Hacking Together A Serial Backpack

January 30, 2017 by Elliot Williams 30 Comments

A serial backpack is really nothing more than a screen and some microcontroller glue to drive it. And a hammer is nothing more than a hardened weight on the end of a stick. But when you’re presented with a nail, or a device that outputs serial diagnostic data, there’s nothing like having the right tool on hand.

[ogdento] built his own serial backpack using parts on hand and a port of some great old code. Cutting up a Nokia 1100 graphic display and pulling a PIC out of the parts drawer got him the hardware that he needed, and he found a good start for his code in [Peter Andersen]’s plain-old character LCD library, combined with a Nokia 1100 graphic LCD library by [spiralbrain]. [ogdento] added control for the backlight, mashed the two softwares together, and voilà!

A simple screen with a serial port is a great device to have on hand, and it makes a great project. We’ve seen them around here before, of course. And while you could just order one online, why not make your own? Who knows what kind of crazy customizations you might dream up along the way.

Bandsaw Tension Gauge Uses Raspberry Pi And Load Cell

January 28, 2017 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

No matter what material you’re cutting, getting the blade tension right is one of the keys to quality cuts on the bandsaw. Unfortunately, most bandsaws come with only a rudimentary tension gauge, and while there are plenty of tricks for measuring blade tension indirectly, nothing beats a digital blade tension gauge for repeatable results.

Despite being an aftermarket accessory for his beefy Hitachi CB-75F bandsaw, [Stephen B. Kirby]’s Pi-based tension guide looks like an OEM product. Housed in a sturdy case and sporting a sealed membrane keypad and four-line LCD display, the interface electronics are pretty straightforward. The tricky bit is sensing the amount of tension on the bandsaw blade. For that task, [Stephen] mounted a load cell in place of the original tensioning spring. A few adapters helped that job, and with a little calibration, the gauge is capable of displaying the tension by measuring the force over the cross-sectional area of the current blade.

We really like it when electronics can bring a new level of precision to old-school hardware, whether it’s a simple DRO for a manual lathe or a more accomplished build like [Stephen]’s. Sometimes adding new silicon can make old iron a little easier to use.

In Defense Of The Electric Chainsaw

December 28, 2016 by Jenny List 94 Comments

Here at Hackaday we are a diverse bunch, we all bring our own experience to the task of bringing you the best of the hardware scene. Our differing backgrounds were recently highlighted by a piece from my colleague [Dan] in which he covered the teardown of a cordless electric chainsaw.

It was his line “Now, we’d normally shy away from any electric chainsaw, especially a cordless saw, and doubly so a Harbor Freight special“. that caught my eye. I’m with him on cordless tools which I see as a cynical ploy from manufacturers to ensure 5-yearly replacements, and I agree that cheap tools are a false economy. But electric chainsaws? Here on this small farm, they’re the saw of choice and here’s why.

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Building An IoT Drill Press For Reasons Unknown

December 6, 2016 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

He’s a little cagey about the reasons, but [Ivan Miranda] plans to put a drill press on the internet. What could go wrong with that?

We’ll take [Ivan] at his word that there’s a method to this madness and just take a look at the build itself, in the hopes that it will inspire someone to turn their lowly drill press into a sorta-kinda 2-axis milling machine. [Ivan] makes extensive use of his 3D printer to fabricate the X-axis slide that bolts to the stock drill press table. And before anyone points out the obvious, [Ivan] already acknowledges that the slide is way too flimsy to hold up to much serious drilling, especially considering the huge mechanical advantage of the gearing he used to replace the quill handle for a powered Z-axis. The motor switch was also replaced with a solid state relay. The steppers, relay, and limit switches are all fed into a Teensy that talks to an ESP8266, which will presumably host a web interface to put this thing online.

The connected aspects of the drill press become a little more clear after the break.

