cnc

652 Articles

Clock Of Clocks Expands, Goes Digital

August 8, 2025 by 9 Comments

Some people just want to have their cake and eat it too, but very few of us ever get to pull it off. [Erich Styger] has, though with V5 of his “MetaMetaClock”— a clock made of clocks, that uses the orientation of the hands to create digits.

We’ve seen previous versions of this clock. As before, the build is exquisitely detailed and all relevant files are on GitHub. This version keeps the acrylic light-pipe hands of version 4, but adds more of them: 60 clocks vs 24. Larger PCBs are used, grouping the dual-shaft steppers into groups of four, instead of the individual PCBs used before. Each PCB has an NXP LPC845 (a Cortex M0 microcontroller) that communicates on an RS-485 bus. Placing four steppers per microcontroller reduces parts count somewhat compared to previous versions (which had each ‘clock’ on its own modular PCB) albeit at the cost of some flexibility.

While the last version used veneers on its face, this version is cut by CNC by from a large slab of oak. It’s certainly the most attractive version yet, and while bigger isn’t always better, more clock faces means more potential effects. Date? Time? Block letters? Arbitrary text? Kaleidoscopic colours from the RGB LEDs? It’s all there, and since it’s open source, anyone who builds one can add more options. A BLE interface makes it quick and easy to wirelessly switch between them or set the time.

It’s nice sometimes to watch projects like this improve incrementally over time. [Erich] mentions that he plans to add Wifi and a web-based user interface for the next version. We look forward to it, and are grateful to  [jicasi] for the tip. Just as it is always clock time at Hackaday, so you can always toss a tip of your own into the box.

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Skateboard Wheels Add Capabilities To Plasma Cutter

July 28, 2025 by 4 Comments

Although firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist now, the skateboard wasn’t always a staple of popular culture. It had a pretty rocky start as surfers jankily attached roller skating hardware to wooden planks searching for wave-riding experiences on land. From those rough beginnings it still took decades of innovation until Rodney Mullen adapted the ollie for flatground skating before the sport really took off. Skateboard hardware is quite elegant now too; the way leaning turns the board due to the shape of the trucks is immediately intuitive for even the most beginner riders, and bearing technology is so high-quality and inexpensive now that skateboard hardware is a go-to parts bin grab for plenty of other projects like this plasma cutter modification.

[The Fabrication Series]’s plasma cutter is mounted to a CNC machine, allowing for many complex cuts in much less time than it would take to do by hand. But cutting tubes is a more complicated endeavor for a machine like this. This is where the skateboard hardware comes in: by fabricating two custom pivoting arms each with two skateboard wheels that push down on a tube to hold it in place, the CNC machine can roll the tube along the table in a precise way as the plasma cutter works through it.

Of course, cutting a moving part is a little more complicated for the CNC machine than cutting a fixed piece of sheet metal, so [The Fabrication Series] walks us through a few ways of cutting pipe for various purposes, including miters and notches. The first step is to build a model of the pipes, in this case using Onshape, and then converting the 3D model of the pipes into a sheet metal model that the CNC machine can use. It does take a few cuts on the machine to fine-tune the cuts, but in no time the machine is effortlessly cutting complex shapes into the pipe. Don’t have a plasma cutter at all? You can always build your own from scratch.

Thanks to [JohnU] and [paulvdh] for the tip!

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The bed of a small CNC machine is shown. A plastic tub is on the bed, and in the tub is a sheet of metal under a pale green solution. In place of the spindle of the CNC, there is a rectangular orange tube extending down into the solution. A red wire runs to this tube, and a black wire runs to the sheet of metal in the tub.

Painting In Metal With Selective Electroplating

July 24, 2025 by 5 Comments

Most research on electroplating tries to find ways to make it plate parts more uniformly. [Ajc150] took the opposite direction, though, with his selective electroplating project, which uses an electrode mounted on a CNC motion system to electrochemically print images onto a metal sheet (GitHub repository).

Normally, selective electroplating would use a mask, but masks don’t allow gradients to be deposited. However, electroplating tends to occur most heavily at the point closest to the anode, and the effect gets stronger the closer the anode is. To take advantage of this effect, [ajc150] replaced the router of an inexpensive 3018 CNC machine with a nickel anode, mounted an electrolyte bath in the workspace, and laid a flat steel cathode in it. When the anode moves close to a certain point on the steel cathode, most of the plating takes place there.

To actually print an image with this setup, [ajc150] wrote a Python program to convert an image into set of G-code instructions for the CNC. The darker a pixel of the image was, the longer the electrode would spend over the corresponding part of the metal sheet. Since darkness wasn’t linearly proportional to plating time, the program used a gamma correction function to adjust times, though this did require [ajc150] to recalibrate the setup after each change. The system works well enough to print recognizable images, but still has room for improvement. In particular, [ajc150] would like to extend this to a faster multi-nozzle system, and have the algorithm take into account spillover between the pixel being plated and its neighbors.

This general technique is reminiscent of a metal 3D printing method we’ve seen before. We more frequently see this process run in reverse to cut metal.

