Omnibot Shows Off Over A Decade Of CNC Prowess

April 23, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 17 Comments

At first glance, you might think the Omnibot v3 wasn’t anything more than a basic 3D printed robotics platform, but you’d be wrong on both counts. There’s actually no 3D printed parts on the build, and while you could describe the platform as simplistic, calling it basic certainly doesn’t do the clever design justice. In the video after the break, creator [Michal] takes us through the process of designing and building this high quality bot.

The build starts with huge amounts of time and effort in a CAD program designing the Omnibot v3 with its four wheel steering and ability to do fancy things like spin in place. With the CAD and 3D renders out of the way, the process of transforming the digital into the physical began with a CNC router.

Rather than routing the individual components out of a suitable material, [Michal] cut forms. Those forms were made only for the creation of silicone molds. Those silicon molds where then used to pour the actual parts with polyurethane resin. It is these resin parts that make up the actual Omnibot v3, which is manually demonstrated at the end of the video.

All in all, it’s a neat project with a neat process. If we were to stop here, things would be mostly complete and you’d click on to the next great Hackaday article. But there’s more to be had here. You see, [Michal] is also fellow behind the Guerrilla guide to CNC and resin casting. In his own words: “CNC machining and resin casting are an underappreciated method for producing engineering-grade parts, but the process is fast, predictable, and garage-friendly.” After seeing the results, we can’t help but to agree.

By the way, before anybody in the comments can yell “DUPE!”, we already know. You see, we featured the Guerrilla guide to CNC and resin casting once before, almost exactly 11.5 years ago! It’s been updated since then, and appears to be an absolute gold mine of information for anybody wanting to walk in [Michal]’s shoes.

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Micromachining With A Laser

April 19, 2022 by Al Williams 3 Comments

[Breaking Taps] has a nice pulsed fiber laser and decided to try it to micromachine with silicon. You can see the results in the video below. Silicon absorbs the IR of the laser well, although the physical properties of silicon leave something to be desired. He also is still refining the process for steel, copper, and brass which might be a bit more practical.

The laser has very short duration pulses, but the pulses have a great deal of energy. This was experimental so some of the tests didn’t work very well, but some — like the gears — look great.

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2022 Sci-Fi Contest: A Friendly Wall Drawing Robot

April 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Drawing on walls is fine for children, but adults tend to get bored quickly with such antics. Even more so when they realize who is responsible for cleaning up afterwards. Instead, consider delegating those duties to a friendly helper by the name of Fumik, as [engineer2you] has done.

Fumik, who looks like a cute little jellyfish, can draw pictures up to 5 meters wide and 3 meters high, making for a massive canvas. Powered by an Arduino Mega 2560 outfitted with a CNC shield, a pair of stepper motors drive pulleys with toothed belts to move Fumik to various positions along the wall. Another smaller stepper motor is used to drive the pen forwards and backwards as needed. Fumik can be programmed to trace out various designs in SVG format. These must be converted to code and programmed into the Arduino, at which point Fumik can begin work, drawing on the wall with its pen.

It’s a fun build, and based on photos shared by [engineer2you,] Fumik is quite able at drawing clean and neat designs without a lot of smudging or jagged lines. As a bonus, it’s easy to swap out the pen, so multicolored designs can be drawn in multiple passes.

We’ve seen other robot drawing builds before, too, like this capable portrait artist. Video after the break.

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the water gravity air powered engine running

Gravity-Water-Air Powered Engine

March 28, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 19 Comments

Air engines are a common occurrence here on Hackaday. They’re relatively novel and reasonably easy to 3D print without requiring any fluids or supporting machinery. For example, [Tom Stanton] took a previous air engine design, did away with the air compressor, and instead used gravity and water to create just a few PSI to run the engine.

The basic setup is to have a large jug of water up somewhere high. Flexible tubing runs down to [Tom’s] custom acrylic pressure chamber. A little CNC-ing and some epoxy made a solid chamber, and we’re happy to report that [Tom] did some initial simulation before construction to make sure he wasn’t accidentally building a bomb. Some back of the napkin math showed that he could expect around 0.6 bar (around eight psi) with his setup. His first test showed almost precisely that. Unfortunately, [Tom] ran into some issues despite the early success. His engine would stop as it drew air and the pressure dropped, and the replenishing rate of the pressure was limited by the relatively small inlet hole he had drilled.

