arduino

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Arduino Bobbin Winding Machine Is Freaky Fast

October 20, 2020 by 16 Comments

One of the worst things about sewing is finding out that your bobbin — that’s the smaller spool that works together with the needle and the larger spool to make a complete stitch — ran out of thread several stitches ago. If you’re lucky, the machine has a viewing window on the bobbin so you can easily tell when it’s getting dangerously close to running out, but many machines (ours included) must be taken halfway apart and the bobbin removed before it can be checked.

Having spare bobbins ready to go is definitely the answer. We would venture to guess that most (if not all) machines have a built-in bobbin winder, but using them involves de-threading the machine and setting it up to wind bobbins instead of sew. If you have a whole lot of sewing to do and can afford it, an automatic bobbin winder is a godsend. If you’re [Mr. Innovative], you build one yourself out of acrylic, aluminium, and Arduinos.

Here’s how it works: load up the clever little acrylic slide with up to twelve empty bobbins, then dial in the speed percentage and press the start button. The bobbins load one at a time onto a drill chuck that’s on the output shaft of a beefy 775 DC motor. The motor spins ridiculously fast, loading up the bobbin in a few seconds. Then the bobbin falls down a ramp and into a rack, and the thread is severed by a piece of nichrome wire.

An important part of winding bobbins is making sure the thread stays in place at the start of the wind. We love the way [Mr. Innovative] handled this part of the problem — a little foam doughnut around a bearing holds the thread in place just long enough to get the winding started. The schematic, BOM, and CAD files are available if you’d like to make one of these amazing machines for yourself. In the meantime, check out the demo/build video after the break.

Still not convinced that sewing is cool enough to learn? Our own [Jenny List] may be able to convert you. If that doesn’t get you, you might like to know that some sewing machines are hackable — this old girl has a second life as a computerized embroidery machine. If those don’t do it, consider that sewing machines can give you a second life, too.

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Precision Metal Detector Finds Needles In Haystacks

October 18, 2020 by 11 Comments

Full-size metal detectors are great for narrowing down a region to start digging through. But what if you had a smaller metal detector that could pinpoint the location? Then you could spend far less time digging and way more time sweeping for metal.

Metal detectors work because of the way metal behaves around electromagnetic fields. [mircemk] reused the ferrite core from an old MW radio to build the antenna coils. When metal objects are close enough, the induced electromagnetism changes the frequency, and the Arduino blinks an LED and beeps a buzzer in time with the new frequency.

[mircemk]’s handheld metal detector is quite sensitive, especially to smaller objects. As you can see in the demo video after the break, it can sense coins from about 4cm away, larger objects like lids from about 7 cm, and tiny things like needles from a few millimeters away. There’s also an LED for treasure hunting in low light.

Don’t want to pinpoint a bunch of useless junk? Build in some phase detection to help you discriminate.

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Turning A Desk Drawer Into A Flight Yoke

October 17, 2020 by 9 Comments

[Christofer Hiitti] found himself with the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator on his PC, but the joystick he ordered was still a few weeks out. So he grabbed an Arduino, potentiometers and a button and hacked together what a joke-yoke.

The genius part of this hack is the way [Christopher] used his desk drawer for pitch control. One side of a plastic hinge is attached to a potentiometer inside a drawer, while the other side is taped to the top of the desk. The second pot is taped to the front of the drawer for pitch control and the third pot is the throttle. It works remarkably well, as shown in the demo video below.

The linearity of the drawer mechanism probably isn’t great, but it was good enough for a temporary solution. The Arduino Leonardo he used is based on the ATmega32u4 which has a built-in USB, and with libraries like ArduinoJoystickLibrary the computer interface very simple. When [Christopher]’s real joystick finally arrived he augmented it with a button box built using the joke-yoke components.

There’s no doubt that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 will spawn a lot of great controller and cockpit builds over the next few years. We’ve already covered a new joystick build, and a 3D printed frame to turn an Xbox controller into a joystick.

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Building This Mechanical Digital Clock Took Balls

October 13, 2020 by 26 Comments

In the neverending quest for unique ways to display the time, hackers will try just about anything. We’ve seen it all, or at least we thought we had, and then up popped this purely mechanical digital clock that uses nothing but steel balls to display the time. And we absolutely love it!

