Retired Welding Robot Picks Up Side Hustle As CNC Router

April 11, 2023 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

Who says you can’t teach an old robot new tricks? Nobody, actually. That saying is about dogs. But it applies to robots too, at least judging by the way this late-90s industrial beast was put to use in a way it was never intended: as a giant CNC router.

The machine in question is an ABB IRB6400, a six-axis, floor-mounted industrial machine that had a long career welding at a Eurorail factory in Austria before [Brian Brocken] made its acquaintance. He procured the non-working machine — no word on what he paid for it — and moved the 2-ton paperweight into his shop, itself a non-trivial endeavor. After a good scrubbing, [Brian] tried to get the machine started up. An error prevented the robot controller from booting; luckily, there’s a large community of ABB users, and [Brian] learned that one of the modules in the controller needed replacement.

After fixing that — and swapping out the controller’s long-dead backup batteries, plus replacing the original 1.44 MB floppy drive with a USB drive — he was able to bring the machine back to life. Unfortunately, the limited amount of internal memory made it difficult to use for anything complicated, so [Brian] came up with an application to stream coordinates to the controller over a serial port, allowing for unlimited operation. With that in place, plus a simple spindle mounted to the robot’s wrist with a 3D printed adapter, [Brian] was able to carve foam blocks into complex shapes. The video below shows everything from delivery to first chips — well, dust at least.

This build seems to be a significant escalation from [Brian]’s previous large-format CNC machine. He must have something interesting in mind, so stay tuned for details.

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Spice Up The Humble 16×2 LCD With Big Digits

April 7, 2023 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

The 16×2 LCD display is a classic in the microcontroller world, and for good reason. Add a couple of wires, download a library, mash out a few lines of code, and your project has a user interface. A utilitarian and somewhat boring UI, though, and one that can be hard to read at a distance. So why not spice it up with these large-type custom fonts?

As [upir] explains, the trick to getting large fonts on a display that’s normally limited to two rows of 16 characters each lies in the eight custom characters the display allows to be added to its preprogrammed character set. These can store carefully crafted patterns that can then be assembled to make reasonable facsimiles of the ten numerals. Each custom pattern forms one-quarter of the finished numeral, which spans what would normally be a two-by-two character matrix on the display. Yes, there’s a one-pixel wide blank space running horizontally and vertically through each big character, but it’s not that distracting.

Composing the custom patterns, and making sure they’re usable across multiple characters, is the real hack here, and [upir] put a lot of work into that. He started out in Illustrator, but quickly switched to a spreadsheet because it allowed him to easily generate the correct binary numbers to pass to the display for each pattern. It seems to have really let his creative juices flow, too — he came up with 24 different fonts! Our favorite is the one he calls “Tron,” which looks a bit like the magnetic character recognition font on the bottom of bank checks. Everyone remembers checks, right?

Hats off to [upir] for a creative and fun way to spice up the humble 16×2 display. We’d love to see someone pick this up and try a complete alphanumeric character set, although that might be a tall order with only eight custom characters to work with. Then again, if Bad Apple on a 16×2 is possible…

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An Ultra Low Power Dash Cam

April 3, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 19 Comments

Dash cameras are handy as they provide a video recording of interactions on the road. However, their utility comes from the fact that they are always recording while driving. This always-on means power draw. [Kuzysk] took it upon himself to cut that power draw by a factor of almost 70x.

He found his existing dash cam from MiVue consumed 3.5mA in idle which works out to be a whole amp-hour every 12 days. The custom version takes just 50uA which means it will draw an amp-hour in two years. The brains of the chip are formed by an ATmega328 and an LM2596M, which is a simple step-down regulator. Interestingly, [Kuzysk] purchased clones and original chips and found that the cheaper clones had a lower switching frequency but a much lower power draw. Programming an Arduino bootloader onto the board is fairly straightforward and [Kuzysk] kindly provides his code. It can detect the ACC voltage that’s on when the engine is on and is powered by a permanent 12v connection to the battery.

Overall it’s a straightforward hack that goes through rolling your own Arduino, optimizing for low power, and putting it all together into a polished project. Perhaps for the next version, he can use the ATmega to control a cheaper camera and make it smart.

Thanks to [Microchip makes] and [Abe] for the tip!

A cat skull enclosed in a domed security camera enclosure with green LEDs illuminating the eye sockets, sitting on a table with other skulls and rocks.

