deflection

5 Articles

Fifteen Flat CRTs And A Bunch Of Magnets Make For Interactive Fun

January 6, 2023 by 46 Comments

If you were a curious child growing up when TVs were universally equipped with cathode ray tubes, chances are good that you discovered the effect a magnet can have on a beam of electrons. Watching the picture on the family TV warp and twist like a funhouse mirror was good clean fun, or at least it was right up to the point where you permanently damaged a color CRT by warping the shadow mask with a particularly powerful speaker magnet — ask us how we know.

To bring this experience to a generation who may never have seen a CRT display in their lives, [Niklas Roy] developed “Deflektron”, an interactive display for a science museum in Switzerland. The CRTs that [Niklas] chose for the exhibit were the flat-ish monochrome tubes that were used in video doorbell systems in the late 2000s, like the one [Bitluni] used for his CRT Game Boy. After locating fifteen of these things — probably the biggest hack here — they were stripped out of their cases and mounted into custom modules. The modules were then mounted into a console that looks a little like an 80s synthesizer.

In use, each monitor displays video from a camera mounted to the module. Users then get to use a selection of tethered neodymium magnets to warp and distort their faces on the screen. [Niklas] put a lot of thought into both the interactivity of the exhibit, plus the practical realities of a public installation, which will likely take quite a beating. He’s no stranger to such public displays, of course — you might remember his interactive public fountain, or this cyborg baby in a window.

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Enormous CNC Router Uses Clever Tricks To Improve Performance

December 16, 2020 by 32 Comments

CNC machines made from wood and 3D-printed parts may be popular, but they aren’t always practical from a precision and repeatability standpoint. This is especially true as the machines are scaled up in size, where the compliance of their components starts to really add up. But can those issues be resolved? [jamie clarke] thinks so, and he’s in the process of building a CNC router that can handle a full sheet of plywood. (Video, embedded below.)

This is very much a work in progress, and the videos below are only the very beginning of the process. But we found [jamie]’s build interesting even at this early point because he has included a few clever tricks to control the normal sources of slop that plague larger CNC machines. To provide stiffness on a budget, [jamie] went with a wooden torsion-box design for the bed of his machine. It’s the approach taken by the Root CNC project, which is the inspiration for this build. The bed is formed from shallow boxes that achieve their stiffness through stressed skins applied to rigid, lightweight frames.

Upon the torsion-box bed are guide rails made from commodity lengths of square steel tubing. Stiff these may be over short lengths, but over the three meters needed to access a full sheet of plywood, even steel will bend. [jamie]’s solution is a support that moves along with the carriage, which halves the unsupported length of the beam at all points of travel. He’s using a similar approach to fight whip in the ball screw, with a clever flip-down cradle at the midpoint of the screw.

So far, we’re impressed by the quality of this build. We’re looking forward to seeing where this goes and how well the machine performs, so we’re paying close attention to the playlist for updates. At an estimated build cost of £1,500, this might be just the CNC build you’ve been looking for.

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Camcorder Viewfinder Converted To Diminutive Vector Display

January 14, 2020 by 26 Comments

We generally cast a skeptical eye at projects that claim some kind of superlative. If you go on about the “World’s Smallest” widget, the chances are pretty good that someone will point to a yet smaller version of the same thing. But in the case of what’s touted as “The world’s smallest vector monitor”, we’re willing to take that chance.

If you’ve seen any of [Arcade Jason]’s projects before, you’ll no doubt have noticed his abiding affection for vector displays. We’re OK with that; after all, many of the best machines from the Golden Age of arcade games such as Asteroids and Tempest were based on vector graphics. None so small as the current work, though, based as it is on the CRT from an old camcorder’s viewfinder. The tube appears to be about 3/4″ (19 mm) in diameter, and while it still had some of its original circuitry, the deflection coils had to be removed. In their place, [Jason] used a ferrite toroid with two windings, one for vertical and one for horizontal. Those were driven directly by a two-channel push-pull audio amplifier to make patterns on the screen. Skip to 15:30 in the video below to see the display playing [Jerobeam Fenderson]’s “Oscilloscope Music”.

As much as we’d love to see a tiny game of Battlezone played on the diminutive display, there’s only so much it can do. Maybe an analog version of this adorable digital oscilloscope would be possible?

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Measuring The Stiffness Of 3D-Printed Parts

October 12, 2018 by 16 Comments

How do you choose filament when you want strong 3D-printed parts? Like most of us, you probably take a guess, or just use what you have on hand and hope for the best. But armed with a little knowledge on strength of materials, you might be able to make a more educated assessment.

To help you further your armchair mechanical engineer ambitions, [Stefan] has thoughtfully put together this video of tests he conducted to determine the stiffness of common 3D-printing plastics. He’s quick to point out that strength and stiffness are not the same thing, and that stiffness might be more important than strength in some applications. Strength measures how much stress can be applied to an element before it deforms, while stiffness describes how well an element returns to its original state after being stressed. The test rig [Stefan] built for the video analyzes stiffness by measuring the deflection of printed parts under increasing loads. Graphing the applied force versus the deflection gives an indication of the rigidity of the part, while taking the thickness of the material into account yields the bending modulus. The results are not terribly surprising, with polypropylene being the floppiest material and exotic composite filaments, like glass fiber or even “nanodiamond” reinforced PLA coming out as the stiffest. PLA, the workhorse filament, comes in around the middle of the pack.

[Stefan] did some great work here, but as he points out, in the final analysis it almost doesn’t matter what the stiffness and strength of the filament are since you can easily change your design and add more material where it’s needed. That only works up to a point, of course, but it’s one of the many advantages of additive manufacturing.

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Mechanisms: The Spring

April 13, 2018 by 63 Comments

Most people probably don’t think about springs until one kinks up or snaps, but most of the world’s springs are pretty crucial. The ones that aren’t go by the name Slinky.

We all use and encounter dozens of different types of springs every day without realizing it. Look inside the world of springs and you’ll find hundreds of variations on the theme of bounce. The principle of the spring is simple enough that it can be extended to almost any shape and size that can be imagined and machined. Because it can take so many forms, the spring as a mechanism has thousands of applications. Look under your car, take apart a retractable pen, open up a stapler, an oven door, or a safety pin, and you’ll find a spring or two. Continue reading “Mechanisms: The Spring” →