A few years back, [Shannon Ley] wondered how hard it would be to build a pair of Bluetooth headphones from scratch. Today, we have our answer. The Homebrew Headphones website is devoted to just one thing: explaining how you can use common components and some 3D printed parts to build an impressively comprehensive pair of wireless headphones for around $50 USD.
The headphones pair a CSR8645 Bluetooth audio receiver with a TP4056 USB-C charging module, a 500 mAh LiPo pouch battery, a pair of Dayton Audio CE38MB-32 drivers, and replacement ear covers designed for the Bose QuietComfort QC15. Some perfboard, a couple buttons, a resistor, and an LED round out the parts list.
All of the components fit nicely into the meticulously designed 3D printed frame, and assembly is made as simple as possible thanks to an excellent step-by-step guide. It’s all so well documented that anyone with even basic soldering experience should be able to piece it together without too much fuss.
Retrograde clocks are unique, in that they eschew the normal fully-circular movement for the hands. Instead, the hands merely sweep out a segment of a circular arc, before jumping back to their start position to begin again. They’re pretty rare to find, but [Jamie Matthews] decided he had to have one. Thusly, he elected to build his own!
For his build, [Jamie] started with a regular off-the-shelf clock movement you might find in any hobbyist clock build. From there, he affixed his own witches’ brew of racks and gears to the output in order to create the desired semi-circular mechanism. The arcane mechanism enables the clock to tell time over roughly a 180-degree arc.
It’s relatively simple to make one of your own, too. The parts are all readily 3D printable, with [Jamie] reporting it took less than 8 meters of filament to produce the geartrain for his build. You can even print the clock face if you don’t want to CNC cut it out of acrylic.
Overall, it’s a fun look at an often-forgotten part of our horological history. Desktop 3D printing really does enable the creation of some exciting, different clock designs. Video after the break.
CNC machines and 3D printers tend to have plenty of cabling which must be neatly managed while the machine moves. If not properly taken care of, wires can easily end up tangled in the moving bits leading to a dead machine at best, and some kind of raucous fire at worst. [Nikodem Bartnik] decided to create his own cable chains for his CNC build to keep everything in check.
The benefit of cable chains is that they stop cables splaying everywhere while still allowing them to move as needed with the axes of the machine. [Nikodem] created 20mm and 40mm chains for his build, affixed into the aluminium extrusion with bolts and T-nuts for easy assembly. The chains are assembled by hand, with 3D printed clips that hammer in place to hold the cables inside once inserted.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from buying cable chains off the shelf. But if you don’t want to wait for shipping in this era of cursed supply chains, or you want a cable chain you can customize to perfectly suit your machine, making your own could be the way to go.
A lot of first-time guitar builders focus on making the body and skip the neck, which has lots of tricky dimensions to get right to if you want a nicely playable instrument. However, [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing wanted to start with the hard part on his guitar building journey, and set about 3D printing a guitar neck in one piece.
Designing a neck might sound difficult on the surface of it, but the Marz Guitar Designer plugin for FreeCAD helps make whipping one up a cinch. Once imported into Fusion 360, the geometry is tweaked for 3D printing, particularly to fit the truss rod inside. Printed on a Creality CF30 belt printer (which interestingly enough, has been mounted to the wall) in green PLA, the resulting neck can be spotted as a non-traditional design from a mile away. With a truss rod hammered in, frets installed, and hardware attached, it’s mounted up to a cheap kit guitar for testing.
The printed neck works, and it’s given a proper shakedown with some appropriate riffs to put it through its paces. It’s reportedly a bit on the flexible side, but remains playable and is surprisingly normal in its performance. [Jón] now plans to continue the project by 3D printing the rest of the guitar.
Don’t get too excited, a 3D printed radiation shield won’t keep you from getting irradiated during WWIII. But until the Doomsday Clock starts clanging its midnight bell, you can use one to improve the accuracy of your homebrew weather monitoring station by keeping the sun from heating up your temperature sensor. But how much does it help, and what material should you load up in your extruder to make one? Those questions, and more, are the topic of a fascinating whitepaper included in the upcoming volume of HardwareX.
