fidget

5 Articles

A business-card-sized fidget spinner with the Hackaday logo.

2024 Business Card Challenge: POV Fidget Keeps Your Info In Their Hands

June 28, 2024 by 4 Comments

So what if we’re halfway through 2024? People who needed to fidget all along still need something to do with their hands. So why not hand them a solution with your information on it?

Not only will this spin nicely, the spinning action will use magnets to energize PCB coils and light up LEDs for some persistence of vision action. Designing the PCB was easier than you might imagine thanks to KiMotor, a KiCad plugin to automate the design of parametric PCB motors.

Mechanical testing went pretty well with the bearings and magnets that [mulcmu] had on hand, along with a scrap PCB as the sacrifice. Although a bit difficult to hold, it spins okay with just the bearing and the shaft. Once the boards arrived, it was time to test the electrical side. So far, things are not looking good — [mulcmu] is only getting a few tens of mV out of the rectifier — but they aren’t giving up hope yet. We can’t wait to see this one in action!

Hurry! This is the last weekend to enter the 2024 Business Card Challenge! Technically you have until Tuesday, July 2nd, but you know what we mean. Show us what you’ve got!

2024 Business Card Challenge

Tighten This Bolt In Any Direction You Want

January 4, 2021 by 49 Comments

Metal lathes are capable machines that played a large role in the industrial revolution, and an incredible tool to have at your disposal. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be used to have a little fun, as demonstrated by [Oleg Pevtsov] who made a bidirectional bolt as a machining exercise just because he could.

Both videos after the break are in Russian, but the video and auto generated subtitles are enough to get the main points across. The bolt is an M42 size with a 40 mm pitch, with grooves cut in both directions to allow left-handed and right-handed nuts to be threaded. The large pitch means that instead of a single continuous groove like a normal bolt, ten separate grooves need to be cut for each threading direction to cover the bolt surface. Since this was all machined on a manual lathe, a dial indicator was required to maintain accurate spacing. It took [Oleg] four painstaking attempts to get it right, but the end result looks very good. Instead of a fixed cutter, he used a trimming router mounted on a custom clamp.

[Oleg] also machined three different brass nuts to go on the bolt with a fixed cutter. First left-hand and right hand threaded nuts were made, followed by a bidirectional nut. Due to the large pitch and careful machining, all three nuts will spin down the bolt under the force of gravity alone. Although the bidirectional nut doesn’t move as smoothly as the other two, it can change rotation and translation direction at random.

While this is a one-of-a-kind fidget toy, have any of our readers seen a bidirectional bolt or lead screw in the wild? We can imagine that the ability to move two nuts in opposite directions on a single lead screw might have some practical applications.

It’s possible to make incredible parts on a manual lathe. A handbuilt V10 engine and a pneumatic hexacopter model are just two examples of what’s possible with enough skill, knowledge, and patience. Sadly it is a fading form of craftsmanship, rendered mostly obsolete outside of hobby projects by CNC machines.

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Fidget Pyramid With Help From A 2500 Pound Robot

March 12, 2017 by 16 Comments

Depending on whom you ask, fidgeting is an unsightly habit or a necessity for free-form ideation. Fan of the latter hypothesis? Well, why aren’t you making yourself a fidget pyramid?

[lignum] sculpted his fidget toy out of a chunk of 2000 year old bog-oak using hand tools and a little precision help from a Kuka KR 150 industrial robot arm. A push button, a toggle switch, a ball-bearing, and a smooth side provide mindless distraction on this piece.

Two plates of 1.5mm aluminium — also cut using the robot arm — are used to attach the button and toggle to the tetrahedron, while the ball bearing is pushed onto a cylindrical protrusion left during the cutting process for the purpose. The build video makes it look easy.

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