Mains Powered 3D Printer Heated Beds

December 16, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 160 Comments

Converting mains voltage down to 12 or 24VDC to drive a heating element makes no sense. To get 120 watts at 12 volts requires thick wires that can handle 10 amps, whereas at 120V, tiny 1A wires will do. If you’ve ever felt the MOSFET that switches your heated bed on and off, you know it’s working hard to pass that much current. [Makertum] is of the opinion this is a dumb idea. He’s creating a 110 / 230 V, mains-powered heated bed.

Creating a PCB heat bed isn’t an art – it’s a science. There are equations and variables to calculate, possibly some empirical measurements by measuring the resistance of a trace, but Ohm’s Law is a law for a reason. If you do things right, you can make a PCB heat bed perfectly suited for the task. You can even design in safety features like overcurrent protection and fuses. It can’t be that hard. After all, your house is full of devices that are plugged into the wall.

However, there’s a reason we use 12V and 24V heated beds – they give us, at the very least, the illusion of safety. Therefore, [Makertum] is looking for a few comments from specialists and people who know what they’re doing.

Although a mains powered heated bed sounds scary for a hobbyist-built 3D printer, there are a number of positives to the design. It would heat up faster, thin down a few parts, and significantly reduce the overall cost of the printer by not requiring another 100 Watts delivered from a 12V power supply. It’s a great idea if it doesn’t burn down the house. Anyone want to help?

Decypering The Hackaday.io Illuminati

December 16, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

A few months ago, a strange account popped up on hackaday.io. Whoever is behind this count is based in Bielefeld, Germany – a place that doesn’t exist. They are somehow related to the Berenstain / Berenstein Bears dimensional rift, and they may be responsible for giving Cap’n Crunch only three rank insignia on his uniform. There is something very, very strange about this account. Since August, a black and white image of static, 98 pixels wide and 518 pixels tall has sat on this account profile. The Illuminati has given us enough clues, but until now, no one has managed to crack the code.

The first person to make sense out of the patterns in static is [Moritz Walter]. What’s in the code? More codes. While that’s not really helpful, it is to be expected.

The hackaday illuminati included one additional piece of information with their encoded static image: a 12×12 pixel bitmap. When this bitmap was XORed with the main image, symbols appeared. In total, there are only seven unique symbols in the image. These symbols seem to be stolen from the Fez alphabet, but there are some significant differences. These symbols are rotated multiples of 90 degrees, and are surrounded by a one pixel border that is either black or white (we’re calling the border a ‘sign’ bit). In total, these seven symbols arranged in four different rotations with two different signs yields forty unique variations of a symbol in the decoded image. At this point, it should be noted 7*2*4 = 56.

As of now, cracking the illuminati’s cyphered machinations has hit a roadblock. There’s a dead image file on the illuminati’s profile. Until that image is rehosted, there is no way to progress any further. That’s not going to stop people from trying, though: the chat channels on hackaday.io have been buzzing about the newly decrypted images. Hopefully, with time, someone will figure out what it all means.

The Square Inch Project

December 11, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

For the last few years, Hackaday has been putting together some amazing contests. We gave away a trip to space, but the winner took the money instead. We gave away another trip to space, but those winners took the money instead. But we had a ton of fun along the way and are glad to see some others are getting in on the action. In September, a contest appeared out of the blue on hackaday.io. It is the Square Inch Project, a contest with the goal of stuffing the most electronics on a square inch of printed circuit board.

This wasn’t a contest designed, planned, or organized by anyone in charge here; this is a completely organic competition arranged and implemented by the hackaday.io community. A few months ago, a few notable hackaday.io people just decided to have a contest. Awesome.

OSHPark was kind enough to give out credits for PCBs as prizes, a we added in a few gift certificates to the Hackaday Store. Apparently that’s all you need to get a lot of people making a lot of cool stuff.

There are a lot of really great entries – far too many to cover in a single post – but you’ll find a few great ones below.

Continue reading “The Square Inch Project” →

Air Quality Surveillance For Whole Cities

November 7, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

Air quality is becoming a major issue these days, and not just for cities like Beijing and Los Angeles. It’s important for health, our environment, and our economy no matter where we live. To that end, [Radu] has been working on air quality monitors that will be widely deployed in order to give a high-resolution air quality picture, and he’s starting in his home city of Timisoara, Romania.

[Radu] built a similar device to measure background radiation (a 2014 Hackaday Prize Semifinalist), and another to measure air quality in several ways (a 2015 Hackaday Prize Finalist and a Best Product Finalist; winners will be announced next weekend). He is using the platforms as models for his new meter. The device will use a VOC air sensor and an optical dust sensor in a mobile unit connected to a car to gather data, and from that a heat map of air quality will be generated. There are also sensors for temperature, pressure, humidity, and background radiation. The backbone of the project is a smart phone which will upload the data to a server.

