A hot glue gun with a revolving stick holder on the back

Quick Reload For Your Glue Sticks: The Glue Gun Six Shooter

October 8, 2022 by Robin Kearey 16 Comments

They say that the two essential items in any toolbox are WD-40 and duct tape: one thing to make stuff move and another thing to stop stuff from moving. Many hackers would argue that the third essential tool should be hot glue — it stops stuff from moving, but still allows you to move it later if you decide that’s better after all. It also works on loads of stuff ranging from macaroni to microcontrollers. And let’s be honest: who hasn’t done the “pew pew” thing with their glue gun?

[Vije Miller] decided to give his hot glue dispenser a bit of a western vibe and built himself a Glue Gun Six Shooter. Like an Old West revolver, it has a rotating cylinder with six rounds of ammunition that lets you continue gluing right away even if your glue stick runs out in the middle of a job. A tiny switch on the side of the barrel starts the reloading sequence: one servo rotates the cylinder, then another one chambers a round. Both are controlled by an Arduino Nano, which is powered by a 5 V USB power supply hidden in the grip.

A red laser below the barrel gives the user a better aim, as well as a bit more “pew pew” ability. The rest of the gun is pretty standard, similar to what we’ve seen before in a teardown. If you’re looking for something more high-tech, check out [Ben Heck]’s ultimate glue gun.

Continue reading “Quick Reload For Your Glue Sticks: The Glue Gun Six Shooter” →

$60 Laser Makes The Cut With New Controller

October 5, 2022 by Al Williams 32 Comments

If you are reading the Lightburn forums, you probably already have a laser cutter of some kind. But, if you are like most of us, you can always be tempted into another “deal.” [Dkj4linux] has a post where he bought a $79 laser engraver (now selling for between $59 and $65, we noticed). Like most of these cheap engravers, the machine takes a proprietary controller with Windows-only software. No surprise that [Dkj4linux] would want to use…um… Linux. The answer? Rip the board out and replace it with an old spare.

The machine looks well constructed, as you can see in the video below. For that price, you get a 3-watt laser head (that is likely way less than that in terms of optical power), and a build area of 220x290mm. The controller was in a small metal enclosure, and it was easy to simply unplug the two axis and the laser control cable.

Continue reading “$60 Laser Makes The Cut With New Controller” →

Power Tool Hack Takes A New Angle On RC Power Plants

October 5, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 25 Comments

For eons, hacker minded people have looked at various items their pile of stuff, came up with an outlandish idea and thought “I wonder if it would work?” Some of us stop there, convincing ourselves that it’s a bad idea that could never work. Others of us such as [Peter Sripol] are well known for not just having those thoughts, but for having the grit to explore them to their impractical limit, such as is shown in the video below the break.

Peter begins by adapting a model airplane propeller to his 9500 RPM battery powered grinder, and then checks thrust with different propellers to see which seemed most efficient. Then [Peter] did what any aerospace engineer out of their right mind would do: He had his brother design the resulting aircraft, which was inspired by an obscure German WWII asymmetric aircraft design.

Did it fly? It did, and you can see a couple of iterations of it tooling around in the video. But what happened next was equally interesting: First, a grinder powered single bladed helicopter and its subsequent hilarious failure, and its slightly more successful successor.

We’ve of course covered many angle grinder hacks, such as this fixture for perfect cuts (something notoriously difficult to do with a handheld grinder), but this is the first time we’ve seen an angle grinder fly out of more than frustration. Do you have your own angle grinder hack to spin our way? Be sure to let the Tip Line know!

Continue reading “Power Tool Hack Takes A New Angle On RC Power Plants” →

Home Brew Sandblaster Is A Junk Bin Delight

October 4, 2022 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Opinions vary as to what actually constitutes a “complete” shop, but one thing is for sure: the more tools, the better. That doesn’t mean running out to buy a tool every time you have a need, of course. Sometimes you can throw together what you need from scrap, as with this ad hoc sandblaster. (Video, embedded below.)

