CNC Hot Wire Cutter From Scanners

October 19, 2009 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

hot-wire-cutter-from-scanners

[Raul] built a CNC hot wire cutter that he uses for cutting shapes out of foam. His device uses two flat bed scanners to provide two planes of motion. One scanner arm has the foam mounted on it and provides the Y-axis movement. The other scanner has the hot wire mounted on it and provides the X-axis movement. The cutting wire is mounted on a flexed bow made from heavy gauge coat hanger wire.

He tapped into the logic board of one scanner to gain access to the motor movements. The other is connected through a couple of H-bridges. Both are controlled by an Atmel AVR ATmega128 which in turn takes its commands from a connection with a computer printer port. A python program uses vector graphic files in SVG format and traces the outline for cutting.

We’ve got a video of this in action after the break. At our request, [Raul] took some time to post a set of pictures and make comments on them. Thanks for the hard work and great job! Continue reading “CNC Hot Wire Cutter From Scanners” →

Snega2usb Preorder Now Available

October 14, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySs4cRVzPAY]

We’ve been watching the development of the snega2usb since it’s debut on Hackaday. Now it’s grown up and is ready to be manufactured. In the low quality video above [Matthias] shows some of the latest high quality additions to the board. It now has a case, shiny new firmware, production made PCB, and game pad ports. The snega2usb is shipping this December for those who preorder now.

Connect A PS/2 Keyboard To A Microcontroller

September 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIiLE0BhE8]

The guys at Nerdkits have put together this tutorial on connecting a PS/2 keyboard to a microcontroller. Though this tutorial is written for one of the kits they sell, you should be able to apply this to pretty much any microcontroller. It is also a lesson in using interrupts instead of polling. They have several pre built examples ready to download as well as source code for the basic setup.

[via HackedGadgets]

Tool Tip: Microcontroller Timer Calculator

September 28, 2009 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

uC_timer_calculator

In life and embedded systems timing is everything. Give [Frank’s] web-based timer calculator a try. Set your system clock resolution (in hertz making sure you account for any system clock divider), select your timer resolution and prescaler, then calculate based on desired ticks, overflows, or real time. He’s built this with the AVR chips in mind but it should be handy for any family of microcontrollers.

Of course none of this is rocket science, but if you’re trying to use one timer for two differently synchronized events this can save you a lot of trial and error time.

Word Clock: Tell The Time With Words

September 27, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

[drj113] posts his cool word clock. After seeing a similar clock on an industrial design website, he set out to make his own version. He made custom pcbs with the toner-etch method. The front is a solid piece of copper clad board and the light shines through the etched areas. It’s powered by a PIC microcontroller and uses approximately 120 ultra bright LEDs. [drj113] has all of the circuit board diagrams, silkscreens, etch negatives, and code on the intructable so you can build your own.

Twitter, Talking Fish, And More

September 24, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 29 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6kECR7T4LY&feature=player_embedded]

[Dan Ros] and the mbed team sent in their hack of a twitter talking Big Mouth Billy Bass. Originally the hack simply had an mbed micrcontroller and an SD card with some wav files allowing Billy to say classic quotes. Wanting to go further however, they used the mbed’s HTTPClient library to grab Twitter updates, and then have Billy say them out loud! Check out some other cool projects the mbed team has in the cookbook.

But wait, whats an mbed? We didn’t have a clue either!

Some researched reveals it is a powerful new microcontroller and prototyping board. With some features such as direct ethernet and USB connections right on the chip, as well as PWM, serial, analog, and more. What really stoked us is how it acts much like a USB thumb drive. Drag and drop your binary files, and it’s programmed! The only downside, at $100 it can be a bit more of an investment compared to an Arduino PIC. Could this be the next big prototyping tool that beats all others? Lets hear it in the comments!

[Update: The mbed can be had for a limited time pre-order price of $60 not $100 – Thanks Dan and the mbed team!]

Hacking USB Serial Port Adapters

September 23, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

keyspan_all (Custom)

The folks at Openschemes.com have written up an article on how to convert a USB serial port adapter to a low voltage serial interface for interfacing with microcontrollers. Though you can always just buy one, this is a fairly quick and cheap solution, especially if you are in a pinch or don’t have access to a retailer. The specific models you should watch for, are the ones with two chips, a microcontroller and a line translater.They go through the process of finding exactly where to patch in to add an extra interface. It only takes a couple wires and you are ready to go.

Not only can you use this as your serial connection to another microcontroller, but you can actually take control of the one on the board itself. If you load it with the drivers from TI, you gain access to the flash memory and can do whatever you want. They don’t go into much detail here though, stating that they’ll write another article on that.

We thought this little bugger looked familiar so we went digging through our archives. Sure enough, we found this system in action back in January of 2008.

[via Hacked Gadgets]