We’ve seen other air quality meters before as well, and even ones based around the Raspberry Pi, but this one has a much broader range of data that it is acquiring. Its ability to be implemented as an array of sensors to gather data for an entire city is impressive as well. We can envision sensor networks installed on public transportation but to get to all parts of every neighborhood it would be interesting to team up with the Google Streetview Cars, Uber, or UPS.

Hackaday.io Just Passed 100,000 Members

October 29, 2015 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

Today, Hackaday.io passed 100,000 registered users. It seems like yesterday that I wrote a post about passing 10k but that was last year already! Much has happened in that year, and there is much more to come. Thank you to everyone that makes Hackaday.io great by interacting with each other, posting about what is going on in basements, garages, hackerspaces, and workplaces, and finding new and interesting ways of making the site your very own. Your involvement has made Hackaday.io the greatest open source hardware resource in the world.

We don’t call it project hosting. The seed idea did start as project hosting for the hardware hacker, but Hackaday.io has long since outgrown that pair of shoes. It’s become a self-sustaining reaction that grows ever bigger and more awesome as everyone gets involved and decides how and what they want to do.

One of the major additions to Hackaday.io this year was group messaging. This spawned an explosion of new communities within Hackaday.io starting with the Hacker Channel. Anyone may request to be a team member and will then gain access to the group messaging; there are now well over 500 members. We’ve scheduled many somewhat-formal events on the channel over the last few months that invited people to show off what they’re building and ask for feedback. That evolved into topic-based sessions on things like FPGA design and what you need to know about manufacturing. Many of these were co-hosted by Hackaday Staff and community members.

This bizarre text is part of the itanimulli profile

A curious event on the site was the appearance of the user itanimulli who join and registered the vanity URL: /conspiracy. This is an enigma. The user is a puzzler and has posted a number of images and other challenges that appear to include hidden data. How do you solve something like this? Get all of your friends involved, of course! Thomas Wilson started a project to solve the itanimulli puzzle and posted about it on the stack to invite teammates to the challenge.

Hackaday.io has spilled over into the real world too. Do you ever look at the valuable odds and ends in your workshop that you know someone will use, but you never will? The Travelling Hacker Box is the answer to that conundrum. It’s the “take a penny, leave a penny” of the hacker world. Get on the project and get in line to receive the box. When it hits your workshop, take out something cool but then we want to see you build something with it! Replace what you took with something of your own and send it to the next person. International shipping has not been solved yet for this particular box, but nothing is stopping you from starting an EU version.

The support we’ve seen from the hardware community for Hackaday.io is one of the reasons we’ve set out to do something new. In just a few weeks the first ever Hackaday SuperConference will be held. Two days of talks and workshops let us meet in person the users we’ve grown close to through the site. I hope to see you there. But if not just ping me on Hackaday.io!

Or course 100k isn’t the only interesting number. We’ve got more juicy statistics in the image below.

Continue reading “Hackaday.io Just Passed 100,000 Members” →

You’re Never Too Young To Be A Rocket Scientist

October 27, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

We’ve been keeping tabs on the progress SpaceX has made toward landing a rocket so that it can be reused for future orbital launches. As you would imagine, this is incredibly difficult despite having some of the world’s greatest minds working on the task. To become one of those minds you have to start somewhere. It turns out, high school students can also build guided rockets, as [ArsenioDev] demonstrates in his project on hackaday.io.

[Arsenio]’s design targets amateur rockets with a fuselage diameter of four inches or so. The main control module is just a cylinder with four servos mounted along the perimeter and some fancy 3D printed fins bolted onto the servo. These are controlled by an Arduino and a 6DOF IMU that’s able to keep the rocket pointing straight up. Staaaay on target.

We saw this project back at the Hackaday DC meetup a month ago, and [Arsenio] was kind enough to give a short lightning talk to the hundred or so people who turned up. You can catch a video of that below, along with one of the videos of his build.

Continue reading “You’re Never Too Young To Be A Rocket Scientist” →

Laser Rangefinder Brought To Life With Arduino

October 21, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

Range finders are amazing tools for doing pretty much anything involving distance calculations. Want to blink some lights when people are nearby? There’s a rangefinder for that. Need to tell how far away the next peak of a mountain range is? There’s a rangefinder for that. But if you’re new to range finders and want one that’s hackable and configurable, look no further than the SF02/F rangefinder with the Arduino shield, and [Laser Developer]’s dive into what this pair can do.

Once the rangefinder and shield have been paired is when the magic really starts to happen. Using USB, the Arduino can instantly report a huge amount of raw data coming from the rangefinder. From there, [Laser Developer] shows us how to put the device into a “settings” mode which expands the capabilities of the rangefinder even more. The data can be dumped into a graph, for example, which can show trends between distance, laser strength, and many other data sets. [Laser Developer] goes one step further and demonstrates how to use this to calculate the speed of light, but from there pretty much anything else is possible as well.

And while you can just buy a rangefinder off the shelf, they are fairly limiting in their features and can cost exponentially more. This is a great start into using a tool like this, especially if you need specific data or have a unique application. But, if laser range finding isn’t for you or if this project is too expensive, maybe this $5 ultrasonic rangefinder will work better for your application.