3d printed

635 Articles

With Grinning Keyboard And Sleek Design, This Synth Shows It All

October 28, 2018 by 24 Comments

Stylish! is a wearable music synthesizer that combines slick design with stylus based operation to yield a giant trucker-style belt buckle that can pump out electronic tunes. With a PCB keyboard and LED-surrounded inset speaker that resembles an eyeball over a wide grin, Stylish! certainly has a unique look to it. Other synthesizer designs may have more functions, but certainly not more style.

The unit’s stylus and PCB key interface resemble a Stylophone, but [Tim Trzepacz] has added many sound synthesis features as well as a smooth design and LED feedback, all tied together with battery power and integrated speaker and headphone outputs. It may have been originally conceived as a belt buckle, but Stylish! certainly could give conference badge designs a run for their money.

The photo shown is a render, but a prototype is underway using a milled PCB and 3D printed case. [Tim]’s Google photo gallery has some good in-progress pictures showing the prototyping process along with some testing, and his GitHub repository holds all the design files, should anyone want a closer look under the hood. Stylish! was one of the twenty finalists selected for the Musical Instrument Challenge portion of the 2018 Hackaday Prize and is therefore one of the many projects in the running for the grand prize!

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Ghost Rider Costume Is Smoking Hot

October 26, 2018 by 20 Comments

It’s that spooky time of year once again, with pumpkins and cobwebs as far as the eye can see. This year, [Mikeasaurus] has put together something really special – a Ghost Rider costume with some amazing effects.

The costume starts with the skull mask, which started with a model from Thingiverse. Conveniently, the model was already set up to be 3D printed in separate pieces. [Mike] further modified the design by cutting out the middle to make it wearable. The mask was printed in low resolution and then assembled. [Mike] didn’t worry too much about making things perfect early on, as the final finish involved plenty of sanding and putty to get the surface just right. To complete the spooky look, the skull got a lick of ivory paint and a distressed finish with some diluted black acrylic.

With the visual components complete, [Mike] turned his attention to the effects. Light is courtesy of a series of self-blinking LEDs, fitted inside the mask to give the eye sockets a menacing orange glow. However, the pièce de résistance is the smoke effect, courtesy of a powerful e-cigarette device and an aquarium pump. At 225W, and filled with vegetable glycerine, this combination produces thick clouds of smoke which emanate from the back of the wearer’s jacket and within the skull itself. Truly stunning.

[Mike] reports that the costume is scary enough that he has been banned from answering the door as Ghost Rider. We think it’s bound to be a hit, regardless. For another epic mask build, check out the Borderlands Psycho. Video after the break. Continue reading “Ghost Rider Costume Is Smoking Hot” →

SandBot Happily And Tirelessly Rolls Patterns In Sand

October 18, 2018 by 1 Comment

The patience and precision involved with drawing geometric patterns in sand is right up a robot’s alley, and demonstrating this is [rob dobson]’s SandBot, a robot that draws patterns thanks to an arm with a magnetically coupled ball.

SandBot, SCARA version. The device sits underneath a sand bed, and a magnet (seen at the very top at the end of the folded “arm”) moves a ball bearing through sand.

SandBot is not a cartesian XY design. An XY frame would need to be at least as big as the sand table itself, but a SCARA arm can be much more compact. Sandbot also makes heavy use of 3D printing and laser-cut acrylic pieces, with no need of an external frame.

[rob]’s writeup is chock full of excellent detail and illustrations, and makes an excellent read. His previous SandBot design is also worth checking out, as it contains all kinds of practical details like what size of ball bearing is best for drawing in fine sand (between 15 and 20 mm diameter, it turns out. Too small and motion is jerky as the ball catches on sand grains, and too large and there is noticeable lag in movement.) Design files for the SCARA SandBot are on GitHub but [rob] has handy links to everything in his writeup for easy reference.

