Hackaday Links: May 18, 2014

May 18, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

Think the original Pong is cool? How about point to point Pong? [v8ltd] did it in three months, soldering all the leads directly to the chip pins. No sockets required. It’s insane, awesome, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, and surprising it works.

[Jeremy Cook] is building a servo-powered light graffiti thing and needed a laser diode. How do you control a laser pointer with a microcontroller? Here’s how. They’re finicky little buggers, but if you get the three-pack from Amazon like [Jeremy] did, you get three chances to get it right.

NFC tags in everything! [Becky] at Adafruit is putting them in everything. Inside 3D printed rings, glued onto rings, and something really clever: glued to your thumbnail with nail polish. Now you can unlock your phone with your thumb instead of your index finger.

Photographs capture still frames, but wouldn’t it be great if a camera could capture moving images? No, we’re not talking about video because this is the Internet where every possible emotion, reaction, and situation can be expressed with an animated GIF. Meet OTTO, the camera that captures animated GIFs! It’s powered by the Raspberry Pi compute module, so that’s interesting.

[Nate] was getting tired of end mills rolling around his bench. That’s a bad thing. He came up with a solution, though: Mill a piece of plywood into a tray to hold end mills.

The Da Vinci printer, a printer that only costs $500 because they’re banking on the Gillette model, has been cracked wide open by resetting the DRM, getting rid of the proprietary host software, and unbricking the device. Now there’s a concerted effort to develop custom firmware for the Da Vinci printer. It’s extraordinarily bare bones right now, but the pins on the microcontroller are mapped, and RepRap firmwares are extremely modular.

Unbricking The Da Vinci And Installing Custom Firmware

May 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 67 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of projects based around the Da Vinci 3D printer, all deserved, because the Da Vinci is honestly a terrible 3D printer; it has chipped and DRM filament cartridges, a terrible software interface, and completely closed firmware. The first two shortcomings have already been taken care of, and now the door is open for open source firmware on the Da Vinci printer.

[Jason] bricked his Da Vinci when upgrading the firmware, and like any enterprising tinkerer opened up the enclosure and took a look at the electronics board. He found an ATSAM3X8E, a very capable ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. This is the same processor in the Arduino Due, making it possible to write code for the Due and upload it to the Da Vinci controller.

After installing Atmel Studio 6, he noticed the printer controller showed up in the device manager, making it a snap to upload updated firmware, unbricking his printer.

With the ability to upload firmware, the problem quickly becomes writing new open source firmware, or at least porting existing firmwares; there are a few people across the internet trying to reverse engineer the board schematic from the PCB. Once that’s done, it should be a trivial matter to make the Da Vinci an open device, and teaching a lesson to every company that thinks they can sell a closed device in what is ultimately an open ecosystem.

Using Non-Crappy Software With The Da Vinci Printer

April 17, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 107 Comments

The Da Vinci printer from XYZprinting is turning out to be one of the best buys in the world of cheap, consumer printers. Sure, it uses chipped filament, but that’s an easy fix for anyone who knows what a .hex file is. And yes, the Da Vinci host software is a mess of proprietary garbage with limited functionality, but [Mark] has figured out a way around that.

When [Mark] received his Da Vinci, he immediately started snooping around inside the printer’s guts, like any good tinkerer should. He found an SD card holding all the sample prints that ship with the printer, all in a convenient Gcode format. Inside these sample .STL files were all the calls you would expect – setting the temperature, changing the layer height, and all the other good stuff you’d find in any other RepRap.

With a little bit of modification to .STL files generated by any slicing program, [Mark] isn’t limited any more by the terrible host software that ships with the Da Vinci. Combine this with the ability to reset the chip inside the filament cartridge, and [Mark] has a printer at least as functional as any open hardware model.

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Resetting DRM On 3D Printer Filament

April 10, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 94 Comments

The Da Vinci 3D printer is, without a doubt, the future of printing plastic objects at home. It’s small, looks good on a desk, is fairly cheap, and most importantly for printer manufacturers, uses chipped filament cartridges that can’t be refilled.

[Oliver] over at Voltivo was trying to test their new printer filament with a Da Vinci and ran head-on into this problem of chipped filament. Digging around inside the filament cartridge, he found a measly 300 grams of filament and a small PCB with a Microchip 11LC010 EEPROM. This one kilobyte EEPROM contains all the data about what’s in the filament cartridge, including the length of filament remaining.

After dumping the EEPROM with an Arduino and looking at the hex file, [Oliver] discovered the amount of filament remaining was held in a single two-byte value. Resetting this value to 0xFFFF restores the filament counter to its virgin state, allowing him to refill the filament. A good thing, too; the cartridge filament is about twice as expensive as what we would normally buy.

Da Vinci’s Viola Organista

November 19, 2013 by James Hobson 34 Comments

hurdy gurdy

Leonardo Da Vinci had many unfinished projects, not unlike many hackers here. Lucky for us though, he was a bit better at writing down his ideas than we are. This is his Viola Organista, as recreated by [Slawomir Zubrzycki] — a mechanical work of art, that sounds good too!

If you’re familiar with a Hurdy gurdy, this is basically the same thing — but on a much bigger scale. It is the combination of an organ, a harp, and a viola. Instead of a hammer hitting the 61 steel-strings, spinning wheels of horse-hair (similar to a bow) caress each string via input from the keyboard and the pedal powered crankshaft. The result is a very unique sound, which is reminiscent to each of the instruments it combines.

The designs for the instrument were found in Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, a 12-volume collection of many of his manuscripts and designs, documenting everything from his flying machines to weaponry. [Slawomir] spent three years and over 5000 hours perfecting his version of it.

Stick around after the break to hear it in action! Don’t forget to turn on the subtitles though, unless you’re fluent in Polish!

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