Never Drill In The Wrong Place, With This Camera!

June 26, 2023 by Jenny List 11 Comments

It’s fair to say that one of the biggest advances for the electronic constructor over the last decade or so has been the advent of inexpensive small-order PCB manufacture. That said, there are still plenty who etch their own boards, and for them perhaps the most fiddly part of the process comes in drilling holes accurately. It’s to aid in this task that [John McNelly] has created a camera with a periscope, to give the drill bit perfect alignment with the hole.

The idea is simple enough, an off-the-shelf all-in-one microscope camera points sideways at a mirror allowing it to look upwards. The viewport is placed under the drill and the crosshairs on the microscope are lined up with the end of the drill. Then the board can be placed on top and the pad lined up with the crosshairs, and a perfectly placed hole can be drilled. It’s a beautiful piece of lateral thinking which we like, as it ends that lottery of slightly off-centre holes. You can see it in glorious portrait-mode action in the video below the break.

Oddly this isn’t the first PCB drilling microscope we’ve shown you. but it may well be the more elegant of the two.

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An Open Source Firmware For Cheap Geiger Counters

June 24, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

It is a time-honored tradition: buy some cheap piece of gear and rewrite the firmware to make it work better. [Gissio] managed to do just that for a cheap FS2011 Geiger counter. Apparently, the firmware will also work with some similar Chinese models, too.

The new firmware boasts an improved UI and multiple measurement units, including Sievert, Rem, and counts per minute or second. You can hold the measurement or compute a dose or average rate. The new firmware also has a host of customizations and can accommodate different tubes.

There are, however, two really key features. First, the new firmware offers about 40% more battery life than the stock version. Second, there is now an onboard nuclear chess game! That way, you can enjoy yourself while you are getting irradiated. There are also a few suggested hardware mods that are optional to improve measurements and increase the buzzer volume, among other things.

If you get a Geiger counter, you might be surprised at what things are slightly radioactive. If you don’t need the microcontroller, you can make a workable counter on the cheap.

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Inside Digital Calipers

June 22, 2023 by Al Williams 51 Comments

If you do any kind of machining, 3D printing, or PCB layout, you probably have at least considered buying a pair of calipers. Old-fashioned ones had a dial and were mechanical devices, but lately, digital ones have become quite affordable. We keep meaning to tear a set of ours apart to see what’s inside, but thanks to [learnelectronics], we don’t have to — the video below provides a fascinating look at what’s inside a cheap pair of Harbor Freight calipers.

Honestly, it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to figure out how far down a bar you are. The trick is the caliper has to be super accurate. Oddly enough, the cheap calipers examined use capacitors as a sensing element.

There is a long flexible PCB stuck to the sliding part with conductive pads. The display unit is also a printed circuit and manages the battery, the display, and the other half of the capacitive sensor. If you want a more detailed explanation of how the sensor actually works, check out capsense.com. If you note, the pattern on the sliding part has traces that look like a square wave, and half have a different phase than the other half. These are the sine plates and the cosine plates. A 100 kHz signal flows through the capacitor, and it is possible to read the direction of travel and the amount of travel easily.

The calipers are very accurate, but it’s possible to improve them. A more practical project is to make them communicate with the outside world.

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Rock Tumbler Doubles As Ice Cream Maker

June 19, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

When working with limited space or even with limited funding, finding a tool that can do many things for less space or cost than its separate counterparts is a tempting option. The most common downside is that these tools often can’t perform as well as the single-purpose tools they replace, with the obvious example being a pocket-sized multitool or Swiss Army knife. Even things like combination drill and driver tools, adjustable crescent wrenches, or even a kitchen stand mixer can’t quite perform as well as their dedicated counterparts. So when we find a tool that can do two things equally well, like this rock tumbler that can also make a delicious bowl of ice cream, it’s definitely noteworthy.

