Understand Your Tools: Finger Exercises

A dip meter is basically a coil of wire that, when you excite it, you can use to tell if something inside that coil is resonating along. This lets you measure unknown radio circuits to figure out their resonant frequency, for instance. This week, we featured a clever way to make a dip meter with a nanoVNA, which is an odd hack simply because a dip meter used to be a common spare-parts DIY device, while a vector network analyzer used to cost more than a house.

Times have changed, and for the better. Nowadays, any radio amateur can pick up a VNA for less than the cost of all but the cheesiest of walkie talkies, putting formerly exotic test equipment in the hands of untrained mortals. But what good is a fancy-pants tool if you don’t know how to use it? Our own Jenny List faced exactly this problem when she picked up a nanoVNA, and her first steps are worth following along with if you find yourself in her shoes.

All of this reminded me of an excellent series by Mike Szczys, “Scope Noob”, where he chronicled his forays into learning how to use an oscilloscope by running all of the basic functions by working through a bunch of test measurements that he already knew the answer to.

It strikes me that we could use something like this for nearly every piece of measuring equipment. Something more than just an instruction manual that walks you through what all the dials do. Something that takes you through a bunch of example projects and shows you how to use the tool in question through a handful of projects. Because these days, access to many formerly exotic pieces of measuring gear has enabled many folks to have gear they never would have had before – and all that’s missing is knowing how to drive them.

Change The Jingle In Your Makita Charger Because You Can

Lots of things beep these days. Washing machines, microwaves, fridge — even drill battery chargers. If you’re on Team Makita, it turns out you can actually change the melody of your charger’s beep, thanks to a project from [Real-Time-Kodi].

The hack is for the Makita DR18RC charger, and the implementation of the hack is kind of amusing. [Real-Time-Kodi] starts by cutting the trace to the buzzer inside the charger. Then, an Arduino is installed inside the charger, hooked up to the buzzer itself and the original line that was controlling it. When it detects the charger trying to activate the buzzer, it uses this as a trigger to play its own melody on the charger instead. The Arduino also monitors the LEDs on the charger in order to determine the current charge state, and play the appropriate jingle for the situation.

It’s an amusing hack, and one that could certainly confuse the heck out of anyone expecting the regular tones out of their Makita charger. It also shows that the simple ways work, too — there was no need to dump any firmware or decompile any code.

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Hackaday Links: November 12, 2023

Somebody must really have it in for Cruise, because the bad press just keeps piling up for the robo-taxi company. We’ve highlighted many of the company’s woes in this space, from unscheduled rendezvous with various vehicles to random acts of vandalism and stupid AI pranks. The hits kept coming as California regulators pulled the plug on testing, which finally convinced parent company General Motors to put a halt to the whole Cruise testing program nationwide. You’d think that would be enough, but no — now we learn that Cruise cars had a problem recognizing children, to the point that there was concern that one of their autonomous cars could clobber a kid under the right conditions. The fact that they apparently knew this and kept sending cars out for IRL testing is a pretty bad look, to say the least. Sadly but predictably, Cruise has announced layoffs, starting with the employees who supported the now-mothballed robo-taxi fleet, including those who had the unenviable job of cleaning the cars after, err, being enjoyed by customers. It seems a bit wrongheaded to sack people who had no hand in engineering the cars, but then again, there seems to be a lot of wrongheadedness to go around.

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Arduino-Controlled Coil Winder

Coil winders are a popular project because doing the deed manually can be an incredibly tedious and time consuming task. After building one such rig, [Pisces Printing] wanted to find even further time savings, and thus designed an improved, faster version.

At it’s heart, it’s a straightforward design, using a linear rail and a leadscrew driven by a stepper motor. Control is via an Arduino Nano, with a few push buttons and a 16 x 2 LCD display for user feedback.

Often, completing a first build will reveal all manner of limitations and drawbacks of a design. In this case, the original winder was improved upon with faster stepper motors to cut the time it took to wind a coil. A redesigned PCB also specified a better buck converter power supply to avoid overheating issues of the initial design. A three-jaw lathe-style chuck was also 3D printed for the build to allow easy fixing of a coil bobbin.

Designing custom tools can be highly satisfying in and of itself, beyond the productivity gains they offer. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: AC Measurements Made Easy

When working on simple DC systems, a small low-cost multimeter from the hardware store will get the job done well enough. Often they have the capability for measuring AC, but this is where cheap meters can get tripped up. Unless the waveform is a perfect sinusoid at a specific frequency, their simple algorithms won’t be able to give accurate readings like a high-quality meter will. [hesam.moshiri] took this as a design challenge, though, and built an AC multimeter to take into account some of the edge cases that come up when working with AC circuits, especially when dealing with inductive loads.

The small meter, an upgrade from a previous Arduino version that is now based on the ESP32, is capable of assessing root mean square (RMS) voltage, RMS current, active power, power factor, and energy consumption after first being calibrated using the included push buttons. Readings are given via a small OLED screen and have an accuracy rate of 0.5% or better. The board also includes modern design considerations such as galvanic isolation between the measurement side of the meter and the user interface side, each with its own isolated power supply.  The schematics and bill-of-materials are also available for anyone looking to recreate or build on this design.

With the project built on an easily-accessible platform like the ESP32, it would be possible to use this as a base to measure other types of signals as well. Square and triangle waves, as well as signals with a large amount of harmonics or with varying frequencies, all need different measurement techniques in order to get accurate readings. Take a look at this classic multimeter to see what that entails.

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Building A Woodworking Lathe From Scratch

Today, cheap dodgy machine tools are more readily available than ever. Sometimes though, there’s great value in putting a simple and rugged version of your own, as demonstrated by [bartworker]’s woodworking lathe build. 

The core of the build is a hefty wooden base, something that is a core component of any good machine tool. It was built from a large beam sourced from a ship supply house, and originally used to hold a sturdy vice. It eventually gained a motor from a cement mixer when [bartworker] decided it should be converted into a lathe. From there, it was further equipped with a sliding support for larger workpieces, allowing [bartworker] to lathe some seriously big stock.

The lathe is very much an ever-evolving thing, and [bartworker] has used it to share the joys of woodworking with his family and friends. As a demonstration of its abilities, the lathe was able to produce a handsome handle for [bartworker]’s axe.

As this story shows, the only thing better than a tool you build yourself is one that your friends get to enjoy too! Meanwhile, if you’ve been whipping up your own machinery, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Hackaday Prize 2023: The Gearing Up Challenge Finalists

If there’s more to life than just a workshop full of tools, it’s probably a workshop full of tools that you’ve built yourself. At least that was the thinking behind the recently concluded “Gearing Up” challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize, which unsurprisingly generated quite a list of entries for our judges to review and whittle down to their top ten favorite tools, jigs, fixtures, and general labor-savers.

Having piqued the interest of our crack team of judges, these ten projects have not only earned a spot in the 2023 Hackaday Prize Finals, but they’ll also get a $500 cash prize to boot. But the heat is really on now; like all the finalists from the previous rounds, they’ve only got until October to get their projects as far along as they can before the final round. The grand prize is grand indeed — $50,000 in cash and a residency at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena!

We’re really getting down to the wire here, but it’s worth taking a little time out to look at some of the Gearing Up challenge winners, and what they came up with to make life in the shop a little easier. And don’t forget — the one who dies with the most tools wins!

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