router

195 Articles

CNC Music Factory Still Alive

April 3, 2009 by 33 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKCX1CeXIjA]

With some careful programming and probably tedious testing, [Tim] was able to get his CNC router to play [Jonathan Coulton’s] “Still Alive”. He didn’t just tell the motors to spin at the correct speeds directly though. He computed the 3d vectors necessary to produce the notes. The router thinks it is just doing its job.  We would love to see those vectors rendered out in 3d space. Imagine having a physical sculpture of “Still Alive” as seen by a CNC machine. This reminds us of the Obsolete Technology Band.

[via Skullydazed’s twitter]

WiFi Streaming Radio

December 19, 2008 by 9 Comments

wifiradio

[Jeff] is continuing to work on his WiFi streaming radio project and is now into part 7. The reason it’s taken so long is because he’s bothering to document every single piece of the system instead of assuming too much of the reader. The core of the system is an Asus WL-520GU wireless router. It is supported by OpenWRT and has a USB port for use with an external audio card. mpd, Music Player Daemon, is used for playback. This latest part features adding an LCD display for the current track. The router board already has points for the serial port, so it’s just a matter of adding an AVR to talk to the LCD. The next step is building a simple user interface and then boxing everything up. You can view a video of the display below.

Continue reading “WiFi Streaming Radio” →

CNC Engraver Upgrades

November 21, 2008 by 3 Comments

cnc

We’ve been following [glaciawanderer]’s CNC build for quite some time and he’s recently added a few upgrades to make for an even more interesting machine. He’s been trying out new bearing blocks, anti-backlash nuts, and z-axis plates hoping to get some improvements. In the case of the bearing blocks, he went back to the older style because of the added safety and smoother movement. The final addition he made was a dust collection system. It’s just a couple support hoops and duct tape, but it should keep dust out of the threads and rails.

Upgrading The Cisco PIX 506E

September 28, 2008 by 37 Comments


[Albert] read the Cisco PIX Wiki, and discovered that the motherboard of the PIX 506E is the same as the PIX 525, which has a 600Mhz Coppermine Pentium III CPU. So he took his Cisco PIX 506E and upgraded it by swapping out the Celeron 300Mhz, with a Pentium III 600Mhz and populating the second PC100 RAM slot inside. The system only shows 448Mhz instead of 600Mhz, but it does recognize the PIII, and there are no problems.  The CPU load has dropped to 0% after the CPU swap, and RAM upgrade.

CNC Wood Router

August 3, 2008 by 16 Comments


[GlacialWanderer] has published the first pictures from his CNC machine build. It’s a three axis gantry style machine that he intends to route and engrave wood with. He’s posted a detailed cost breakdown: $1800. He estimates spending 30 hours researching on sites like CNCzone. The build time for the mechanical side was around 50 hours. The electrical system hasn’t been hoooked up yet, so look for that in a future post. It looks like an incredible machine already, so we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Netgear Open Source Router

June 29, 2008 by 10 Comments


Netgear recently launched the WGR614L wireless router targeted specifically at open source firmware enthusiasts. It can use Tomato, DD-WRT, and soon OpenWRT. The core is a 240MHz MIPS processor with 16MB of flash and 4MB of RAM. You’ll probably remember when Linksys decided to dump Linux from their iconic WRT54G line in favor of VxWorks; they released the similarly speced WRT54GL for enthusiasts. Netgear seems to be arriving pretty late in the game, but they’ve set up a community specifically for this router. Time will tell whether community support is enough to make this the router of choice for hackers. We wish someone would release an x86 based router in the same price range just to make porting stupidly simple.

[via Slashdot]