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531 Articles

Neato Botvac LiDAR Repair Includes Juicy Pics And A Tool Hack

September 28, 2015 by 4 Comments

It seems second nature to us and it’s one of the ways we hackers are different from the larger population… sometimes we absolutely insist on buying something that is already broken. Which is where we join [Anton] as he reverse engineers, debugs, and repairs a broken Neato Botvac’s LiDAR system all in the name of having clean floors at a fraction of the cost.

Now keep your head on a swivel ’cause along the way [Anton] has the all-too familiar point in his repair where he puts the original project on hold while he makes a specialized tool he needs to finish the job. It’s hard to tell which is more impressive: turning a laptop webcam into a camera capable of clearly viewing bond wires and (wait for it!) where they are attached on the Silicon, or that he (yeah, we were making a comparison…member?) went straight back to solving the original problem. [Anton] did split this project into two separate blog posts, the first one is linked above and it’s not until the second post that he fixes the original problem. Perhaps there was a bit of scope creep, which was the reason for the separate blog entries? At any rate, [Anton] does a great job documenting the process along with what he calls some ‘juicy pictures’ and you can see a few of them after the break.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Neato hack (there’s pun in there somewhere, commenters below us will surely wipe the floor with it). LiDar on the other hand has been covered more recently in a Police LiDAR Tear Down and another post relating more directly to [Anton’s] repair.

Continue reading “Neato Botvac LiDAR Repair Includes Juicy Pics And A Tool Hack” →

Sinterit Pulls SLS 3D Printer Entry Level Price Down To Just $8k

September 10, 2015 by 27 Comments

Almost exactly two years ago, news of a great revolution in 3D printing carried itself through blogs and tech columns. Patents were expiring, and soon the ‘squirting filament’ printers would be overtaken by a vastly better method: selective laser sintering. In the last two years, the market has been markedly silent on the possibilities of SLS technology, until now, at least. Today, Sinterit is launching their first printer. It’s an SLS printer that builds objects by fusing nylon powder with a laser, producing things with much better quality than filament-based printers.

The Sinterit Lisa is a true laser sintering printer, able to create objects by blasting nylon powder with a 5W laser diode. Inside this box that’s about the same size as a laser printer is a CoreXY mechanism to move the laser diode around, heated pistons, cylinders, feed bed and print bed for keeping the print volume at the right temperature and the top layer perfectly flat. The layer thickness of the printer goes down to 0.06 mm, and the maximum print size is 13 x 17 x 13 cm. Material choice is, for now, limited to black PA12 nylon but other materials are being tested.

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CO2 Laser Decapping To Fix Soldering Mistake

August 29, 2015 by 59 Comments

[Carsten] messed up. He was soldering an ARM CPU onto a quadcopter board in haste, failed to notice that the soldering iron was turned up to eleven, and pulled some of the traces up off the PCB. In the process of trying to fix that, he broke three pins off of the 100-pin CPU. The situation was going from bad to worse.

Instead of admitting defeat, or maybe reflowing the CPU off of the board, [Carsten] lasered the epoxy case off of the chip down to the lead frame and worked a little magic with some magnet wire. A sweet piece of work, to be sure!

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Fast ADC Uses Old School Scope Hack For 48 MSPS

July 21, 2015 by 41 Comments

[Carlos] needed an ADC with a 50 nanosecond sample period for his laser lab, that’s 20Msps! (20 million samples a second). While in recent years, commodity ADCs reaching into the low GSPS have become available, integrated acquisition systems are still somewhat expensive. So [Carlos] decided to do what every good hacker does, and built his own solution. His project post pretty much just links to a whitepaper he wrote (PDF) so we’ll try and boil it down for you:

In order to simplify development [Carlos] borrowed a technique commonly used in the first era of digital oscilloscopes, Equivalent Sampling Time.

est

The figure to the right is from the TDS460 manual. While it may seem counter intuitive to those only familiar with modern scopes, the TDS460 achieved a 400MHz bandwidth using a 100MSPS ADC. In order to achieve this the scope acquires a single trace in multiple cycles, each time offsetting the acquisitions as shown and combining the result.

In this way, early digital scope developers could sidestep the limitations of the available ADCs to achieve a higher effective bandwidth. However there is of course one catch: the technique only works for periodic signals.

This was fine for [Carlos] who implemented a technique on a Cypress PSoC 4, which provides analog FPGA-like functionality. By offsetting the ADC trigger he has able to achieve an EST of 48MHz using a ADC sampling at 1MHz. If you want a little help getting into PSOC 4 yourself, check out the guide that [Bil Herd] made.

Neat hack [Carlos] and we hope to hear more about your laser lab in the future.