To fix this, he printed a larger diaphragm for the engine, so the lower air pressure had more to push against. This allowed the engine to run for a good while before the tank filled up. Additionally, he smoothed and polished everything, so it was as low friction as possible. We know we often state it here, but it is incredible what can be achieved with 3D printed parts these days.

We love seeing the iteration evident in this video. The various engine versions splayed across the table offer a powerful story about [Tom’s] persistence. Powering an engine is a small step to powering your whole home.

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Split Flap Display Tells Us The Word

March 2, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

LED and LCD displays are a technological marvel. They’ve brought the price of televisions and monitors down to unheard-of levels since the days of CRTs, but this upside arguably comes with an aesthetic cost. When everything is covered in bland computer screens, the world tends to look a lot more monotonous. Not so several decades ago when there were many sharply contrasting ways of displaying information. One example of this different time comes to us by way of this split-flap display that [Erich] has been recreating.

Split-flap displays work by printing letters or numbers on a series of flaps that are attached to a spindle with a stepper motor. Each step of the motor turns the display by one character. They can be noisy and do require a large amount of maintenance compared to modern displays, but have some advantages as well. [Erich]’s version is built out of new acrylic and MDF, and uses an Arduino as the control board. A 3D printer and CNC machine keep the tolerances tight enough for the display to work smoothly and also enable him to expand the display as needed since each character display is fairly modular.

Right now, [Erich]’s display has 20 characters on two different rows and definitely brings us back to the bygone era where displays of this style would have been prominent in airports and train stations. This display uses a lot of the basics from another split flap display that we featured a few years ago but has some improvements. And, if you’d prefer restorations of old displays rather than modern incarnations, we have you covered there as well.

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AR Display Shows CNC Lathe Operations In Real Time

February 16, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 16 Comments

[Kent VanderVelden] has come up with an interesting AR system to assist operators who are monitoring CNC lathes. (video, embedded, below) The idea is to first produce a ‘frozen’ video stream of the workpiece. This was achieved by placing a high-speed camera above the lathe, and triggering an image capture, synchronized to the rotational position of the workpiece. A high-speed rotary encoder, attached to the tailstock via a belt drive, feeds the current position into an Altera Terasic DE-Nano FPGA eval board. This is then compared to the position from another encoder, doing duty as an angular set point control. The resulting signal is used as the camera trigger to generate a video stream of just the frames where the angle is as selected by the operator, thus giving the impression of a frozen position. The video stream is sent over to a client device based on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a UPS hat, allowing it to be portable.

High speed rotary encoder driven via a belt

This video stream is overlaid with details of the current machine position, as well as the LinuxCNC G-code being executed and a graphical representation of the operation being performed by the machine. This combined video is then fed to a Vufine VUF-110 wearable, which is minimally invasive, allowing the operator to clearly see the machine of interest. As [Kent] suggests, there are many possible usage scenarios for such a setup, including remote monitoring of multiple operating machines by a single operator.

We’ve seen a few neat machine hacks over the years, here’s a nice project adding a programmable power feed to an old lathe, and since wood lathes are often missing out some DRO love, here’s a nice way to tell them that you care.

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Tiny CNC Cuts The Metal

January 28, 2022 by Al Williams 21 Comments

We’re no strangers to [Ivan]’s work and this time he’s building a relatively small CNC machine using extrusion, 3D printed parts, and a Makita router. The plans are available at a small cost, but just watching the accelerated build is fascinating.

You might think you could just attach something to an existing 3D printer frame that cuts like a Dremel tool. You can do that, but for most purposes, you need something stiffer than most desktop printers. You can see how solid this build is with multiple extrusions forming the base and very rigid axes.

Judging from the video, the machine made short work of some aluminum plate. Of course, some of that is in the choice of tool, but it appears the machine is stable enough to hold the workpiece and the tool stable to allow this sort of service. [Ivan] says the machine cost him about 600 Euro ($670 USD) and you need a printer that can create parts as large as 180 x 180 mm.

There are quite a few similar mostly 3D printed machines on Thingiverse, including some that have been through multiple versions. If you have an old 3D printer sitting around for parts, you may have nearly everything you need if you add some printed parts, presumably from your new printer.

We’ve seen plenty of CNC builds if you want to pick and choose your own design. Depending on your expectations, it doesn’t have to be an expensive project.

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