Click to embiggen (you’ll be glad you did)

One glimpse at the still images or the brief video below shows you exactly how [Eric Nguyen] managed to pull this off. Each segment of the display is made up of four 0.25″ (6.35 mm) steel balls, picked up and held in place by magnets behind the plain wood face of the clock. But the electromechanical complexity needed to accomplish that is the impressive part of the build. Each segment requires two servos, for a whopping 28 units plus one for the colon. Add to that the two heavy-duty servos needed to tilt the head and the four needed to lift the tray holding the steel balls, and the level of complexity is way up there. And yet, [Eric] still managed to make the interior, which is packed with a laser-cut acrylic skeleton, neat and presentable, as well he might since watching the insides work is pretty satisfying.

We love the level of craftsmanship and creativity on this build, congratulations to [Eric] on making his first Arduino build so hard to top. We’ve seen other mechanical digital displays before, but this one is really a work of art.

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World’s Smallest Version Of World’s Fastest Bumper Car

October 12, 2020 by 6 Comments

A few years ago, YouTubing madman [Colin Furze] took an old bumper car and made a 600-horsepower beast of a go-kart that managed to clock 100MPH with a headwind. This isn’t that. It’s a miniaturized, remote-control homage to [Colin]’s go-kart that is equally awesome.

[Forsyth Creations] started by CAD-modeling the chassis right on top of a still from the video. The entire body is 3D-printed in four large pieces, which took several days because each piece took around 24 hours. Inside the car there’s an Arduino brain driving a motor in the back and a servo in the front. This bad boy runs on a couple of rechargeable battery packs and can be controlled with either a Wii balance board or a PS2 controller. This thing really moves, although it doesn’t quite reach 100MPH. Watch it zoom around in the video after the break.

Got a Segway lying around that just doesn’t do it for you anymore? You could always turn it into a go-kart. Never had a Segway to begin with? Just roll your own.

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Procedural Barcode Synth Is As Simple As Black And White

October 10, 2020 by 3 Comments

We are no stranger to peculiar and wonderful musical instruments here at Hackaday. [James Bruton] has long been fascinated with barcode scanners as an input source for music and now has a procedural barcode-powered synth to add to his growing collection of handmade instruments. We’ve previously covered his barcode guitar, which converts a string of numbers from the PS/2 output to pitches. This meant having a large number of barcodes printed as each pitch required a separate barcode. As you can imagine, this makes for a rather unwieldy and large instrument.

Rather than looking at the textual output of the reader, [James] cracked it open and put it to the oscilloscope. Once inside, he found a good source that outputs a square wave corresponding to the black and white lines that the barcode sees. Since the barcodes [James] is using don’t have the proper start and stop codes, the barcode reader continuously scans.  Normally it would stop the laser to send the text over the USB or PS/2 connection. A simple 5v to 3.3v level shifter feeds that square wave into a Teensy board, which outputs the audio.

A video showcasing a similar technique inspired [James] with this project. The creators of that video have a huge wall of different patterns of black and white lines. [James’s] next stroke of brilliance was to have a small HDMI display to generate the barcodes on the fly. A Raspberry Pi 4 reads in various buttons via GPIO and displays the resulting barcode on the screen. A quick 3d printed shell rounds out the build nicely, keeping things small and compact. All the code and CAD files are up on GitHub.

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Starshine Is A MIDI Controller For The Musically Shy

October 10, 2020 by 10 Comments

What keeps people from playing music? For one thing, it’s hard. But why is it hard? In theory, it’s because theory is confusing. In practice, it’s largely because of accidentals, or notes that sound sour compared to the others because they aren’t from the same key or a complementary key.

What if there were no accidentals? Instruments like this exist, like the harmonica and the autoharp. But none of them look as fun to play as [Bardable]’s Starshine, the instrument intended to be playable by everyone. The note buttons on the outside are laid out and programmed such that [Bardable] will never play off-key.

We love the game controller form factor, which was also a functional choice. On the side that faces the player, there’s a PSP joystick and two potentiometers for adding expression with your thumbs. The twelve buttons on this side serve several functions like choosing the key and the scale type depending on the rocker switch position. A second rocker lets [Bardable] go up or down an octave on the fly. There’s also an OLED to show everything from the note being played to the positions of the potentiometers. If you want to know more, [Bardable] made a subreddit for this and other future instruments, and has a full tour video after the break.

If this beginner-friendly MIDI controller isn’t big enough for you, check out Harmonicade’s field of arcade buttons.

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