Printed Door Handle Turns Key With A Servo

March 30, 2020 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

[Madalin Valceleanu] had a somewhat unique problem. He wanted to make his front door a bit “smarter”, but none of the IoT door locks he found were compatible with the style of reinforced door he had. So he set out to design and 3D print his own Internet-controlled door handle.

Now we say handle and not lock because the internal mechanisms haven’t actually been replaced. Those aren’t exactly the kind of parts that lend themselves to being recreated in PLA, after all. The printed components simply replace the original plate and handle on the interior of the door.

In that case, you might be wondering what the point of all this was. If he’s still using the same internal mechanism, how does a new handle help? On his new handle, [Madalin] has integrated a servo that’s capable of turning the original key in the door. With the servo wired up to a Raspberry Pi, this allows him to lock and unlock the door through his home automation system.

[Madalin] has made the STLs for his printed handles available on Thingiverse, but like most of these “bolt on” style door modifications, we imagine the design is bespoke enough that it won’t be much practical use to anyone else. Still, it’s an excellent example of solving a real-world problem with some outside of the box thinking. Continue reading “Printed Door Handle Turns Key With A Servo” →

Self-Playing Whistle While You Work From Home

March 27, 2020 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

In ridiculous times, it can help to play ridiculous instruments such as the slide whistle to keep your bristles in check. But since spittle is more than a little bit dangerous these days, it pays to come up with alternative ways to play away the days during lockdown life.

Thanks to some clever Arduino-driven automation, [Gurpreet] can maintain a safe distance from his slide whistle while interacting with it. Slide whistles need two things — air coming in from the top, and actuation at the business end. The blowing force now comes from a focused fan like the ones that cool your printed plastic as soon as the hot end extrudes it. A stepper motor moves the slide up and down using a printed rack and pinion.

Here’s a smooth touch — [Gurpreet] added a micro servo to block and unblock the sound hole with a cardboard flap to make the notes more distinct. Check out the build video after the break, which includes a music video for “My Heart Will Go On”, aka the theme from Titanic. It’s almost like the ship herself is playing it on the steam whistles from the great beyond.

Speaking of, did you hear about the effort to raise and restore the remains of her radio room?

Continue reading “Self-Playing Whistle While You Work From Home” →

Automating Hand Sanitizer — If You Can Find Any

March 25, 2020 by Al Williams 31 Comments

We once saw a Romeo and Juliet production where the two families were modern-day mob families with 3-piece suits and pistols. If they made King Richard III set in this week, the famous line might be: “Hand sanitizer, hand sanitizer, my kingdom for hand sanitizer!” Even if you have a supply stashed in your prepper cache, you have to touch the bottle so you could cross-contaminate with other users. Public places often have automatic dispensers to combat this, and now you can too. [Just Barran] shows the device in a video, you can see below.

Sourcing parts for projects is sometimes a problem, but right now we are betting the hand sanitizer will be the hardest component. Of course, the Internet is ripe with homemade brews that may or may not be effective based on beer, grain alcohol, or a variety of other base materials.

Continue reading “Automating Hand Sanitizer — If You Can Find Any” →

This Is Not An Argument Bot

March 17, 2020 by Kristina Panos 41 Comments

While in-person arguments are getting harder to come by these days, we’ll always have the internet (hopefully). So what can you do to stay on your game in a time when a little levity is lauded? Build an argument bot and battle wits with the best — a stern-faced John Cleese!

This latest offering from [8 Bits And A Byte] refers to a Monty Python sketch featuring an argument service — an office with a receptionist who will take your money and send you down the hall for a healthy and heated discussion. If you’ve never gone on a Monty Python binge, well, it’s probably as good a time as any.

Electronics-wise, the argument bot is a pretty simple build. A Raspberry Pi B+ outfitted with a Google AIY hat listens to your side of things and decides which bones to pick. Your obviously misguided statements are then matched with DialogFlow intents, and dissent is sent back through the speaker. Meanwhile, Mr. Cleese’s jaw moves up and down on a printed and servo-driven linear actuator while he maintains a stiff upper lip. Before you go off on that Python binge, check out the build video after the break.

