Getting To Know An 18th Century Hacker

January 19, 2018 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Here at Hackaday we tend to stay pretty close to the bleeding edge in tech, not by any conscious effort, but simply because that’s what most hackers are interested in. Sure we see the occasional vintage computer rebuild, or reverse engineering of some component that was put into service before most of us were born; but on the whole you’re way more likely to see projects involving the latest and greatest microcontroller to hit AliExpress than ones involving the once ubiquitous vacuum tube.

But occasionally it’s nice to take a step back from the latest and greatest, to really look at what makes the hacker spirit without the all modern trappings of blinking LEDs and Wi-Fi connectivity. We make and explore because it’s something we are passionate about, and while today most of us are doing that with a soldering iron or a compiler, that hasn’t always been the case. In the video below, historic interpreter and woodworker [Bill Maddox] talks about what draws him to 18th century technology. His tools may look foreign to us, but the passion he shows while talking about his creations will be familiar to anyone who’s ever set foot in a hackerspace.

Even with a vastly different set of interests than the modern hacker, [Bill] runs into some very familiar problems. When the highly specialized tools he needed to work like an 18th century craftsman weren’t available, he decided to make his own. But to make his own tools he needed to learn how to forge, and after he forged his hand tools he moved on to forging chisels for the lathe he decided to build.

Whether or not we ever take a knife to a piece of wood and try to carve out a spoon, it’s impossible to watch [Bill] speak about his creations and not see him as a kindred spirit. Like many of us, he’s honed skills in a niche that the everyday person takes for granted. Makes you wonder what people from 300 years in the future would think of us if they could peer back through the centuries.

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Smartphone Controlled Periodic Table Of Elements

January 16, 2018 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that here at Hackaday, we’re about as geeky as they come. Having said that, even we were surprised to hear that there are people out there who collect elements. Far be it from us to knock how anyone else wishes to fill their days, but telling somebody at a party that you collect chemical elements is like one step up from saying you’ve got a mold and fungus collection at home. Even then, at least a completed mold and fungus collection won’t be radioactive.

But if you’re going to spend your spare time working on a nerdy and potentially deadly collection, you might as well put it into an appropriate display case. You can’t just leave your Polonium sitting around on the kitchen counter. That’s the idea behind the interactive periodic table built by [Maclsk], and we’ve got to admit, if we get to put it in a case this awesome we might have to start our own collection.

A large portion of this project is building the wooden display case itself as, strangely enough, IKEA doesn’t currently stock a shelving unit that’s in the shape of the periodic table. The individual cells and edge molding are made of pine, the back panel is MDF, and the front of the display is faced off with thin strips of balsa to cover up all the joints. Holes were then drilled into the back of each cell for the LED wiring, and finally the entire frame was painted white.

Each cell contains an WS2812B RGB LED, which at maximum brightness draws 60mA. Given the 90 cells of the display case, [Maclsk] calculated a 5.4A power supply would be needed to keep everything lit up. However, he found a 4A power supply that made his budget happier, which he reasons will be fine as long as he doesn’t try to crank every cell up to maximum at the same time. Control for the display is provided by an Arduino Nano and HC05 Bluetooth module.

The final piece of the project was the Android application that allows the user to control the lighting. But it doesn’t just change colors and brightness, it’s actually a way to visualize information about the elements themselves. The user can do things like highlight certain groups of elements (say, only the radioactive ones), or light up individual cells in order of the year each element was discovered. Some of the information visualizations are demonstrated in the video below, and honestly, we’ve seen museum displays that weren’t this well done.

We last caught up with [Maclsk] when he created a very slick robotic wire cutting machine, which we can only assume was put to work for this particular project. Too bad he didn’t have a robot to handle the nearly 540 soldering joints it took to wire up all these LEDs.

[via /r/DIY]

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DIY Bookshelf Is More Than Meets The Eye

January 14, 2018 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

It might surprise you, Dear Reader, that not every project featured on Hackaday needs to pulsate with LEDs, or update the world about its goings-on over Twitter. They don’t even, contrary to what you may have heard, need to have an Arduino inside. No, sometimes you can pull off a pretty neat hack with nothing more than some wood, a couple of tools, and a unique idea which repurposes something that would otherwise be in a landfill.

