Imagine trying to make a ball-shaped robot that rolls in any direction but with a head that stays on. When I saw the BB-8 droid doing just that in the first Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, it was an interesting engineering challenge that I couldn’t resist. All the details for how I made it would fill a book, so here are the highlights: the problems I ran into, how I solved them and what I learned.
Continue reading “My DIY BB-8: Problems, Solutions, Lessons Learned”
The Starship Enterprise (no bloody A, B, C, or D) recently got a makeover. It was donated to the Smithsonian, and the workers at the Air and Space Museum took it apart and put it back together. Why? It’s the 50th anniversary of TOS. Hopefully the new show will be using some practical effects.
After years of trying, we’ve finally attained max buzzword. Here’s a pentesting hacker quadcopter drone, “a hacker’s laptop that can fly.” Why would anyone do this? Because, “You need to be close to the wireless signal to be able to read it. [Danger Drone] removes that barrier of physical access.” For just $500, you can do the same thing a coat hanger yagi can do. Amazing.
Q2 reports for 3D printer companies! Lulzbot is going gangbusters yet again. We’re looking at the greatest success of Open Source Hardware here. Stratasys, on the other hand, lost less money in Q2 2016. That’s their good news.
About a year ago, we heard about an LCD that was one inch high and ten inches long. That’s bizarre, but great for rackmount gear. The company behind this weird LCD is updating this weird and wonderful LCD and giving it touchscreen capability.
On this week’s edition of, ‘you’re going to cut your arm off with that thing’, here’s an angle grinder converted into a chainsaw.
A few weeks ago, we posted a link to this video, demonstrating an absurdly clever method for creating a mold for a fiberglass dome. You can just use a pendulum and a pile of dirt. Now, the mold for this fiberglass dome is complete. [J Mantzel] has already pulled 1/8th of his gigantic fiberglass sphere out of his mold, and there are only seven more to go. After that, he’ll find out if these sphere sections actually line up.
UK peeps! Hackaday and Tindie are doing a London Meetup! Details to come, but follow the event page on Hackaday.io.
I arrived in Vegas a day (or two) early for DEF CON. Instead of contemplating the banality of existence on the strip, I decided on a meetup at the grave of James T. Kirk. The meetup was a huge success. Walking two miles in 115° heat was not a great idea, but I didn’t die.
Parabolic reflectors are pretty handy devices. Whether you’re building a microwave antenna or a long-distance directional microphone, suitable commercial dishes aren’t that hard to come by. But a big, shiny mirror for your solar death-ray needs is another matter, which is where this pressure-formed space blanket mirror might come in handy.
Pressure-forming was a great choice for [NighthawkInLight]’s mirror. We’ve covered pressure-formed plastic domes before, and this process is similar. A sheet of PVC with a recessed air fitting forms the platen. The metallized Mylar space blanket, stretched across a wooden frame to pull out the wrinkles and folds, is applied to a circle of epoxy on the platen. After curing, a few puffs with a bicycle tire pump forms the curve and stretches the film even smoother. [NighthawkInLight]’s first attempt at supporting the film with spray foam insulation was a bust, but the later attempt with fiberglass mesh worked great. A little edge support for the resulting shiny taco shell and the mirror was capable of the required degree of destructive potential.
We doubt this process can be optimized enough to produce astronomy-grade mirrors for visible light, but it still has a lot of potential applications. Maybe a fiberglass radio astronomy dish could be pressure-formed directly with a rig like this?
[Aykut Çelik] uses some strong words to describe how he feels about his VW Polo’s current radio set-up. Words like, “useless,” are bandied about. What is a modern man supposed to do with a car that doesn’t have built-in navigation or Bluetooth connectivity with phones? Listen to the radio? There are actual (mostly) self driving cars on the road now. No, [Aykut] moves forward, not backwards.
