Neural Network Gimbal Is Always Watching

October 10, 2017 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

[Gabriel] picked up a GoPro to document his adventures on the slopes and trails of Montreal, but quickly found he was better in front of the camera than behind it. Turns out he’s even better seated behind his workbench, as the completely custom auto-tracking gimbal he came up with is nothing short of a work of art.

There’s quite a bit going on here, and as you might expect, it took several iterations before [Gabriel] got all the parts working together. The rather GLaDOS-looking body of the gimbal is entirely 3D printed, and holds the motors, camera, and a collection of ultrasonic receivers. The Nvidia Jetson TX1 that does the computational heavy lifting is riding shotgun in its own swanky looking 3D printed enclosure, but [Gabriel] notes a future revision of the hardware should be able to reunite them.

In the current version of the system, the target wears an ultrasonic emitter that is picked up by the sensors in the gimbal. The rough position information provided by the ultrasonics is then refined by the neural network running on the Jetson TX1 so that the camera is always focused on the moving object. Right now the Jetson TX1 gets the video feed from the camera over WiFi, and commands the gimbal hardware over Bluetooth. Once the Jetson is inside the gimbal however, some of the hardware can likely be directly connected, and [Gabriel] says the ultrasonics may be deleted from the design completely in favor of tracking purely in software. He plans on open sourcing the project, but says he’s got some internal house keeping to do before he takes the wraps off it.

From bare bones to cushy luxury, scratch-built camera gimbals have become something of a right of passage for the photography hacker. But with this project, it looks like the bar got set just a bit higher.

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3D Printed Lamp Even Prints The Nuts And Bolts

October 10, 2017 by Inderpreet Singh 13 Comments

The first print to come off a shiny new 3D printer is usually a toy widget of some sort that will forever sit at your desk without purpose. The alternative is a practical project that is custom and personal like this 3D Printed Articulating Lamp. [IgorF2] shares his design for this wall mounted device which was created using Fusion 360.

The complete design consists of eight parts which includes the arms, nuts, and bolts, as well as the wall mount, each of which can be printed individually. These come together to form a structure that can be attached to a wall or your work bench. Though [IgorF2] has provided arm pieces of length 100 mm, 140 mm and 200 mm, you can mix and match to create a much larger project. The files are available for download from Thingiverse for your making pleasure.

We think this can be a great basic structure for someone looking at custom wall mounted projects. The lamp mount can be easily supplemented by a Raspberry Pi and Camera holder if you feel like live streaming your bench. Alternatively, it may be customized to become a motion detecting lamp just for fun. We hope to see some good use come of it in the future.

Mini Spool System For 3D Printing Pen Tidies Things Up

October 5, 2017 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

3D printing pens may be toys to some, but they can be genuinely useful tools to repair 3D prints, rescue a support structure, or weld together different pieces. However, [BManx2000] found that the way the filament simply sticks out of the back of a 3D printing pen like a bizarre tailfeather was troublesome.

The solution? A Mini Spool System for 3D Printing Pens, with which you can use your 3D printing pen to weld together the parts after printing them. The unit holds 1.75mm filament coiled under its own tension in a tidy package that doesn’t interfere with feeding. Since different 3D pens are shaped differently, the interface to the pen is a separate piece that can be modified or changed as needed without affecting the rest of the design.

We’ve seen some interesting innovations with filament holders before, like this entirely 3D printed filament holder, but a mini spool for a 3D pen is definitely a new one.

Spray Paint Goes DIY Virtual With A Vive Tracker

September 21, 2017 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

Here is a virtual spray painting project with a new and DIY twist to it. [Adam Amaral]’s project is an experiment in using the Vive Tracker, which was released earlier this year. [Adam] demonstrates how to interface some simple hardware and 3D printed parts to the Tracker’s GPIO pins, using it as a custom peripheral that is fully tracked and interactive in the Vive’s VR environment. He details not only the custom spray can controller, but also how to handle the device on the software side in the Unreal engine. The 3D printed “spray can controller” even rattles when shaken!

There’s one more trick. Since the Vive Tracker is wireless and completely self-contained, the completed rattlecan operates independently from the VR headset. This means it’s possible to ditch the goggles and hook up a projector, then use the 3D printed spray can to paint a nearby wall with virtual paint; you can see that part in action in the video embedded below.

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See This Mesmerizing 3D Printed Water Droplet Automaton

September 21, 2017 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

*Water Experiment No. 33* by [Dean O’Callaghan]

Most modern automata are hand-cranked kinetic sculptures typically made from wood, and [videohead118] was inspired by a video of one simulating a wave pattern from a drop of liquid. As a result, they made a 3D printed version of their own and shared the files on Thingiverse.

In this piece, a hand crank turns a bunch of cams that raise and lower a series of rings in a simulated wave pattern, apparently in response to the motion of a sphere on a central shaft. The original (shown in the animation to the right) was made from wood by a fellow named [Dean O’Callaghan], and a video of it in its entirety is embedded below the break.

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DIY Mocha Cooker

August 27, 2017 by Inderpreet Singh 27 Comments

Food-grade 3D printing filament is on the rise and it is nice to have a custom coffee mug in the office to instill a little envy in the locals. [Stefan] took it upon himself to create a Mocha Machine that he would 3D print and test the boundaries of his filament.

[Stefan] used Fusion 360 to replicate the famous Bialetti Moka Express pot in it true octagonal shape. Since the pot brews coffee under pressure, he tested tolerances in Fusion 360 to make sure all the thicknesses were right. While the design was being printed, a steel washer was added to facilitate induction heating since you can’t really put a plastic pot over a flame. The print uses Formfutura Volcano PLA which is annealed for an hour at 110 degrees Celsius.

Below is a video of the whole process and though the material may not be food grade, the project is definitely a step in the right direction. Since the printed parts can withstand temperatures of up to 160 degrees Celsius, projects that involve boiling water or experiments with crystallization can benefit from a custom design.

We really hope to see more projects that use this technique, however, for those looking at their coffee machine right now, take a look at more coffee machine hacks as well as alarm clock hacks to get the coffee brewing in the morning.

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Design And 3D Print Robots With Interactive Robogami

August 26, 2017 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Internals of 3D printed “print and fold” robot. [Image source: MIT CSAIL]

Robot design traditionally separates the body geometry from the mechanics of the gait, but they both have a profound effect upon one another. What if you could play with both at once, and crank out useful prototypes cheaply using just about any old 3D printer? That’s where Interactive Robogami comes in. It’s a tool from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) that aims to let people design, simulate, and then build simple robots with a “3D print, then fold” approach. The idea behind the system is partly to take advantage of the rapid prototyping afforded by 3D printers, but mainly it’s to change how the design work is done.

To make a robot, the body geometry and limb design are all done and simulated in the Robogami tool, where different combinations can have a wild effect on locomotion. Once a design is chosen, the end result is a 3D printable flat pack which is then assembled into the final form with a power supply, Arduino, and servo motors.

A white paper is available online and a demonstration video is embedded below. It’s debatable whether these devices on their own qualify as “robots” since they have no sensors, but as a tool to quickly prototype robot body geometries and gaits it’s an excitingly clever idea.

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