Lit up coffee table

Smart Coffee Table To Guide Your Commute

July 13, 2025 by 8 Comments

One of the simple pleasures of life is enjoying a drive to work… only to get stuck in traffic that you could’ve known about if you just checked before your daily commute. Who are we kidding? There’s almost nothing worse. [Michael Rechtin] saw this as a great opportunity to spruce up his living room with something practical, a coffee table that serves as a traffic map of Cincinnati.

The table itself is fairly standard with mitered joints at the corners and coated in polyurethane. Bolt on a few legs, and you’ve got a coffee table. But the fun comes with the fancy design on top. A CNC-cut map of Cincinnati is laid out under a sheet of glass. Roads and rivers are painted for a nice touch.

Of course, none of the woodcraft is what gets the attention. This is where the LED light show comes in. On top of the map resides an animated display of either road conditions or the other five pre-programmed animations. The animations include color-coded highways or the good ole’ gamer RGB. To control all of the topographic goodness, a Raspberry Pi is included with some power regulation underneath the table. Every minute, the Pi is able to grab live traffic data from the cloud to display on top.

A looker, this project shows how our hacking fun can be integrated directly into our everyday life in more subtle ways. When we want to decorate ourselves, however, we might want to turn to more personal fare. Check out this miniature liquid simulation pendant for some more everyday design.

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The PCB Router You Wish You Had Made

June 14, 2025 by 41 Comments

The advent of cheap and accessible one-off PCB production has been one of the pivotal moments for electronic experimenters during the last couple of decades. Perhaps a few still etch their own boards, but many hobbiest were happy to put away their ferric chloride. There’s another way to make PCBs, though, which is to mill them. [Tom Nixon] has made a small CNC mill for that purpose, and it’s rather beautiful.

In operation it’s a conventional XYZ mechanism, with a belt drive for the X and Y and a lead screw for the Z axis. The frame is made from aluminium extrusion, and the incidental parts such as the belt tensioners are 3D printed. The write-up is very comprehensive, and takes the reader through all the stages of construction. The brains of the outfit is a Creality 3D printer controller, but he acknowledges that it’s not the best for the job.

It’s certainly not the first PCB router we’ve seen, but it may be one of the nicer ones. If you make a PCB this way, you might like to give it professional-looking solder mask with a laser.

“Unnecessary” Automation Of A DIY Star Lamp Build

March 23, 2025 by 10 Comments

It all started with a gift idea: a star-field lamp in the form of a concrete sphere with lightpipes poking out where the stars are, lit up from the inside by LEDs. When you’re making one of these, maybe-just-maybe you’d be willing to drill a thousand holes and fit a thousand little plastic rods, but by the time you’re making a second, it’s time to build a machine to do the work for you.

So maybe we quibble with the channel name “Unnecessary Automation,” but we won’t quibble with the results. It’s a machine that orients a sphere, drills the hole, inserts the plastic wire, glues it together with a UV-curing glue, and then trims the end off. And if you like crazy machines, it’s a beauty.

The video goes through all of the design thoughts in detail, but it’s when it comes time to build the machine that the extra-clever bits emerge. For instance, [UA] used a custom 3D-printed peristaltic pump to push the glue out. Taking the disadvantage of peristaltic pumps – that they pulse – as an advantage, a custom housing was designed that dispensed the right amount between the rollers. The rolling glue dispenser mechanism tips up and back to prevent drips.

There are tons of other project-specific hacks here, from the form on the inside of the sphere that simplifies optic bundling and routing to the clever use of a razor blade as a spring. Give it a watch if you find yourself designing your own wacky machines. We think Rube Goldberg would approve. Check out this video for a more software-orientated take on fiber-optic displays.

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CNC Router And Fiber Laser Bring The Best Of Both Worlds To PCB Prototyping

March 4, 2025 by 22 Comments

Jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes, and that’s especially true for PCB prototyping tools. Sure, it’s possible to use a CNC router to mill out a PCB, and ditto for a fiber laser. But neither tool is perfect; the router creates a lot of dust and the fiberglass eats a lot of tools, while a laser is great for burning away copper but takes a long time to burn through all the substrate. So, why not put both tools to work?

Of course, this assumes you’re lucky enough to have both tools available, as [Mikey Sklar] does. He doesn’t call out which specific CNC router he has, but any desktop machine should probably do since all it’s doing is drilling any needed through-holes and hogging out the outline of the board, leaving bridges to keep the blanks connected, of course.

Once the milling operations are done, [Mikey] switches to his xTool F1 20W fiber laser. The blanks are placed on the laser’s bed, the CNC-drilled through holes are used as fiducials to align everything, and the laser gets busy. For the smallish boards [Mikey] used to demonstrate his method, it only took 90 seconds to cut the traces. He also used the laser to cut a solder paste stencil from thin brass shim stock in only a few minutes. The brief video below shows the whole process and the excellent results.

In a world where professionally made PCBs are just a few mouse clicks (and a week’s shipping) away, rolling your own boards seems to make little sense. But for the truly impatient, adding the machines to quickly and easily make your own PCBs just might be worth the cost. One thing’s for sure, though — the more we see what the current generation of desktop fiber lasers can accomplish, the more we feel like skipping a couple of mortgage payments to afford one.

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