Rapid Furniture Prototyping

July 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

SketchChair is a piece of software that takes the engineer out of engineering furniture. In a child’s-dream-come-true you draw the outlines you’d like to have, add some legs, and the software pops out a design ready to be laser-cut. The finishing touch of adding palm fiber and felt produces what we imagine is a moderately comfortable place to sit. Now the hard part will be convincing your spouse that you should spend the money building an industrial grade laser cutter because of all the money you’ll save on furniture.

We’re still holding out for furniture that is 3d-printed from rock to match our Flintstone’s motif.

Oh, and as always, video after the break.

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$100 CNC Mill

June 21, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 30 Comments

This final project at MIT turned out quite nice. It is a CNC mill that cost under $100 to make. The tolerances are pretty tight as you can see in the pictures of the PCBs he has milled. He shows that he can even mill mild steel. It is a pretty brief writeup, but you can download build instructions and pcb files.

[via HacknMod]

Hackaday Links: April 18, 2010

April 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Remote motion control

This project walks though a method of controlling motors with an accelerometer when the two are physically separated. Two Arduinos are used, with the user interface and the motor control connected via Ethernet. This must be useful for something; maybe it should be the next step once you get your accelerometer up and running.

CNC machine build

[Lucassiglo21] is doing a great job documenting his CNC build. The project has been ongoing for several months. He’s seeing some success with milling simple PCBs along with other millwork projects.

Condom starts a fire

Ever needed to start a fire and had nothing on you but a condom? Yeah, we haven’t either but that doesn’t diminish the fun of this whimsical ‘Condom Hack Pack‘ video. See the uses you never thought of for those rubbery package protectors.

Solderless PCB

Print your component locations on a piece of card stock and populate the board without any soldering? This is quick and convenient for a circuit that doesn’t need to last very long. It uses wire wrapping to connect the components, completing the circuit. [Thanks Frogz]

ARM-based CNC Mill Needs No Computer

March 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

[Fedeortiz12] and his team are nearing completion of their CNC mill (english translation). They set out to build a standalone machine that takes G-code in the RS274/NGC format from an SD card and machines parts accordingly. At the heart of the system is an ARM LPC2148 controller with a character LCD and control pad for operation. The guys have made a teaser video showing the project being tested with a felt-tipped pen. Take a look after the break.

We’d like to see the final product milling PCBs. We’ve always been a little jealous of the PCB milling setup that [imsolidstate] has in his shop.

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Lathe Modification

February 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maB28gXoZV4]

The folks over at NerdKits got a shiny new Smithy 1220xl lathe/ mill. They found, however that adjusting the Z axis wasn’t as accurate as they desired. They decided to resolve this by installing a digital caliper and an LCD interface to display the adjustments. The writeup is quite detailed and the results seem to work great.

Lego Spider-bot

February 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[MkMan’s] LEGO spider robot combines pieces from a Mindstorm kit with a few milled plastic parts. The legs are a locomotive concept called a Klann Linkage. They operate in pairs and convert the rotational force from one motor into movement for two legs. Here, a total of four rotating gears moves eight legs, besting the hexapods we saw a couple of weeks ago in both leg count and motor economy.

Each limb is made up of five pieces plus one base for each pair. That makes eleven pieces per pair and a total of 44 for the entire robot. [MkMan] milled these parts out of 3/8″ HDPE stock. He’s made videos of forward motion and turning which we’ve embedded after the break. Even on a polished surface the bot looks fairly efficient at getting around.

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CNC Brought To You By Zip Ties

January 17, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 22 Comments

Gimp skillz.

[lucassiglo21] let us know about his finished 3 axis CNC (Translation via Google). While home CNCs are nothing new, we really liked this masterpiece. The CNC is entirely custom, from the electronic control boards (connected to a PC via parallel port) to the physical mill (with an end result of 30x30x15cm workable area). Our favorite part is the use of screw/band clamp zip ties to hold the Dremel – a true showing of hacker geekyness. For those who haven’t seen a CNC drill a circle before (and honestly, who hasn’t?), check a video after the break.

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