For Your Holiday Relaxation: The Clickspring Sundial Build Megacut

December 23, 2020 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

The fortunate among us may very well have a bit of time off from work coming up, and while most of that time will likely be filled with family obligations and festivities, there’s probably going to be some downtime. And if you should happen to find yourself with a half hour free, you might want to check out the Clickspring Byzantine Calendar-Sundial mega edit. And we’ll gladly accept your gratitude in advance.

Fans of machining videos will no doubt already be familiar with Clickspring, aka [Chris], the amateur horologist who, through a combination of amazing craftsmanship and top-notch production values, managed to make clockmaking a spectator sport. We first caught the Clickspring bug with his open-frame clock build, which ended up as a legitimate work of art. [Chris] then undertook two builds at once: a reproduction of the famous Antikythera mechanism, and the calendar-sundial seen in the video below.

The cut condenses 1,000 hours of machining, turning, casting, heat-treating, and even hand-engraving of brass and steel into an incredibly relaxing video. There’s no narration, no exposition — nothing but the sounds of metal being shaped into dozens of parts that eventually fit perfectly together into an instrument worthy of a prince of Byzantium. This video really whets our appetite for more Antikythera build details, but we understand that [Chris] has been busy lately, so we’ll be patient.

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3D Printed Rigid Chain Mechanism

December 8, 2020 by Danie Conradie 34 Comments

One of the major advantages of 3D printing is the ability to quickly test and then iterate on mechanical designs. [gzumwalt] does a lot of this, and has recently been working on various versions of a rigid chain mechanism. (Video, embedded below.)

A rigid-chain mechanism is one way of fitting a long beam into a small box. It works similar to a zipper, meshing two separate “chains” with specially teeth designed to form a rigid beam. Due to clearances between the teeth, the beam tends to be a bit floppy. [gzumwalt] made various sizes of the mechanism, and also reduced the clearances on later versions to reduce the flop. He also integrated it into a cool “snake in a basket” automaton (second video below) by adding a reversible gearbox and a binary snap-action switch.

One possible use for this type of mechanism is for autonomously assembling long structures in space, as one of the 2017 Hackaday Prize finalist projects, ZBeam, proposed.

[gzumwalt] has not made the files available for download yet, but you can keep and eye on his Instructables pages for updates. He got a number of fascinating 3D printed devices already available, like a domino laying machine or a WiFi controlled rover.

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Linkage Inferring Software Handwaves Away The Hard Stuff

September 22, 2020 by Joshua Vasquez 17 Comments

Jokes aside, manually designing linkages that move along specific paths is no easy task. Whether we’re doodling paper sketches or constraining lines in a CAD program, we still need to do the work of actually “imagining” the linkage design. If only there were some sort of tool that would do all that hard imagining work for us! Thankfully, we’re in luck! That’s exactly what researchers [Gen Nishida], [Adrien Bousseau2], and [Daniel G. Aliaga1] at Purdue have done. They’ve designed a software tool that lets us position important bodies in space in particular “key” frames, and then the software simply fills in the linkage for you!

To start the design process, the user inputs a few candidate locations that their solid bodies need to reach in the final linkage path. From here, these locations get fed to a particle filter. This particle filter seeds thousands of semi-random linkage configurations at small timesteps, selects some of the best-matching ones that most closely approximate the required body locations, removes the lesser-scoring results, re-creates a new set of possible joint configurations based on the best matching ones, and repeats until the tool converges on a linkage that respects our input key frames.

Like a brute force search, this solution takes lots and lots of samples to find a solution, but unlike a brute force search, trials iteratively improve, enabling the software to converge closer and closer to a final solution. Under the hood, the software needs to actually simulate these candidate linkage in order to grade them. It’s in this step that the team wrote in additional checks to remove impossible linkages like self-intersecting joints from this linkage “gene pool” before reseeding them. The result is a tool that does all that trial-and-error scratchwork for you–no brain cycles. For more details, have a peek at their (open access!) paper.

Design software that augments our mechanical design capabilities is a rare gem on these pages, and this one is no exception. If your curious to play with other useful linkages simulating tools, have a go at Linkage Designer. And if you’re in the mood for other tools that fill in the blanks, check out this machine learning algorithm that literally fills in footage between frames in a video feed.