Cat Skull For Internet Connection Divination

April 1, 2023 by Abe Connelly 9 Comments

[Emily Velasco] has an internet provider that provides sub-par connectivity. Instead of repeatedly refreshing a browser tab to test if the network is up, [Emily] decided to create an internet status monitor by embedding indicator lights in a cat skull…for some reason.

The electronics are straightforward, with the complete parts list consisting of an Arduino Nano 33 IoT device connected to a pair of RGB LEDs and 50 Ohm resistors. The Nano attempts to connect to a known site (in this case, the Google landing page) every two seconds and sets the LEDs to green if it succeeds or red if it fails.

The cat skull is thankfully a replica, 3D printed by one of [Emily]’s Twitter acquaintances, and the whole project was housed in a domed security camera enclosure. [Emily] mounts the LEDs into the skull to create a “brain in a jar” effect.

The source is available on GitHub for those wanting to take a look. We’ve featured internet connectivity status indicators in the form of traffic lights here before, as well as various network status monitors and videoconferencing indicator lights.

Move Aside Yoda, It’s Furby’s Turn On Luke’s Back

March 31, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 9 Comments

When you want a backpack that turns heads and gets people talking, you can get ahead of the conversation with a talking backpack. [Nina] created a rucksack with the legendary babbler itself, the infamous Furby.

Believe it or not, no actual Furbies were sacrificed in the making of this backpack. The build uses an Arduino Nano, two servos, and a DFPlayer Mini for audio. A 3D printed faceplate is used for the iconic eyes and face. The code is fairly simple, waiting for a random delay and then triggering one of four effects. It can play a sound or blink and does its best to move the mouth while the sound is playing thanks to the handy busy line coming off the sound module. A unicorn children’s backpack offered a furry shell to stuff the electronics inside. A custom PCB makes the whole thing just a little neater internally.

Perhaps next [Nina] can integrate voice recognition so that the backpack can answer simple questions like an Alexa-powered Furby we’ve seen before.

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Low-Power Challenge: Making An Analog Clock Into A Calendar With A 50-Year Life

March 24, 2023 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

You have to be pretty ambitious to modify a clock to run for 50 years on a single battery. You also should probably be pretty young if you think you’re going to verify your power estimates, at least in person. According to [Josh EJ], this modified quartz analog clock, which ticks off the date rather than the time, is one of those “The March of Time” projects that’s intended to ~~terrify~~ incentivize you by showing how much of the year is left.

Making a regular clock movement slow down so that what normally takes an hour takes a month without making any mechanical changes requires some clever hacks. [Josh] decided to use an Arduino to send digital pulses to the quartz movement to advance the minute hand, rather than let it run free. Two pulses a day would be perfect for making a 30-day month fit into a 60-minute hour, but that only works for four months out of the year. [Josh]’s solution was to mark the first 28 even-numbered minutes, cram 29, 30, and 31 into the last four minutes of the hour, and sort the details out in code.

As for the low-power mods, there’s some cool wizardry involved with that, like flashing the Arduino Pro Mini with a new bootloader that reduces the clock speed to 1 MHz. This allows the microcontroller and RTC module to run from the clock movement’s 1.5 V AA battery. [Josh] estimates a current draw of about 6 μA per day, which works out to about 50 years from a single cell. That’s to be taken with a huge grain of salt, of course, but we expect the battery will last a long, long time.

[Josh] built this clock as part of the Low-Power Challenge contest, which wrapped up this week. We’re looking forward to the results of the contest — good luck to all the entrants!

One Method For Removing Future Space Junk

March 22, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

When sending satellites into space, the idea is to place them into as stable an orbit as possible in order to maximize both the time the satellite is useful and the economics of sending it there in the first place. This tends to become rather untenable as the amount of space junk continues to pile up for all but the lowest of orbits, but a team at Brown University recently tested a satellite that might help solve this problem, at least for future satellite deployments.

The main test of this satellite was its drag sail, which increases its atmospheric drag significantly and reduces its spaceflight time to around five years. This might make it seem like a problem from an economics standpoint, as it’s quite expensive to build satellites and launch them into space, but this satellite solves these problems by being both extremely small to minimize launch costs, and also by being built out of off-the-shelf components not typically rated for spaceflight. For example, it gets its power solely from AA batteries and uses an Arduino for its operation and other research.

The satellite is currently in orbit, and has already descended from an altitude of 520 km to 470 km. While it won’t help reduce the existing amount of debris in orbit, the research team hopes to demonstrate that small satellites can be affordable and economically feasible without further contributing to the growing problem of space junk. If you’re looking to launch your own CubeSat one day, take a look at this primer which goes over most of the basics.