Sand and robots (or any moving parts) aren’t exactly a natural combination, but that hasn’t stopped anyone. We’ve seen Clearwalker stride along the beach, and the Sand Drawing Robot lowers an appendage to carve out messages in the sand while rolling along.

Just In Time For Halloween: Another Talking Skull

October 16, 2018 by 4 Comments

It isn’t a unique idea, but we liked [Eric Wiemers’s] take on the classic animated skull for Halloween. In addition to showing you the code and the wiring, the video spends some time discussing what the audio looks like and what has to happen to get it into a format suitable for the Arduino. You can see the spooky video, below.

Of course, this is also a 3D printing project, although the skull is off-the-shelf. We wondered if he felt like a brain surgeon taking the Dremel to the poor skull. To fix the two parts of the device, he used brass threaded inserts that are heat set, something we’ve seen before, but are always surprised we don’t see more often.

Continue reading “Just In Time For Halloween: Another Talking Skull” →

Hybrid Robot Walks, Transforms, And Takes Flight

October 15, 2018 by 10 Comments

[Project Malaikat] is a 3D printed hybrid bipedal walker and quadcopter robot, but there’s much more to it than just sticking some props and a flight controller to a biped and calling it a day. Not only is it a custom design capable of a careful but deliberate two-legged gait, but the props are tucked away and deployed on command via some impressive-looking linkages that allow it to transform from walking mode to flying mode.

Creator [tang woonthai] has the 3D models available for download (.rar file) and the video descriptions on YouTube contain a bill of materials, but beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much other information available about [Malaikat]. The creator does urge care to be taken should anyone use the design, because while the robot may be small, it does essentially have spinning blades for hands.

Embedded below are videos that show off the robot’s moves, as well as a short flight test demonstrating that while control was somewhat lacking during the test, the robot is definitely more than capable of actual flight.

Continue reading “Hybrid Robot Walks, Transforms, And Takes Flight” →

Listen To A Song Made From Custom Nintendo LABO Waveform Cards

October 14, 2018 by 2 Comments

[Hunter Irving] has been busy with the Nintendo LABO’s piano for the Nintendo Switch. In particular he’s been very busy creating his own custom waveform cards, which greatly expands the capabilities of the hackable cardboard contraption. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we covered his original method of creating 3D printed waveform cards that are compatible with the piano, but he’s taken his work further since then. Not only has he created new and more complex cards by sampling instruments from Super Nintendo games, he’s even experimented with cards based on vowel sounds in an effort to see just how far things can go. By layering the right vowel sounds just so, he was able to make the (barely identifiable) phrases I-LIKE-YOU, YOU-LIKE-ME, and LET’S-A-GO.

Those three phrases make up the (vaguely recognizable) lyrics of a song he composed using his custom waveform cards for the Nintendo LABO’s piano, appropriately titled I Like You. The song is at the 6:26 mark in the video embedded below, but the whole video is worth a watch to catch up on [Hunter]’s work. The song is also hosted on soundcloud.

Continue reading “Listen To A Song Made From Custom Nintendo LABO Waveform Cards” →

The Little Cat That Could

October 10, 2018 by 10 Comments

Most humans take a year to learn their first steps, and they are notoriously clumsy. [Hartvik Line] taught a robotic cat to walk [YouTube link] in less time, but this cat had a couple advantages over a pre-toddler. The first advantage was that it had four legs, while the second came from a machine learning technique called genetic algorithms that surpassed human fine-tuning in two hours. That’s a pretty good benchmark.

The robot itself is an impressive piece inspired by robots at EPFL, a research institute in Switzerland. All that Swiss engineering is not easy for one person to program, much less a student, but that is exactly what happened. “Nixie,” as she is called, is a part of a master thesis for [Hartvik] at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Machine learning efficiency outstripped human meddling very quickly, and it can even relearn to walk if the chassis is damaged.

We have been watching genetic algorithm programming for more than half of a decade, and Skynet hasn’t popped forth, however we have a robot kitty taking its first steps.

Continue reading “The Little Cat That Could” →