Fans of junk builds — and we mean that with the highest respect — will want to pay special attention to [GARAGEUA]’s video below. It looks like pretty much everything he uses to make this sandblaster comes from the junk pile — bits of old plumbing fixtures, a blow gun that’s seen much better days, some old nuts and bolts, and even a deceased spark plug all make an appearance. That last one is perhaps the most interesting, since with some clever dissection the spark plug’s body and its ceramic insulator were used for the nozzle of the sandblaster. And best of all, no lathe was needed for this job — everything was done with a hand drill and an angle grinder. Check out the build details in the video below; you might pick up some useful tips.

We’ve featured even junkier sandblaster builds before, but this one is a clever way to save a few bucks and flex a bit on your mechanical ingenuity. If you need a sandblaster and it’s something you’re going to use again and again, by all means go out and buy one — we won’t judge. But rolling your own is cool too.

Continue reading “Home Brew Sandblaster Is A Junk Bin Delight” →

Your Own Home IR Cloner

October 3, 2022 by Abe Connelly 22 Comments

Many devices use infrared (IR) as a signalling medium like, for example, RGB LED strip controllers
modules and some TV controllers. Often times these signals aren’t meant for secure applications which means the functionality can be reproduced by simply replaying back the received signal verbatim. Sometimes, enterprising hackers want to reverse engineer the IR signals, perhaps to automate some tasks or just to get a better understanding of the electronics we use in our everyday life. To help in this effort, [dilshan] creates an open source hardware IR cloner device, capable of snooping IR signals and retransmitting them.

The IR cloner is a sweet little IR tool that can be used to investigate all sorts of IR signals.
In addition to the source code and design files, [dilshan] has also taken care to create detailed documentation as an addendum to the video on assembly and usage. Continue reading “Your Own Home IR Cloner” →

A Compressor Of Compressors Breaks The Noise Barrier

October 2, 2022 by Jenny List 48 Comments

Having compressed air available in a workshop can be extremely useful. Having a compressor isn’t such a pleasure though, because unless it’s a very expensive model, it will be one of the noisier devices you own. Other than putting your compressor outside, is there a solution to the noisy side of having an air line? [Dominik Meffert] may have found one for his CNC plasma cutter in the shape of a rack of much quieter fridge compressors arranged in parallel with an air tank.

Of course, there’s nothing new about using a fridge compressor in the workshop. Indeed, such units are even commercially available as compressors for low-capacity tasks such as airbrushing. But we’ve never seen so many at once. It’s not entirely apparent how he’s handling the replacement of any lubricating oil that’s being caught in his filters, and we hope the refrigerant was disposed of safely, but we can see he’s on to something.

Fridge compressors have appeared here many times over the years, for more than compressing, we’ve even seen one as an engine. They aren’t always as strongly built as they should be though.

DVD Drives Turned Into Microscopes

October 1, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 24 Comments

With the advent of streaming services, plenty of people are opting to forego the collection of physical media. In turn, there are now a lot of optical drives sitting unused in parts bins and old computers. If you’d like something useful to do with this now-obsolete technology, you can have a try at turning one into a laser microscope.

This build requires two DVD pickups. By scanning once horizontally and once vertically and measuring the returning light from the DVD laser, an image can be created. For this build, the second pickup is used to move the object itself. The entire device is controlled by an Analog Discovery 2, although this principle could be ported to other microcontroller platforms. Thanks to the extremely fine laser in a DVD and the precise movements of the motors found in the control machinery, the images obtained using this method have the potential to be more detailed than comparable visible light microscopes.

While this isn’t quite scanning electron microscope territory, it’s good enough to clearly image the internal workings of a de-capped integrated circuit. Something like this could be indispensable for reverse-engineering ICs or troubleshooting other comparably small electronics, with resolutions higher than can typically be obtained with visible light microscopes. We’ve even seen similar builds in the past which build microscopes like this as dedicated lab equipment.