Optics Laboratory Made From LEGO

July 2, 2015 by 10 Comments

16A lot of engineers, scientists, builders, makers, and hackers got their start as children with LEGO. Putting those bricks together, whether following the instructions or not, really brings out the imagination. It’s not surprising that some people grow up and still use LEGO in their projects, like [Steve] who has used LEGO to build an optics lab with a laser beam splitter.

[Steve] started this project by salvaging parts from a broken computer projector. Some of the parts were scorched beyond repair, but he did find some lenses and mirrors and a mystery glass cube. It turns out that this cube is a dichroic prism which is used for combining images from the different LCD screens in the projector, but with the right LEGO bricks it can also be used for splitting a laser beam.

The cube was set on a LEGO rotating piece to demonstrate how it can split the laser at certain angles. LEGO purists might be upset at the Erector set that was snuck into this project, but this was necessary to hold up the laser pointer. This is a great use of these building blocks though, and [Steve] finally has his optics lab that he’s wanted to build for a while. If that doesn’t scratch your LEGO itch, we’ve also featured this LEGO lab which was built to measure the Planck constant.

Solar-Cell Laser Communication System

July 2, 2015 by 90 Comments

Forget the soup cans connected by a piece of string. There’s now a way to communicate wirelessly that doesn’t rely on a physical connection… or radio. It’s a communications platform that uses lasers to send data, and it’s done in a way that virtually anyone could build.

This method for sending information isn’t exactly new, but this project is one of the best we’ve seen that makes it doable for the average tinkerer. A standard microphone and audio amplifier are used to send the signals to the transmitter, which is just a typical garden-variety laser that anyone could find for a few dollars. A few LEDs prevent the laser from receiving too much power, and a solar cell at the receiving end decodes the message and outputs it through another amplifier and a speaker.

Of course you will need line-of-sight to get this communications system up and running, but as long as you have that taken care of the sky’s the limit. You can find incredibly powerful lasers lying around if you want to try to increase the communication distance, and there are surprisingly few restrictions on purchasing others that are 1W or higher. You could easily increase the range, but be careful not to set your receiving station (or any animals, plants, buildings, etc) on fire!

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Laser Cutter Exhaust Interlock Is Silly, Educational, Useful

June 3, 2015 by 20 Comments

If there’s one maker space that has an excess of mad scientist type hackers, it has to be LVL1 in Louisville, KY. They sure do a lot of crazy stuff, like this simple device to defeat the laser cutter smoke monster. Nobody got the memo about the “simple” part. Instead they created a functional, educational and aesthetically pleasing element for the hackerspace.

LVL1 has a large format laser cutter. Laser cutters emit nasty smoke. Said smoke needs to be vented outside. To do so, it needs to pass through a scrubber/filter so the neighbouring Pigs don’t complain. So they installed a larger, better filter. The Pigs are happy, until the filter gets clogged and the smoke monster decides to escape. Next they install a pressure switch which disables the laser when the filter gets clogged. Laser cutters have a myriad of safety interlocks, so quite often, it isn’t apparent which one caused it to trip. Hence, the Laser Cutter Enable Module – LCEM.

The simple part was to install an indicator that lights up when the pressure switch is enabled, and off when not. But when it’s off, it isn’t clear if the pressure switch is off, or the indicator has failed. Simple, just install a bi-color LED – Red for off, Green for On. But then what about color blind folks who cannot tell the two colors apart? So, finally, two LED’s with clearly labelled text marking them as Enabled and Disabled.

A simple (this time for real) circuit was finally agreed upon. The SPDT contacts of the pressure switch drive the LED in an optoisolator. Its output drives a DPDT relay via a transistor. One set of contacts light up the two indicator LED’s and the other set of contacts goes to the laser cutter enable contacts. Of course, the optoisolator is totally redundant and over kill too – it’s input LED shares the same power supply as the output transistor! Remember the missing memo?

It was time to assemble the circuit. This is where the mad scientist dudes got really creative. On one half of a piece of acrylic, the schematic diagram was etched using the laser. This ensures n00bs get some education. And the remaining half had the circuit laid out in old-skool wire wrap fashion. Holes were drilled and connections were drawn (using the laser, of course) for the various components. Parts were inserted, and wires were soldered to make the connections. The result is what they call the PCB/Mounting Plate/Educational Schematic/Acrylic thing. Of course, exposed connections and wires are no good. So they made a sandwich consisting of a flat acrylic base, and a cut out frame in the middle to accommodate the wire connections and joints. All of this to light up an indicator. Because.

Thanks [JAC_101] from LVL1 for sending in this tip.

If you want to read more about LVL1 shenanigans, check out this post about their Rocketry group, or this post when Hackaday visited LVL1.