Draw Your Own Vinyl Beats

October 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The Dyskograf lets you make music with a magic marker. The musical installation looks much like a turntable for playing vinyl records. But instead of a spiraling groove containing the sounds, this uses marks on a paper disk to play sound samples.

You can see the light outline of several tracks on the paper disc shown above. By adding black marks the optical input of the Dyskograf knows when to start and end each sound. This is best illustrated in the video demonstration after the break.

The marker-based setup makes a lot of sense, and we think it would be perfect if the disc was a dry-erase board. It certainly makes it a lot easier to lay down new beats than this other optical turntable which required holes to be drilled in a vinyl record to play the sounds. While we’re on the topic you may also find this coin-based turntable sequencer of interest.

Continue reading “Draw Your Own Vinyl Beats” →

Hacking A Brother Thermal Printer To Use Non-OEM Continuous Rolls

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

You can get your hands on a Brother thermal label printer for $65-75. But if you don’t want to buy the Brother branded continuous feed paper for it you’re out of luck. Unless you pull off this hack which lets you use any thermal paper you want with a Brother QL-500 printer.

The printer is tied to the OEM paper because of a pattern printed on the back of the roll. It’s basically an encoder strip made up of black rectangles spaced at regular intervals. Surely there are other brands that come with this pattern on them, but if you want to use paper without it the secret is in moving the sensor that reads that strip.

The brilliant solution is to use one of the white feed-gears as an encoder wheel. [CheapSkateVideo] used a magic marker to paint two opposite quarters of the gear black. He then removed the optical sensor and placed it on the side of the case facing the wheel. It needs to be adjusted along the radius of that gear until the timing is just right, but once it is you’re ready to go. The sensor is a safety feature to ensure there is media in the printer. If there’s not you can burn up the print head so keep that in mind. See the explanation in the video after the break.

Continue reading “Hacking A Brother Thermal Printer To Use Non-OEM Continuous Rolls” →

Gold Leaf Circuit Board

February 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Ah, the glitter of gold… or fake gold, we’re not really sure. But [Mike Hogan] and [PJ Santoro] have been working with faux gold leaf as a conductor on circuit boards. The device you see above is mounted on metal-covered paper substrate and it really works.

They started by applying spray adhesive to heavy paper to make the gold-clad they needed. This was cut down into hexagons in homage to their hackerspace, Hive76 in Philadelphia. From there the shape of the microcontroller (an MSP430 G2211 in this case) to prevent shorts under the chip. The leads were flattened to interface well with the gold contacts, and a hobby knife was used to score the traces. Some careful soldering made up the final connections, and they were in business.

Oh, wait; chip on board but nothing on chip. They forgot to program it first! Since there’s no header they needed an easy way to interface with the board. The clever guys used the power of magnets to hold alligator clips in place. See how they did that in the demo video after the break.

They’re also working on some boards that use conductive ink similar to this hack but we haven’t seen a write-up from these two about those experiments… yet.

Continue reading “Gold Leaf Circuit Board” →

Printable Solar Cells That Can Be Folded Up When Not In Use

December 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 59 Comments

Here’s a photovoltaic cell that can be printed onto paper. The manufacturing technique is almost as simple as using an inkjet printer. The secret is in the ink itself. It takes five layers deposited on the paper in a vacuum chamber. But that’s a heck of a lot easier than current solar cell fabrication practices. In fact, is sounds like the printing process is very similar to how potato chip bags are made. This is significant, because it could mean a fast track to mass production for the technology.

It isn’t just the easy printing process that excites us. Check out the video after the break where a test cell is placed on top of a light source while being monitored by a multimeter. It’s been folded like a fan and you can see a researcher sinch up the cell into a small form for storage. It’s a little counter-intuitive; for instance, you wouldn’t want to make a window shade out of it because it would have to be down during the day to get power. Be we think there’s got to be some great use for these foldable properties. Continue reading “Printable Solar Cells That Can Be Folded Up When Not In Use” →

Paper Craft Claw

July 5, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Grab some stiff paper and get to work building your own paper claw. [Dombeef] posted the instructions to recreate the claw above because he was unsatisfied with his previous design which was flimsy and unable to pick up just about anything. This version is a bit larger and it internalizes all of the parts.

Being paper craft, you don’t need much in the way of materials or tools. A push-pin makes holes for the paperclip and wire which serve as the pivot points. Glue and some tape hold the rest of assembly together. You can see a video of the final product after the break. A shaft at the center closes the claw when pulled, and opens it when pushed to opposite way. This makes it perfect for that home-made crane game (or was that a claw game?)… as long as you’re not trying to pick up anything too heavy.

Continue reading “Paper Craft Claw” →

New Conductive Ink Allows Circuit Prototyping With A Pen And Paper

June 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 42 Comments

roller_ball_circuit_drawing

Why spend time etching circuit boards and applying solder masks when all you really need is a rollerball pen and some paper? That’s what University of Illinois professors [Jennifer Lewis and Jennifer Bernhard] were asking when they set off to research the possibility of putting conductive ink into a standard rollerball pen.

The product of their research is a silver nanoparticle-based ink that remains liquid while inside a pen, but dries on contact once it is applied to a porous surface such as paper. Once dry, the ink can be used to conduct electricity just like a copper trace on a circuit board, making on the fly circuit building a breeze.

Previous ink-based circuit construction was typically done using inkjet printers or airbrushing, so removing the extra hardware from the process is a huge step forward. The team even has some news for those people that think the writable ink won’t hold up in the long run. The ink is surprisingly quite resilient to physical manipulation, and they found that it took folding the paper substrate several thousand times before their ink pathways started to fail.

While we know this is no substitute for a nicely etched board, it would be pretty cool to prototype a simple circuit just by drawing out the connections on a piece of paper – we can’t wait to see this come to market.

Cutting Paper Scrolls With Frickin’ Lasers

May 4, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

This circuit illustration adds a scrolling paper feeder to the bed of a laser cutter. In the video after the break you can see that the actual assembly is put on the bed of the laser cutter. After the laser has cut out the specified pattern, the scroll is wound to move an un-cut portion into place. It uses a servo motor to drive one of the spools.

An Arduino Uno with a servo shield is being used for this application. It has one button which winds one spool for a pre-programmed period of time. There’s a few issues with this setup, namely that it’s not tied into the CNC program that runs the laser. There’s also a lack of precision when using a continuously rotating servo like this. If it were upgraded to use a stepper motor and patched into the CNC hardware this would make cutting new scrolls for your player piano a breeze.

Here’s a project that does the opposite, it takes old player piano rolls and digitizes them.

Continue reading “Cutting Paper Scrolls With Frickin’ Lasers” →