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Getting Your Morning Mix Exactly Right, Every Time

April 17, 2020 by Danie Conradie 8 Comments

In historical times, before the pandemic, most people had to commute to work in the mornings, and breakfast often ended up being a bit rushed. [Elite Worm] is very serious about getting his breakfast mix exactly right, and o shave a bit of time off the prep, he built a 3D printed automatic ingredient dispenser for his breakfast bowl.

[Elite Worm] breakfast consists of four ingredients, that have either a powder or granular consistency. They are held in 3D printed hoppers, with a screw top for refilling and a servo-operated door with a funnel at the bottom. The hoppers need to be shaken to properly dispense the ingredients, so all four are mounted on a bracket that can slide up and down on linear bearings. The shaking is done by a brushed DC motor with a slider-crank mechanism, which moves bracket and hoppers up and down very vigorously. [Elite Worm] notes that the shaking is probably a bit too violent and can make the entire table shake if it isn’t sturdy enough, and reducing the motor RPM might be a good idea. Below the hopper system sits a movable weighing station with a load cell, a custom ATmega328P based control board and a Nextion touch screen display, which allows for various ingredient combinations to be saved. The load cell is used to keep track of the ingredient quantities by weight, as they are dispensed one at a time.

We really like the ingenuity of the build, but personally, we would have swapped out the hopper for something that’s moulded, since all the crevices in 3D printed parts is a perfect place for bacteria to grow and can be tricky to clean properly Continue reading “Getting Your Morning Mix Exactly Right, Every Time” →

Awesome Animation Channel Is An Educational Rabbit Hole

September 27, 2019 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Once [Shabab] clued us in to the brilliant animations of [Jared Owen], we pretty much lost an afternoon exploring this incredible YouTube channel. Self-taught Blender wizard [Jared] combines fantastic animations with clear and concise explanations for the inner workings of everything from Nerf guns and Fisher-Price corn poppers to the International Space Station.

Space nerds and casuals alike should check out [Jared]’s crowning achievement: a three-video Apollo spacecraft series, which covers many details in a short amount of time. Want more Apollo? Here’s a deeper dive into the lunar module. [Jared] uses music to great effect in these videos, especially in the Apollo series.

Several videos are devoted to mechanisms, like the humble gumball machine, the grand piano, and the combination lock. In addition to all the great how-it-works videos, [Jared] explores various noteworthy buildings. You know there’s a bowling alley in the White House, right? [Jared]’s tour shows you exactly where it is.

We love the diversity of the videos, all of which [Jared] researches in great detail. He enjoys working from user suggestions, so let him know what you’re dying to see dissected in detail.

Thanks for the tip, [Shabab].

Learning Through Play Hack Chat With Greg Zumwalt

March 11, 2019 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Learning Through Play Hack Chat!

You may think you’ve never heard of Greg Zumwalt, but if you’ve spent any time on Instructables or Thingiverse, chances are pretty good you’ve seen some of his work. After a long career that ranged from avionics design and programming to video game development, Greg retired and found himself with the time to pursue pet projects that had always been on the back burner, including his intricate 3D-printed automata. His motto is “I fail when I decide to stop learning,” and from the number of projects he turns out and the different methods he incorporates, he has no intention of failing.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

Lifelong learning through play;
Toy-building as a means to skillset growth;
Sources of inspiration and getting new ideas; and
What sorts of projects Greg has in the pipeline.

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Learning Through Play Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 13, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

New Contest: Flexible PCBs

March 6, 2019 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

The now-humble PCB was revolutionary when it came along, and the whole ecosystem that evolved around it has been a game changer in electronic design. But the PCB is just so… flat. Planar. Two-dimensional. As useful as it is, it gets a little dull sometimes.

Here’s your chance to break out of Flatland and explore the third dimension of circuit design with our brand new Flexible PCB Contest.

We’ve teamed up with Digi-Key for this contest. Digi-Key’s generous sponsorship means 60 contest winners will receive free fabrication of three copies of their flexible PCB design, manufactured through the expertise of OSH Park. So now you can get your flex on with wearables, sensors, or whatever else you can think of that needs a flexible PCB.

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