touch sensors

2 Articles

Cheap Lab Balance Needs Upgrades, Gets Gutted Instead

June 12, 2020 by 29 Comments

What is this world coming to when you spend seven bucks on a digital scale and you have to completely rebuild it to get the functionality you need? Is nothing sacred anymore?

Such were the straits [Jana Marie] found herself in with his AliExpress special, a portable digital scale that certainly looks like it’s capable of its basic task. Sadly, though, [Jana] was looking for a few more digits of resolution and a lot more in the way of hackability. And so literally almost every original component was ripped out of the scale, replaced by a custom PCB carrying an STM32 microcontroller and OLED display. The PCB has a complicated shape that allows the original lid to attach to it, as well as the stainless steel pan and load cell. [Jana] developed new firmware that fixes some annoying traits, for example powering down after 30 seconds, and adds new functionality, such as piece-counting by weight. The video below shows some of the new features in action.

Alas, [Jana] reports that even the original load cell must go, as it lacks the accuracy her application requires. So she’ll essentially end up building the scale from scratch, which we respect, of course. At this rate, she might even try to build her own load cell from SMD resistors too.

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Hackaday Links: March 1, 2015

March 1, 2015 by 12 Comments

The somewhat regular Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic was a few days ago in San Francisco. Here’s the video to prove it. Highlights include [James Whong] from Moooshimeter, the two-input multimeter, [Mark Garrison] from Saleae, and a half-dozen other people giving talks on how to develop hardware.

[Taylor] made a portable NES with a retron, a new-ish NES clone that somehow fits entirely in a glop top IC. The controllers sucked, but [Taylor] made a new one with touch sensors. All that was required was eight transistors. The enclosure is an Altoid tin, and everything works great.

Here’s a YouTube channel you should subscribe to: Ham College. The latest episode covers the history of radio receivers and a crystal radio demonstration. They’re also going through some of the Technical class question pool, providing the answers and justification for those answers.

[Prusa] just relaunched prusaprinters and he’s churning out new content for it. Up now is an interview with [Rick Nidata] and his awesome printed container ship.

The tip line is overflowing with ESP8266 breakout boards. Here’s the simplest one of them all. It’s a breadboard adapter with stickers on the pin headers. Turn that into a right-angle breadboard adapter, and you’ll really have something.

Here’s something that’s a bit old, but still great. [Dillon Markey], one of the stop-motion animators for Robot Chicken modified a Nintendo Power Glove for animation duties. It seems to work great, despite being so bad. Thanks [Nicholas] for the link.

[David] the Swede – a consummate remote control professional we’ve seen a few times before – just flew his tricopter in a mall so dead it has its own Wikipedia page. Awesome tricopter, awesome location, awesome video, although we have to wonder how a few really, really bright LEDs would make this video look.

Here’s an item from the tip line. [Mark] wrote in with an email, “Why do you put names in [square brackets] in the blog entries? Just curious.” The official, [Caleb]-era answer to that question is that sometimes people have bizarre names that just don’t work in text. Imagine the sentence, “[12VDC] connected the wires to the terminal” without brackets. The semi-official answer I give is, “because.”