Visual 3D Print Finishing Guide

November 15, 2017 by Tom Nardi 52 Comments

With 3D printers now dropping to record low prices, more and more people are getting on the additive manufacturing bandwagon. As a long time believer in consumer-level desktop 3D printing, this is a very exciting time for me; the creativity coming out of places like Thingiverse or the 3D printing communities on Reddit is absolutely incredible. But the realist in me knows that despite what slick promotional material from the manufacturers may lead you to believe, these aren’t Star Trek-level replicators. What comes out of these machines is often riddled with imperfections (from small to soul crushing), and can require considerable cleanup work before they start to look like finished pieces.

If all you hope to get out of your 3D printer are some decent toy boats and some low-poly Pokemon, then have no fear. Even the most finicky of cheap printers can pump those out all day. But if you’re looking to build display pieces, cosplay props, or even prototypes that are worth showing to investors, you’ve got some work cut out for you.

With time, patience, and a few commercial products, you can accomplish the ultimate goal: turning a 3D printed object into something that doesn’t look like it was 3D printed. For the purposes of this demonstration I’ll be creating a replica of the mobile emitter used by the “Emergency Medical Hologram” in Star Trek: Voyager. I can neither confirm nor deny I selected this example due to the fact that I’m currently re-watching Voyager on Netflix. Let’s make it look good.

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Homebrew SNES Mini Aims For Historical Accuracy

November 15, 2017 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

While “normies” are out fighting in the aisles of Walmart to snap up one of the official “Classic Mini” consoles that Nintendo lets slip out onto the market every once and awhile, hackers have been perfecting their own miniature versions of these classic gaming systems. The “Classic Mini” line is admittedly a very cool way to capitalize on nostalgic masses who have now found themselves at the age where they have disposable income, but the value proposition is kind of weak. Rather than being stuck with the handful of generation-limited games that Nintendo packed into the official products, these homebrew consoles can play thousands of ROMs from systems that stretch across multiple generations and manufacturers.

But for those old enough to remember playing on one of these systems when they first came out, these modern reincarnations always lack a certain something. It never feels quite right. That vaguely uncomfortable feeling is exactly what [ElBartoME] is aiming to eliminate with his very slick miniature SNES build. His 3D printed case doesn’t just nail the aesthetics of the original (PAL) console, but the system also uses real SNES controllers in addition to NFC “cartridges” to load different ROMs.

The project’s page on Thingiverse has all the wiring diagrams and kernel configuration info to get the internal Raspberry Pi 3 to read an original SNES controller via the GPIO pins. He also gives a full rundown on the hardware and software required to get the NFC-enabled cartridges working with EmulationStation to launch the appropriate game when inserted. Though he does admit this is quite a bit trickier than the controller setup.

[ElBartoME] has put a video up on YouTube that shows him inserting his mock cartridges and navigating the menus with an original SNES controller. If it wasn’t for the fact that the console is the size of a smartphone and the on-screen display is generations beyond what the SNES could pull off, you’d think he was playing on the real thing.

We’ve seen some incredibly impressive emulation boxes based on the Raspberry Pi, and builds which tried to embrace original hardware components, but this particular project may represent the best of both worlds.

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Face ID Defeated With 3D Printed Mask (Maybe)

November 14, 2017 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

Information about this one is still tricking in, so take it with a grain of salt, but security company [Bkav] is claiming they have defeated the Face ID system featured in Apple’s iPhone X [Dead link, try the Internet Archive]. By combining 2D images and 3D scans of the owner’s face, [Bkav] has come up with a rather nightmarish creation that apparently fools the iPhone into believing it’s the actual owner. Few details have been released so far, but a YouTube video recently uploaded by the company does look fairly convincing.

For those who may not be keeping up with this sort of thing, Face ID is advertised as an improvement over previous face-matching identification systems (like the one baked into Android) by using two cameras and a projected IR pattern to perform a fast 3D scan of the face looking at the screen. Incidentally, this is very similar to how Microsoft’s Kinect works. While a 2D system can be fooled by a high quality photograph, a 3D based system would reject it as the face would have no depth.

[Bkav] is certainly not the first group to try and con Apple’s latest fondle-slab into letting them in. Wired went through a Herculean amount of effort in their attempt earlier in the month, only to get no farther than if they had just put a printed out picture of the victim in front of the camera. Details on how [Bkav] managed to succeed are fairly light, essentially boiling down to their claim that they are simply more knowledgeable about the finer points of face recognition than their competitors. Until more details are released, skepticism is probably warranted.

Still, even if their method is shown to be real and effective in the wild, it does have the rather large downside of requiring a 3D scan of the victim’s face. We’re not sure how an attacker is going to get a clean scan of someone without their consent or knowledge, but with the amount of information being collected and stored about the average consumer anymore, it’s perhaps not outside the realm of possibility in the coming years.

Since the dystopian future of face-stealing technology seems to be upon us, you might as well bone up on the subject so you don’t get left behind.

Thanks to [Bubsey Ubsey] for the tip.