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A Machine Shop In A Toolbox: Just Add Time

October 21, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 73 Comments

You don’t need any fancy tools. A CNC machine is nice. A 3D printer can help. Laser cutters are just great. However, when it comes to actually making something, none of this is exactly necessary. With a basic set of hand tools and a few simple power tools, most of which can be picked up for a pittance, many things of surprising complexity, precision, and quality can be made.

Not as pretty, but worked just the same.

A while back I was working on a ring light for my 3D printer. I already had a collection of LEDs, as all hackers are weak for a five-dollar assortment box. So I got on my CAD software of choice and modeled out a ring that I was going to laser cut out of plywood. It would have holes for each of the LEDs. To get a file ready for laser cutting ook around ten minutes. I started to get ready to leave the house and do the ten minute drive to the hackerspace, the ten minutes firing up and using the laser cutter (assuming it wasn’t occupied) and the drive back. It suddenly occurred to me that I was being very silly. I pulled out a sheet of plywood. Drew three circles on it with a compass and subdivided the circle. Under ten minutes of work with basic layout tools, a power drill, and a coping saw and I had the part. This was versus the 40 minutes it would have taken me to fire up the laser cutter.

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Electronic Message In A Bottle

September 26, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

We remember going to grandfather’s garage. There he would be, his tobacco pipe clenched between his teeth, wisps of smoke trailing into the air around him as he focused, bent over another of his creations. Inside of a simple glass bottle was something impossible. Carefully, ever so carefully, he would use his custom tools to twist wire. He would carefully place each lead. Eventually when the time was right he would solder. Finally he’d place it on the shelf next to the others, an LED matrix in a bottle.

Well, maybe not, but [Mariko Kosaka]’s father [Kimio Kosaka] has done it. In order to build the matrix, he needed tools that could reach inside the mouth of the bottle without taking up too much space to allow for precise movement. To do this he bent, brazed, twisted, and filed piano wire into tools that are quite beautiful by themselves. These were used to carefully bend and position the LEDs, wires, and other components inside the bottle.

Once the part was ready, he used a modified Hakko soldering iron to do the final combination. We wonder if he even had to be careful to solder quickly so as not to build up a residue on the inside of the bottle? The electronics are all contained inside the bottle. One of the bottles contained another impressive creation of his: an entire Arduino with only wire, dubbed the Arduino Skeleton. Batteries are attached to the cork so when the power runs low it can be removed and replaced without disturbing the creation.

It’s a ridiculous labor of love, and naturally, we love it. There’s a video of it in operation as well as one with him showing how it was done which is visible after the break. He showed them off at the Tokyo Maker Faire where they were surely a hit.

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Intel Makes A Cool Robot Brain In Latest Attempt To Pry Hackers From Their Wallets

August 26, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 25 Comments

Hackerboards got a chance to sit down with Intel’s latest attempt to turn hackers into a willing and steady revenue stream, the, “Euclid.” The board is cool in concept, a full mini computer with stereo cameras, battery, Ubuntu, and ROS nicely packaged together.

We would be more excited if we knew how much it costs, but in principle the device is super cool. From a robotics research perspective it’s a sort of perfect package. ROS is a wonderful distributed and asynchronous robotic operating system, test, and development platform. The Intel developers designed this unit around the needs of ROS and it comes pre-installed on the camera.

For those who haven’t used ROS before, this is a really cool feature. ROS is natively distributed. It really doesn’t care where the computer supplying its data lives. So, for example, if you already had a robot and wanted to add stereo vision to it. You could offload all the vision processing components of your existing ROS codebase to the Euclid and continue as if nothing changed.

The other option is to use the board as the entire robot brain. It’s self contained with battery and camera. It’s a USB to serial connection away from supercharging any small robotics project.

Unfortunately the board is still a demo, and based on Intel’s history, likely to be too expensive to lure ordinary hackers away from the RasPis and import cameras they already know how to hack together into more or less the same thing. Universities will likely be weak at the knees for such a development though.