Soft Robot With Microfluidic Logic Circuit

September 7, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 17 Comments

Perhaps our future overlords won’t be made up of electrical circuits after all but will instead be soft-bodied like ourselves. However, their design will have its origins in electrical analogues, as with the Octobot.

The Octobot is the brainchild a team of Harvard University researchers who recently published an article about it in Nature. Its body is modeled on the octopus and is composed of all soft body parts that were made using a combination of 3D printing, molding and soft lithography. Two sets of arms on either side of the Octobot move, taking turns under the control of a soft oscillator circuit. You can see it in action in the video below.

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Quick And Easy Thermic Lance Is Hot Enough To Melt Rocks

October 12, 2015 by Dan Maloney 42 Comments

Heat can be a hacker’s best friend. A little heat can help release a stubborn nut cleanly, and a lot of heat can melt a rusty bolt clean off. An oxy-acetylene torch is handy for these applications, but if you need a more portable setup, and you want enough heat to melt rocks, you might want to look into this field-expedient thermic lance.

Thermic lances have been around a long time in the demolition industry, where cutting steel quickly is a common chore. Commercial thermic lances are just a bundle of steel fuel rods which are set on fire while oxygen is blown down a consumable outer tube. The resulting flame can reach up to 4500°C with impressive results. In need of a similarly destructive device, [NightHawkInLight] came up with a super-simple lance – a small disposable tank of oxygen and regulator, a length of Tygon tubing, and a piece of 5/8″ steel brake line. No need for fuel rods in this design; the brake line provides both fuel and oxygen containment. As you can see in the video below, lighting the little lance without the usual oxy-acetylene torch is no problem – a “wick” of twisted steel wool is all that’s needed to get the torch going. The results are pretty impressive on both steel and rock.

You say you’re fresh out of brake line and still need some “don’t try this at home” action? No problem at all – just hit up the pantry for the materials needed for this tinfoil and spaghetti thermic lance.

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Clever Chemistry Leads To Much Faster 3D Printing

March 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 48 Comments

Resin printing, it can be messy but you get really great resolution thanks to the optical nature of curing the sticky goo with light from a projector. Soon it will have a few more notches in its belt to lord over its deposition cousins: speed and lack of layers. A breakthrough in resin printing makes it much faster than ever before and pretty much eliminates layering from the printed structure.

The concept uses an oxygen-permeable layer at the bottom of the resin pool. This inhibits curing, and apparently is the source of the breakthrough. The resin is cured right on the border of this layer and allows for what is described as a continuous growth process rather than a layer-based approach. One of the benefits described is no need for resin to flow in as the part is extracted but we’re skeptical on that claim (the resin still needs to flow from somewhere). Still, for us the need to work with resin which is expensive, possibly messy, and has an expiry (at least when compared to plastic filament) has kept deposition as a contender. The speed increase and claims of strength benefits over layer-based techniques just might be that killer feature.

The technology is coming from a company called Carbon3D. They are branding it CLIP, or Continuous Liquid Interface Production. After the break you can see a video illustration of the concept (which is a bit too simple for our tastes) as well as a TED talk which the company’s CEO, [Joseph Desimone] gave this month. Of course there is also the obligatory time-lapse print demo.

So what do you think: game changer or not, and why do you feel that way? Let us know in the comments.

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Hybrid Rocket Engine Uses Acrylic As Fuel

September 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

We are fascinated by the hybrid rocket engine which [Ben Krasnow] built and tested in his shop. It is actually using a hollow cylinder of acrylic as the fuel, with gaseous oxygen as an oxidizer. We’re already quite familiar with solid rocket propellant, but this hybrid approach is much different.

When a rocket motor using solid propellant is lit it continues to burn until all of the fuel is consumed. That is not the case with this design. The acrylic is actually burning, but if the flow of oxygen is cut off it will go out and can be ignited later. This also opens up the possibility of adjusting thrust by regulating the pressure of the oxygen feed.

[Ben] milled the test rig in his shop. It’s a fat acrylic rod through which he bored a hole. There are two aluminum plates which complete either end of the chamber. The intake has a fitting for a valve which connects to the oxygen tank. There is a nozzle on the outflow end. Check out the video after the break to see a full description. You’ll also get a look at the toll the combustion heat takes on the rig.

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Pulse Oximeter

January 6, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdN5IRVJOXI]

[Mike] is building his own Pulse Oximeter which uses light to measure the oxygen saturation in blood. One collateral benefit of this measurement is that pulse rate can be calculated from the same data. The parts used for the detector include a red LED, infrared LED, and a TSL230R light intensity measuring chip. As explained in the video above, each LED is shined through the tip of your finger and onto the light sensor. The IR LED is used as a baseline and compared to the red LED, which has some of its intensity absorbed by the red blood in your finger. This is a pretty approachable biometric concept so you may want to start here before moving on to more involved biometric interfaces.

[Thanks Russ]