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A Sandbox For DIY Pinball Design

November 11, 2017 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

If you’ve always wanted to build your own pinball machine but have no idea where to start, this is the project for you. [Chris] is in the process of building a 3/4 size pinball table and is currently in the waiting-for-parts stage. As they arrive, he is testing them in a sandbox he built in an afternoon. Let [Chris]’s proving ground be your quick-start guide to all the ways you could approach the two most important parts of any pin: the flippers and targets.

The field of play is a sturdy piece of particle board, and the cardboard walls are attached with hot glue. [Chris] designed and printed a pair of flippers that are driven by some cheap remote door lock motors he found at a popular online auction house. You can see how snappy are in the test video after the break.

We love the crisp action and elegant simplicity of the spring-loaded drop targets [Chris] designed. Right now he resets them manually, but soon they will be reset by a solenoid or maybe a motor. We can’t wait to see how the table turns out. In the meantime, we’ll have to go back to drooling over this amazing life-size 3D-printed pinball machine.

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3D-Printed Robot Golem Only A Tiny Bit Creepy

November 9, 2017 by John Baichtal 13 Comments

ASPIR, the Autonomous Support and Positive Inspiration Robot is an goblin-sized robot, designed by [John Choi], aims to split the difference between smaller hobbyist robots and more robust but pricy full-sized humanoids only a research institute could afford. By contrast, [John] estimates it cost a relatively meager $2,500 to create such a homunculus.

The robot consists of 33 servos of various types moving the limb, controlled by an Arduino Mega with a servo control shield seated on it. The chassis uses 5 kg of filament and took 300 hours to print, and it has a skeleton made up of aluminum hex rods. Spring-loaded RC shocks help reinforce the shoulders. There are some nice touches, like 3D-printed hands with living hinge fingers, each digit actuated by a metal-gear micro servo. It stores its power bricks in its shins. For sensors it includes a chest-mounted webcam and a laser distance sensor.

The main design feature is the Android smartphone serving as its brains, and also — at least cosmetically — its eyes. Those eyes… might be just a teensy bit too Chucky for our taste. (Nice work, [John]!)

SimpleSumo Bots Teach More Than Fighting

October 28, 2017 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

[MechEngineerMike] wrote in to share the enthusiasm over SimpleSumo, a series of open source, customizable robots he designed for mini-sumo battling and much more. For the unfamiliar, mini-sumo is a sport where two robots try to push each other out of a ring. [Mike]’s bots are simplified versions designed for education.

[Mike] was inspired by a video of some kids building mini-sumo bots who were doing anything and everything to personalize them. He vowed to make his own affordable, easy-to-build bots with education firmly in mind. His other major requirement? They had to be as easily customizable as that one potato-based toy that eventually came with a bucket of parts. As of this writing, there are 34 interchangeable accessories.

[Mike]’s first idea was to build the bots out of custom 3D-printed building blocks. He soon found it was too much work to print consistent blocks and switched to a modular cube-like design instead. SimpleSumo bots can do much more than just fight each other. [Mike] has written programs to make them flee from objects, follow lines, find objects and push them out of the ring, and beep with increasing frequency when an object is detected.

The bots are completely open source, but [Mike] sells kits for people who can’t print the parts themselves. He’s made a wealth of information available on his website including links to outside resources about mini-sumo, Arduino, programming, and 3D design. How about a complete series of assembly videos? First one is after the break. Don’t know how to build a battle ring? He’s got that covered, too.

For a sumo bot that’s more brains than brawn, check out Zumo Red, the smart sumo.

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Neural Network Really Ties The Room Together

October 27, 2017 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

If there’s one thing that Hollywood knows about hackers, it’s that they absolutely love data visualizations. Sometimes it’s projected on a big wall (Hackers, WarGames), other times it’s gibberish until the plot says otherwise (Sneakers, The Matrix). But no matter what, it has to look cool. No hacker worth his or her salt can possibly work unless they’ve got an evolving Venn diagram or spectral waterfall running somewhere in the background.

Inspired by Hollywood portrayals, specifically one featured in Avengers: Age of Ultron, [Zack Akil] decided it was time to secure his place in the pantheon of hacker wall visualizations. But not content to just show meaningless nonsense on his wall, he set out to create something that was at least showing actual data.

[Zack] created a neural network to work through multi-label classification data in Python using the scikit-learn machine learning suite. The code takes the values from the neutral network training algorithm and converts them to RGB colors by way of an Arduino. Each “node” in the neutral network is 3D printed in translucent filament, and fitted with an RGB LED module. These modules are then connected to each other via side-glow fiber optic tubes, so that the colors within the tubes are mixed depending on the colors of the nodes they are attached to. This allows for a very organic “growing” effect, as colors move through the network node-by-node.

In the end this particular visualization doesn’t really mean anything; the data it’s working on only exists for the purposes of the visualization itself. But [Zack] succeeded in creating a practical visualization of machine learning, and if you’re the kind of person who needs to keep tabs on learning algorithms, some variation of this design may be just what you’re looking for.

If AI isn’t your thing but you still want a wall of RGB LEDs, maybe you can use this phased array antenna visualizer instead. If you’re really hip, maybe you’ll go the analog route and put a big gauge on the wall.

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