To fix this horrendous shortcoming in his car’s feature package, he set out to install a tablet in the dash. His blog write-up undersells the amount of work that went into the project, but the video after the break rectifies this misunderstanding. He begins by covering the back of a face-down Samsung tablet with a large sheet of plastic film. Next he lays a sheet of fiberglass over the tablet and paints it with epoxy until it has satisfactorily clung to the back of the casing. Afterwards comes quite a bit of work fitting an off-the-shelf panel display mount to the non-standard hardware. He eventually takes it to a local shop which does the final fitting on the contraption.
The electronics are a hodgepodge of needed parts: An amplifier, to replace the one that was attached to the useless husk of the prior radio set; a CAN shield for an Arduino, so that he could still use the steering wheel buttons; and a Bluetooth shield, so that the Arduino could talk to the tablet. Quite a bit of hacking happened, and the resulting software is on GitHub.
The final assembly went together well. While it’s no Tesla console. It does get over the air updates whenever he feels like writing them. [Aykut] moves forward with the times.
Continue reading “Fight That Tesla Envy With A Tablet Dash For Your Car”
When [hobbyman] wanted some 3D printed parts to attach a bag to his bike, he was worried that the parts would not be strong enough to hold when the bag was full. He decided to find a way to reinforce the part with fiberglass and epoxy. His first model had holes and grooves to be filled in with epoxy.
However, after working with the part for a bit, he decided to take a different approach. Instead of making the part nearly solid plastic with space for the epoxy, he instead created the part as a shell and then filled it with fibers and epoxy. After it all cured, a little sanding started removing some of the plastic shell and what was left was mostly a cast fiberglass part (although some of the plastic was left on).
Motorcycles are extremely efficient already, but if you want a torquey ride with a lot of acceleration, electric is the way to go. [ErikL] is hard at work transforming a 2005 Ninja 250R into an electric vehicle, both to get away from gas-sipping engines and as a really, really cool ride. Interestingly, the battery technology in this bike isn’t that advanced – it’s a lead acid battery, basically, that reduces the complexity of the build.
Motorcycles aren’t for everybody, but neither are normal, everyday, electronic conversion cars. [MW Motors] is building a car from scratch. The body, the chassis, and the power train are all hand built.
The amazing part of this build is how they created the body. It’s a fiberglass mold that was pulled off of a model carved out of a huge block of foam. There’s a lot of composite work in here, and a lot of work had to happen before digging into the foam; you actually need to choose your accessories, lights, and other bits and bobs before designing the body panels.
While the suspension and a lot of the mechanical parts were taken from a Mazda Miata, the power and drive system are completely custom. Most of the chassis is filled with LiFeMnPO4 batteries, powering four hub motors in each wheel. It’s going to be an amazing car.
If you’re designing an electric car, the biggest decision you’re going to make is what motor you’re going to use. This is a simple process: open up a few catalogs and see what manufacturers are offering. There’s another option: building your own motor. [Solenoid] is working on a piece of software that will calculate the specifications of a motor given specific dimensions. It will also generate files for a 3D printed motor given the desired specs. Yes, you’ll still need to wind a few miles of copper onto these parts, but it’s the beginning of completely custom electronic motors.
You whippersnappers these days with your 3D printers! Back in our day, we had to labor over a blank for hours, getting all sweaty and covered in foam dust. And it still wouldn’t come out symmetric. Shaping a surfboard used to be an art, and now you’re just downloading software and slinging STLs.
Joking aside, [Jody] made an incredible surfboard (yes, actual human-sized surfboard) out of just over 1 kilometer of ABS filament, clocking 164 hours of printing time along the way. That’s a serious stress test, and of course, his 3D printer broke down along the way. Then all the segments had to be glued together.
But the printing was the easy part; there’s also fiberglassing and sanding. And even though he made multiple mock-ups, nothing ever goes the same on opening night as it did in the dress rehearsal. But [Jody] persevered and wrote up his trials and tribulations, and you should give it a look if you’re thinking of doing anything large or in combination with fiberglass.
Even the fins are 3D printed and the results look amazing! We can’t wait for the ride report.
Shaka.