Such is the case with the latest project from [Keith Decent], which uses plywood and the spines of old books to create a secret compartment “bookshelf”. The concept is probably best described as a roll-top desk on its side, and while the action does appear a little stiff, it scores extra points for how easy it looks to replicate.

Using a router, [Keith] cuts a channel into the top and bottom sheets of plywood, which the “books” will eventually ride in. This channel goes around the entire perimeter of the shelf, and it’s important to make it as straight as possible so nothing binds up. To make sure things move through as smoothly as possible, some sandpaper is used to clean-up the inside edges.

The next step is to rip some books apart and salvage their spines. Used books can be purchased for next to nothing at flea markets, so even if you don’t have a home library filled with vintage tomes to eviscerate, it should be easy enough to get your hands on some if you want to build your own version. For sanity’s sake it would seem that books with the same size spines are ideal, so keep an eye out for old sets of encyclopedias and the like.

When the spines are removed from the books, they get glued to individual wooden slats. These slats then have holes drilled in the top and bottom, and standard wood screws driven in to act as “rollers”. Real rollers would undoubtedly make for smoother action, but you can’t beat his method if you’re trying to get it done cheaply and quickly.

The slats are then glued onto a piece of fabric, creating what is referred to as a tambour. The fabric backing links all the slats together and makes it so that pushing and pulling one slat will move them all together as one. The book spine tambour is then inserted in the routed channel, and the back panel of the shelf can be installed to lock it all together.

At this point the project is essentially done, but [Keith] does take it the extra mile by sealing all the book spines and doing some finish work on the shelf to make it look more like a real vintage piece of furniture instead of some scrap plywood screwed together.

If this exercise in woodworking has gotten you interested in the wonderful world of dead trees, you’re in luck. We’ve covered several woodworking projects from the hacker perspective, so you won’t be completely lost.

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Robotic Table Saw Automates Finger Joints

January 13, 2018 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

We’ve all seen finger joints or box joints, those interlocking puzzle pieces that make laser-cut plywood enclosures such a fixture for DIY projects. But laser cutters make finger joints look much easier to fabricate than they are with traditional woodworking tools, which often lead to disappointing results.

But this finger joint cutting robot is no traditional woodworking tool, and [timschefter] put a lot of work into building the rig. We have to admit that when we first saw the video below, the thought of having a table saw in our shop that could be turned on with a button on a phone gave us pause. But on closer analysis, it looks like safety was a major concern with this build. With a prominent e-stop and an interlock switch, the small table saw that forms the foundation of the robot should be safe enough. On the table top is a sled with a linear slide that moves the workpiece perpendicular to the blade, and the sled moves back and forth over the blade with pneumatic cylinders. The joint is set up with a custom app which calculates the pin width and spacing, which can be evenly distributed across the panel, or, for a bit of geeky fun, controlled to make a joint that encodes a message in Morse.

A lot of work went into this, and while it’s not the first robotic finger joint cutter we’ve seen, it’s pretty impressive. Now if it could only automate dovetails.

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The Majesty Of Saturn’s Rings Lighting Your Abode

January 8, 2018 by James Hobson 4 Comments

[Modustrial Maker] is at it again with another seriously cool LED visualizer. This time around, he’s built pair of pendant lights inspired by the rings of Saturn.

The rings are made mostly of walnut plywood using a circle router jig to make the cut easier. If you are inspired to make these for yourself, [Modustrial Maker] is clear — the order in which you cut out the pieces of the rings is absolutely critical. The pieces are glued together — with any edges sanded smooth — and edgebanding applied using a hot air gun due to the curved surface before staining. Duplicate for the second (or more if you so choose!) rings. Be forewarned — a little geometry will be needed to find anchor points that will keep the rings properly balanced.

[Modustrial Maker] suggests an off-the shelf LED controller to handle the visualizations and lighting effects, but he used an Arduino Mega clone as the brains — code available here, a MonkeyJack MAX9814 electret mic, and a four-channel RF remote/transceiver to control the different modes. Pulsing along to the music, these rings make for sleek lighting indeed.

