of course, if you still want to design and build your own, there are TONS of variations available in the forums at DIYbookscanner.org.

[via Adafruit]

Continue reading “Book Scanner Kits Now Available” →

Copying Complex Objects In Wood

June 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

[Matthias], eminent woodworker he is, designed and built an awesome machine to make copies of just about any object imaginable. With a few scrap 2x4s, and a few bolts, screws, and skateboard bearings, you too can copy anything into a solid block of wood.

The theory of operations for [Matthias]’ copy carver is mounting a router and ‘follower’ to the same piece of wood. Put that on an XY table with a rotation axis, and just about any object can be copied in wood or plastic. It’s not too dissimilar to a Dulplicarver, a routing machine meant to copy everything from gun stocks to guitar and violin bodies.

So far, [Matthias] has copied a rotary phone and a sadly non-functional wrench. It’s the perfect follow-up for [Matthias]’ 3 axis pantograph router that can copy and enlarge any random flat object you can throw at it.

via Make

Piping Micrometer Data To A VGA

June 3, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

[sspence] found himself in need of a way to push the data from his digital micrometer to a VGA panel for easy display. His micrometer had a data port, so he figured he could plug it into a micro controller and have that push data to a VGA. The micrometer spits out a 52 character data stream in reverse order, so he had to reassemble it in the correct order in software. After a bit of reverse engineering the funky data stream, he had an Arduino pulling the serial data. All that was left was the addition of a VGA shield for output.

He wanted to extend this a bit further though, so he added a foot switch and finger switch to allow for taking multiple measurements and display an average. In the end, he was left with a nice huge display for his micrometer that gave him exactly what he wanted.

We expect that someone will ask why he chose to use an arduino and a shield instead of designing a custom circuit with less components and cost. Our guess would be that his goal was to “generate bin numbers for gear sets” and he just needed an upgraded tool. His goal wasn’t to research design and implement the most efficient circuit. That being said, if anyone feels like designing a smaller package for this, feel free to share with the rest of us!

PCB Manufacturing Tutorial

June 2, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

There comes a time in every maker’s career where solderless breadboards won’t do, perfboard becomes annoying, and deadbug is impossible. The solution is to manufacture a PCB, but there’s a learning curve. After learning a few tricks from [Scott]’s awesome DIY PCB guide, it’s easy to make your own printed circuit boards.

There are a few basic steps to making a PCB. First is designing the board in Eagle or KiCad. The next step, putting the design into copper, has a lot of techniques to choose from. Photo transfer, direct printing, and CNC milling have huge benefits, but by far the most common means hobbyists produce boards is with toner transfer using a laminator.

Unless you’re doing SMD-only circuits, a drill is required. Most people can get away with a Dremel or other rotary tool, but Hackaday has a favorite drill press that is perfect for drilling holes in FR-4. In part two of [Scott]’s tutorial, he goes over solder masks, silk screens before jumping into vias. These small bits of copper conducting electricity through a circuit board are extremely hard for the garage-bound builder to achieve on their own, but there are a few solutions – copper rivets (anyone have a US source for these?) and copper foil can be used, but sometimes the most effective solution is just hitting the board with a lot of solder and heat.

Thanks [Upgrayd] for the title pic.

On-the-go Tool Wallet

May 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Whether you’re off to the local Hackerspace, or headed to a friend’s house to lend a hand with the latest project it’s nice to have your favorite tools in a handy package. [Mário Saleiro] decided to take the concept one step further than a toolbox by making his own zipper wallet with cutouts for his favorite tools.

The enclosure is a CD wallet, but who carries those plastic discs around with them anymore? After removing the CD sleeves [Mário] positioned his tools — in this case a pen, angle cutters, and pliers — on one side of the case to make a template. The tracings were then used to cut out pieces from an exercise carpet (we think this is like a rubber yoga mat). The square was glued to the side of the wallet, and some elastic band was sewn in to hold them in place. On the other side is a small components bin, and a little box to hold a tiny multimeter.

[Thanks Nuno]