The project comes to us by way of [North_Stordeur] whose main goal was to create a delicious bowl of ice cream but was deterred by the cost of purpose-built ice cream makers. Making ice cream isn’t a particularly complex process, though, and [North_Stordeur ] realized that grinding down ice for ice cream shares similarities with tumbling and polishing rocks. Normally, the rocks to be polished are placed in a drum with grit and a liquid, then the drum is placed on the tumbler and spun, which causes the rocks to bounce around inside the drum with the grit and smooth out relatively quickly. Replacing sugar for grit, ice for rocks, and milk for the liquid, the ice eventually is worn all the way down, creating an excellent bowl of ice cream.

Truly, the only downside we could see with a build like this is that the drum in the National Geographic rock tumbler that [North_Stordeur] chose for this project looks like it would only make a single serving at a time. However, with picky eaters around who like their own additions to ice cream, this might be a perk as everyone can make exactly the style they like with their own choice of flavors. It’s an excellent discovery for anyone already grinding and polishing rocks or someone who has already built a DIY ball mill for any number of other uses.

Review: InfiRay P2 Pro Thermal Camera

June 19, 2023 by Tom Nardi 63 Comments

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Hackaday is constantly hounded by companies that want us to review their latest and greatest gadget. After all, getting us to post about their product is cheaper, easier, and arguably more effective than trying to come up with their own ad campaign. But if you’ve been with us for awhile, you’ll also know that in-house reviews aren’t something we actually do very often.

The reason is simple: we’re only interested in devices or products that offer something useful or unique to this community. As such, the vast majority of these offers get ignored. I’ll give you an example. For whatever reason, multiple companies have been trying desperately to send me electric bikes with five-figure price tags this year. But since there’s no obvious way to turn that into useful content for the readers of Hackaday, I’m still stuck pedaling myself around like it’s the 1900s. I kid of course…I haven’t dared to get on a bike in a decade.

So I don’t mind telling you that, when InfiRay contacted me about reviewing their P2 Pro thermal camera, the email very nearly went into the trash. We’ve seen these kind of phone-based thermal cameras before, and it seemed to be more of the same. But after taking a close look at the specs, accessories, and claims laid out in the marketing material, I thought this one might be worth checking out first-hand.

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Thermal Camera Reviewed

June 16, 2023 by Al Williams 13 Comments

We keep thinking about buying a better thermal camera, as there are plenty of advantages. While [VoltLog’s] review of the Topdon TC002 was interesting though, it has a connector for an iPhone. Even if you aren’t on Android, there is a rumor that Apple may (or may be forced to) change connectors which will make it more difficult to connect. Of course, there will be adapters, and you can get a USB C version of the same camera.

Technically, the camera is pretty typical of other recent cameras in this price range, and they probably all use the same image sensor. The camera provides 256×192 images.

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The Crystal (High Voltage) Method

June 13, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

Do high voltages affect the resonant frequency of a crystal? Honestly, we never thought about it, but [Joe] did and decided to risk his analyzer to find out. He started with some decidedly old-school crystals like you might have found in a 1960-era Novice rig. Since the crystal is piezoelectric, he wondered if using a high DC voltage to bend the crystal to move the frequency to create a variable crystal oscillator (sometimes called a VXO).

He created a rig to block DC away from the network analyzer and then feed voltage directly across the crystal. The voltage was from an ESD tester that provides over 1000 volts.

Getting a crystal to change much in frequency is difficult, which is why they are useful. So we weren’t surprised that even at very high voltages, the effect wasn’t very large. It did change the frequency, but it just wasn’t very much.

At one point, it looked like he might have killed the test equipment. There was a time when letting the smoke out of a network analyzer would have been a costly mistake, but these days the cost isn’t that prohibitive. In the end, this experiment probably doesn’t produce any practical results. Still, it is interesting, and we always enjoy watching anything that gives us more intuition about the behavior of circuits or, in this case, circuit elements.

If you need a refresher on crystal oscillators, we can help. There are other ways to modify a crystal’s frequency, of course.

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