Design and Implementation of 3-D Printed Radiation Shields for Environmental Sensors not only tests how effective these low-cost shields are when compared to an uncovered sensor, but addresses specific concerns in regards to leaving 3D printed parts out in the elements. Readers who’ve squirted out a few rolls worth of the stuff will know that common polylactic acid (PLA) filament, while easy to work with and affordable, isn’t known for its resilience. In fact, one of the advertised properties of the renewable plastic is that it’s biodegradable (theoretically, at least), so leaving it outside for any length of time sounds like it’s bound to go poorly.
PLA’s mechanical strength dropped rapidly.
To make a long story short, it does. While the team demonstrated that the PLA printed radiation shield absolutely helped preserve the accuracy of the temperature and humidity sensors mounted inside of it, the structure itself began to deform rapidly from UV exposure. Further tests determined that the mechanical strength of the PLA showed a notable reduction in as little as 30 days, and a sharp decline after 90 days.
Luckily, there was more than one plastic horse in the race. In addition to the PLA printed shield, the team also tested a version printed in acrylonitrile styrene acrylate (ASA) which fared far better. There was no visible deformation of the shield, and after 90 days, the reduction in mechanical strength was negligible. It even performed a bit better when it came to shielding the temperature sensor, which the team believes may be due to the material’s optical transmission properties.
So there you have it: a 3D printed radiation shield will absolutely improve the accuracy of your weather sensors, but if you want it to last outside, PLA just isn’t going to cut it. On the other hand, you could also save yourself a whole lot of time by just using a stack of plant saucers. Whatever works.
The Competition Pro joystick is often considered to be the pinnacle of input devices, at least as far as the 1980s gaming goes. But the design isn’t perfect, and time hasn’t been kind to certain aspects of its mechanism. For example, the large rubber disc used to keep the stick centered on early generations of the hardware will invariably be hardened up on any surviving specimens. Looking to return these classic controllers to their former glory, and then some, [mageb] has released a number of 3D printed modifications for the Competition Pro that should be of great interest to the vintage gamer.
The new microswitches
First and foremost is the deletion of the original rubber disc for a new spring mechanism. Even if this is the only modification you do, [mageb] says you’ll already have a better and longer-lasting joystick to show for it. But if you want to continue with the full rebuild, be aware that there’s no going back to stock. Once you start cutting the original parts, you’re committed to taking it all the way.
Assuming you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty, the next step is cutting the metal contacts from the bottom of the face buttons so they’ll work with the new microswitch array he’s designed. Each button gets its switch, and four handle movement of the joystick. You can try out different switches to adjust the feel of the joystick, but [mageb] assures us that he’s already done the research and put the best quality switches in the bill of materials.
The end result is a Competition Pro joystick that looks more or less the same from the outside, but is considerably improved internally. That’s always a win in our books, though we’re sure somebody out there is going to get mad that the brittle old rubber disc wasn’t sent to the Smithsonian.
Despite the technology itself being widely available and relatively cheap, devices that offer wireless charging as a feature still aren’t as common as many would like. Sure it can’t deliver as much power as something like USB-C, but for low-draw devices that don’t necessarily need to be recharged in a hurry, the convenience is undeniable.
Sick of having to plug it in after each session, [Taylor Burley] decided to take matters into his own hands and add wireless charging capability to his Turtle Beach Recon 200 headset. But ultimately, there’s nothing about this project that couldn’t be adapted to your own particular headset of choice. Or any other device that charges via USB, for that matter.
To keep things simple, [Taylor] used an off-the-shelf wireless charging transmitter and receiver pair. The transmitter is housed in a 3D printed mount that the headset hangs from, and the receiver was simply glued to the top of the headset. The receiver is covered with a thin 3D printed plate, but a couple turns of electrical tape would work just as well if you didn’t want to design a whole new part.
Once everything was in place, he then ran a wire down the side of the headset and tapped into the five volt trace coming from the USB port. So now long as [Taylor] remembers to hang the headset up after he’s done playing, the battery will always be topped off the next time he reaches for it.
The headphones pair a CSR8645 Bluetooth audio receiver with a TP4056 USB-C charging module, a 500 mAh LiPo pouch battery, a pair of Dayton Audio CE38MB-32 drivers, and replacement ear covers designed for the Bose QuietComfort QC15. Some perfboard, a couple buttons, a resistor, and an LED round out the parts list.
