Helix Display Brings Snake Into Three Dimensions

June 7, 2017 by James Hobson 7 Comments

Any time anyone finds a cool way to display in 3D — is there an uncool way? — we’re on board. Instructables user [Gelstronic]’s method involves an array of spinning props to play the game Snake in 3D.

The helix display consists of twelve props, precisely spaced and angled using 3D-printed parts, each with twelve individually addressable LEDs. Four control groups of 36 LEDs are controlled by the P8XBlade2 propeller microcontroller, and the resultant 17280 voxels per rotation are plenty to produce an identifiable image.

In order to power the LEDs, [Gelstronic] used wireless charging coils normally used for cell phones, transferring 10 W of power to the helix array. A brushless motor keeps things spinning, while an Arduino controls speed and position via an encoder. All the links to the code used are found on the project page, but we have the video of the display in action is after the break.

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Digitize Your Room With LIDAR

May 15, 2017 by James Hobson 20 Comments

What’s the best way to image a room? A picture? Hah — don’t be so old-fashioned! You want a LIDAR rig to scan the space and reconstruct it as a 3D point map in your computer.

Hot on the heels of [Saulius Lukse]’s scanning thermometer, he’s replaced the thermal camera on their pan/tilt setup with a time-of-flight (TOF) camera — a Garmin LIDAR — capable of 500 samples per second and end up scanning their room in a mere fifteen minutes. Position data is combined with the ranging information to produce a point cloud using Python. Open that file in a 3D manipulation program and you’ll be treated to a sight like this:

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Printing Bed Off-Kilter? Blu-Tack To The Rescue!

April 30, 2017 by James Hobson 9 Comments

For all their applications, 3D printers can be finicky machines. From extruder problems, misaligned or missing layers, to finding an overnight print turned into a tangled mess, and that’s all assuming your printer bed is perfectly leveled. [Ricardo de Azambuja’s] new linear delta printer was frustrating him. No matter what he did, it wouldn’t retain the bed leveling calibration, so he had to improvise — Blu-Tack to the rescue.

It turns out [Azambuja]’s problem was so bad that the filament wouldn’t even attempt to adhere to the printing bed. So, he turned to Printrun Pronterface and a combination of its homing feature and the piece-of-paper method to get a rough estimate of how much the bed needed to be adjusted — and a similar estimate of how big of a gob of Blu-Tack was needed.

Pressing the bed into place, he re-ran Pronterface to make sure he was on the level. [Azambuja] notes that you would have to redo this for every print, but it was good enough to print off a trio of bed leveling gears he designed so he doesn’t have to go through this headache again for some time.

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Making Laser Cutter Designs Work In A 3D Printer

March 3, 2017 by Al Williams 18 Comments

The main mechanical tools in a hacker’s shop used to be a drill press and a lathe. Maybe a CNC mill, if you were lucky. Laser cutters are still a rare tool to find in a personal shop, but today’s hackers increasingly have access to 3D printers. What happens when you have a design for a laser cutter (2D parts) but only have access to a 3D printer? You punt.

[DIY3DTECH] has a two-part video on taking a 2D design (in an SVG file) and bringing it into TinkerCad. At that point, he assembles the part in software and creates a printable object. You can see the videos below.

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Ingenious Use Of 3D Printer Gives Simba The Mane He Deserves

February 13, 2017 by Adil Malik 7 Comments

Here at Hackaday, we love clever 3D prints. This amazing lion statue remixed by [ _primoz_], makes us feel no different. It is no secret that FDM 3D printers have come a long way, propelled by the enthusiastic support from the open source community.

However, FDM 3D printers have some inherent limitations; some of which arise from a finite print nozzle diameter, tracing out the 3D object layer by layer. Simply put, some print geometries and dimensions are just unattainable. We discussed the solution to traditional FDM techniques being confined to Planer layers only in a previous article.

The case in point here is a 3D printed lion whose original version did not fully capture its majestic mane. [_primoz_] solution was to construct a support cylinder around the head and form the actual hair as a series of planar bristles, which were one extrusion wide.

This was followed by some simple post processing, where a heat gun was used to form the bristles into a dapper mane.

The result is rather glorious and we can’t wait for someone to fire up a dual extruder and bring out the flexible filament for this print!

[via Thingiverse]

Spinning 3D POV Display: A High School Term Project

November 16, 2016 by Jenny List 25 Comments

If you are a fan of sci-fi shows you’ll be used to volumetric 3D displays as something that’s going to be really awesome at some distant point in the future. It’s been about forty years since a virtual 3D [Princess Leia] was projected to Star Wars fans from [R2D2]’s not-quite-a-belly-button, while in the real world it’s still a technology with some way to go. We’ve seen LED cubes, spinning arrays, and lasers projected onto spinning disks, but nothing yet to give us that Wow! signaling that the technology has truly arrived.

We are starting to see these displays move from the high-end research lab into the realm of hackers and makers though, and the project we have for you here is a fantastic example. [Balduin Dettling] has created a spinning LED display using multiple sticks of addressable LEDs mounted on a rotor, and driven by a Teensy 3.1. What makes this all the more remarkable is that he’s a secondary school student at a Gymnasium school in Germany (think British grammar school or American prep school).

There are 480 LEDs in his display, and he addresses them through TLC5927 shift registers. Synchronisation is provided by a Hall-effect sensor and magnet to detect the start of each rotation, and the Teensy adjusts its pixel rate based on that timing. He’s provided extremely comprehensive documentation with code and construction details in the GitHub repository, including a whitepaper in English worth digging into. He also posted the two videos we’ve given you below the break.

What were you building in High School? Did it involve circuit design, mechanical fabrication, firmware, and documentation? This is an impressive set of skills for such a young hacker, and the type of education we like to see available to those interested in a career in engineering.

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All Your Displays Are Belong To Us

September 26, 2016 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

Artist and Hackaday reader [Blair Neal] wrote in with his incredible compendium of “alternative” displays. (Here as PDF.) From Pepper’s Ghost to POV, he’s got it all covered, with emphasis on their uses in art.

There’s an especially large focus on 3D displays. Projecting onto screens, droplets of water, spinning objects, and even plasma combustion are covered. But so are the funny physical displays: flip-dots, pin-cushions, and even servo-driven “pixels”.

We really liked the section on LCDs with modified polarization layers — we’ve seen some cool hacks using that gimmick, but the art pieces he dredged up look even better. Makes us want to take a second look at that busted LCD screen in the basement.

We’re big fans of the bright and blinky, so it’s no surprise that [Blair] got a bunch of his examples from these very pages. And we’ve covered [Blair]’s work as well: both his Wobbulator and his “Color a Sound” projects. Hackaday: your one-stop-shop for freaky pixels.

[Blair]’s list looks pretty complete to us, but there’s always more out there. What oddball displays are missing? What’s the strangest or coolest display you’ve ever seen?