Have you seen what can happen two robots argue? ‘Tis but a scratch. Continue reading “This Is Not An Argument Bot” →

Slippy Slapper Uselessly Uses All The Arduinos

March 13, 2020 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Want to take that annoyingly productive coworker down a notch? Yeah, us too. How dare they get so much done and be so happy about it? How is it possible that they can bang on that keyboard all day when you struggle to string together an email?

The Slippy Slapper is a useless machine that turns people into useless machines using tactics like endless distraction and mild physical violence. It presses your buttons by asking them to press buttons for no reason other than killing their productivity. When they try to walk away, guess what? That’s another slappin’. Slippy Slapper would enrage us by proxy if he weren’t so dang cute.

You’re right, you don’t need an Arduino for this. For peak inefficiency and power consumption, you actually need four of them. One acts as the master, and bases its commands to the other three on the feedback it gets from Slippy’s ultrasonic nostrils. The other three control the slappin’ servos, the speakers, and reading WAV files off of the SD card. Slap your way past the break to see Slippy Slapper’s slapstick demo.

Need to annoy a group of coworkers all at once? Slip a big bank of useless machines into the conference room while it’s being set up.

Continue reading “Slippy Slapper Uselessly Uses All The Arduinos” →

Self-Playing Kalimba V2 Thanks To Readers Like You

February 25, 2020 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

Would you like to know the great thing about this community we have here? All the spitballing that goes on every day in the comments, the IO chat rooms, and in the discussion threads of thousands of projects. One of our favorite things about the Hackaday universe is that we help each other out, and because of that, our collective curiosity pushes so many designs forward.

[Gurpreet] knows what we’re talking about. He’s back with version two of his self-playing kalimba, driven as strongly as ever by the dulcet tones of the Avatar theme. Now the robo-kalimba is rocking two full octaves, and thanks to your comments and suggestions, has relocated the servos where they can’t be picked up by the soundboard.

We gasped when we saw the new mechanism — a total of 15 rack and pinion linear actuators that make the kalimba look like a tiny mechanical pipe organ. Now the servos float, fixed into a three-part frame that straddles the sound box. [Gurpreet] melted servo horns to down to their hubs rather than trying to print something that fits the servos’ sockets.

Thumb your way past the break to check out the build video. [Gurpreet] doesn’t shy away from showing what went wrong and how he fixed it, or from sharing the 3D printering sanity checks along the way that kept him going.

Plucking kalimba tines is a difficult problem to solve because they’re stiff, but with timbre sensitive to many degrees of pressure. A slightly easier alternative? Make a toy player piano.

Continue reading “Self-Playing Kalimba V2 Thanks To Readers Like You” →

This Servo Actuated Multimeter Does The Twist

February 14, 2020 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

This tip comes our way courtesy of [Elad Orbach], who’s been experimenting with a device that uses a servo to turn the function dial on a multimeter. It’s something you can put together in a few minutes with leftovers from the parts bin, and as you can see in the video after the break, the basic concept seems to be sound enough.

As to finding a practical reason for spinning the switch on your meter with a servo, that’s left largely as an exercise for the reader. [Elad] hints at the possibility of using such a setup to help automate repetitive testing, which we could see being useful especially in combination with a foot pedal that allows you to switch modes without having to put the probes down. The same basic idea could also be helpful as an assistive device for those who have difficulty grasping or limited dexterity.

Whether top of the line or bottom of the barrel, the multimeter is easily the hardware hacker’s most frequently used tool (beyond the screwdriver, perhaps). We’ve seen plenty of projects that try to graft additional features onto this common gadgets, though automation isn’t usually among them.

Continue reading “This Servo Actuated Multimeter Does The Twist” →