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Automatic Dust Collection For The Whole Shop

January 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

If you’ve got a woodworking area, or even if you’ve just got something that really churns out dust like a belt sander or table saw, there’s an excellent chance you hate sawdust with a passion. It gets all over your clothes, jams up everything mechanical, and as a fun little bonus can be explosive if not handled properly. Thankfully newer tools tend to come with their own dust collection bags (back in the old days, you weren’t really a man unless you were coughing up wood fibers), but if you’ve got a half a dozen tools with half a dozen different dust bags you’ve got to empty, that can get pretty annoying.

Especially if you take woodworking as seriously as [Brad Wright] does. Over on his YouTube channel [DIY Builds], he quickly runs through the construction of a whole-shop dust collection system with some very neat features. Not everyone needs a system this intricate, but the tips and tricks he shows off during the build are great and can certainly be adapted to less grandiose setups.

Dust collection connector with closeable gate — One of the scratch-built gates.

[Brad] goes into a bit more detail in this gallery, revealing that the heart of the build is a Harbor Freight dust collection system that he modified into a cyclone separator. Big chunks fall down into the 55 gallon bucket, and what’s left gets blown out of the shop via a louvered vent through an exterior wall. An intricate system of 4 inch PVC pipe is then used to connect up each individual machine’s dust collection port. Even individual hand sanders get into the act via a three way manifold. His table saw lacked a dust port, so he enclosed the motor with a piece of plywood and made his own.

One of the most interesting aspects of the build is the scratch-built blast gates. These are essentially valves which open and close the different sections of the PVC where they mate to the individual stations. This prevents the dust collection system from wasting suction by trying to pull from all the stations at once when only one is in use at any given time. [Brad] even wired up the blast gates with switches that will turn the dust collection system on when the gate is open, and off when it’s closed.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered the lengths people will go to rid their shop of dust. Cyclone dust separators are an especially popular build, using everything from sheet metal to 3D printed parts.

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Scratchbuilt Cryptex Would Make Da Vinci Weep

October 30, 2017 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Here’s a fun fact, the kind of thing that you might (but we definitely did not) find out when writing a blog post: Dan Brown actually made up the cryptex for his book, The Da Vinci Code. We therefore have Mr Brown, with a bit of help from the filmmakers over at Sony, to thank every time we see somebody make their own version. To follow that line of logic to its conclusion, we believe you’ll agree that the following is without question the greatest thing Dan Brown has ever done in his life.

Created by [Stephen Peduto] as a ring box for an exceptionally lucky young lady, it required an estimated 127 hours to complete over the course of two months. From the incredible job [Stephen] did photographing and documenting the build, we don’t doubt it for a second. Expertly combing milled aluminum and lathe-turned bocote wood, this has got to be the most gorgeous ring “box” ever made.

Frankly, it’s hard to do justice to what [Stephen] has created in so short a space, and you really should browse through the 140+ images in his gallery. But the short version is that after some furious white board sketching, [Stephen] moved over to AutoCAD and then SolidWorks to design all the parts which would eventually get machined out of aluminum. As a very clever touch, he wisely added 17° slop in the locking mechanism so that the recipient wouldn’t fumble too much at the big moment.

When the machining was all said and done, [Stephen] then switched over to the woodworking part of the project. Rather than numbers or letters for a combination, this cryptex uses the grain pattern in the turned piece of wood. This gives the final product a more organic feel, while at the same time avoiding the head-scratching problem of getting the characters printed or engraved into the wheels.

Towards the end of construction there was a worrying moment when the newly made wooding rings warped so badly that the aluminum inserts would no longer fit. As a last resort, the rings were placed in a box with a humidifier for a week and slowly worked back into shape. [Stephen] says he’s still surprised it worked.

Even if some may argue that a cryptex is nothing but a prettied-up bike lock, people sure do love them. We’re no stranger to high quality cryptex builds here, though even mere mortals can play along if they’ve got a well calibrated 3D printer.