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Monday, December 23rd, 2013
- Gcodetools for Inkscape – Free, great for art generated on Inkscape. Somewhat limited in capability, and the documentation may take a little time to figure out.
- ESTLCam – Inexpensive at $35, and it has a good-looking interface. More of a 2D environment, and you can draw your parts on this program if you like.
- CAMBam – Reasonably priced at $149, with a very good free trial period. I primarily use this CAM program.
- MeshCAM – Really excellent looking user interface, and it has some neat features. Along with this polish, it is more expensive than some at $250. It’s geared more toward 3D users, so it wasn’t a great fit for my Draftsight-centric CAD style.
- Custom CAM routine - If you’re a programmer (or pretend to be), it’s possible that you could write your own Gcode generating script. I’ve linked to a post on my “pixel machining” Python routine if you’d like to see an example.
| Time | Event |
| 12:01a | Hackaday Links: December 22, 2013
[Korben] is using a picture frame as a Bluetooth speaker (translated). He hacked a Rock’R² for this project. It’s a device that has a vibrating element which can be used to make any hollow item into a speaker. Entertain yourself over the holidays by mastering the Apollo Guidance Computer simulator. It’s a JavaScript version of the computer used in the modules of the Apollo moon missions. [Thanks Gregory and Paul] Here’s a little mirror attachment that lets you use your laptop as an overhead projector. [Ian] calls it the ClipDraw. Affix it to the webcam and use the keyboard as the drawing surface. Since it’s simply using the camera this works for both live presentations and video conferencing. What we can’t figure out is why the image doesn’t end up backward? This guide will let you turn a Carambola board into an AirPlay speaker. Those who suck at remembering the rules for a game of pool will enjoy this offering. It’s some add-on hardware that uses a color sensor to detect when a ball is pocketed. The Raspberry Pi based system automatically scores each game. We spend waaaay too much time sitting at the computer. If we had a treadmill perhaps we’d try building [Kirk's] treadmill desk attachment. It’s made out of PVC and uses some altered reduction fittings to make the height adjustable. It looks like you lose a little bit of space at the front of the belt, but if you’re just using it at a walking pace that shouldn’t matter too much. You can have your own pair of smart tweezers for just a few clams. [Tyler] added copper tape to some anti-static tweezers. The copper pads have wires soldered to them which terminate on the other end with some alligator clips. Clip them to your multimeter and you’ve got your own e-tweezers. Filed under: Hackaday links   |
| 3:00a | 3D Printering: Making A Thing In AutoCAD, Part II
It’s time once again for another part in 3D Printering’s series of Making A Thing. Last week was a short tutorial on the beginnings of making a thing in AutoCAD. This is an extremely complex software package, and in a desire to make things short and sweet, I broke this AutoCAD tutorial into two parts. Since we already covered the 2D design portion of AutoCAD, part II of this tutorial is going to turn our 2D part into a three-dimensional object. Check out the rest of the tutorial below.
Our Thing
Just like all of these Making a Thing tutorials, we’re using this object pulled out of a nearly 100-year-old textbook on drawing and drafting. We already have a 2D projection of this part, from the previous AutoCAD tutorial, so let’s just dig right in. Views and Presspull
With being able to see the Z axis sorted out, the first order of business is making a 2D object 3D. You might think the command we want to use here is extrude. You’d be terribly wrong, though. The command we want to use is called presspull. Extrude is an AutoCAD command that pulls the highlighted objects (in our case, the lines making up our part) through the Z axis. It doesn’t make your lines a solid, though, so unless you’re designing single-thickness vases to print on your RepRap, there isn’t much use for extrude. By selecting the presspull command from the ‘solid’ menu in AutoCAD, we can click on the object we want to pull up into the Z axis and make them solid. If you’re following along with this tutorial by copying all these steps, highlight the main part of our ‘thing’, type in presspull, and type in the height you want to pull it up to. In our case, we want this part of our ‘thing’ to be 7/16″ thick, or 0.4375 in decimal inches.
Editing SolidsYou’ll notice our ‘thing’ is missing something – the flange on top with the drilled hole. Not to worry, because by playing with the box and cylinder solids we can add that part in. Here’s our process in handy animated .gif format, complete with a textual description of how to do it.
Switch to the NE Isometric view. From the Home tab, select box. This is a tool that allows us to draw a box in three dimensions, by selecting two points on the X and Y axes, and extruding it up through the Z axis. From the 100-year-old drawing we’re working off of, the top of our box should be 7/16″ tall for the base, then another 7/8″ tall to get to the midpoint of the cylinder we’re going to put on. That adds up to 1.3125 decimal inches, so click one corner of our 2D box, click the opposite corner, and type in 1.3125. Now we have a bit of a challenge. We need to add the ‘dome’ on our part. This is easily made with the cylinder tool, but we need to make sure it’s aligned on the center of the edge of the box we just made. If you’re following along with this tutorial, you’ve already experienced some of the ‘snap-to’ effects, but nothing that’s a midpoint yet.
OSNAP. Yep, the command you want to type in is called osnap. That joke gets really, really old after the first week of a drafting class, by the way. Osnap enables different snap-tos, allowing you to draw something from the midpoint, endpoint, and center. By default midpoint isn’t selected. Click that check box and get hit OK. Draw your cylinder, then from the solid tab, click Union, select both the box and the cylinder and hit enter.
We’re nearly done here. All that’s left to do are the drilled hole through this flange we just created and the counter bore. First we’ll work on the drill that’s 7/16″ in diameter. Not radius, diameter. Using your new-found osnap skills, draw a cylinder that is 0.21875 decimal inches in diameter. Pull that through our flange and subtract it, just like we unionized the box and cylinder above. The counter bore is left as an exercise to the reader because It’s the exact same process. Wrapping things upSince our goal is to design a part for a 3D printer, we’ll need to make an STL file. This is done with the export command. It’s a simple process, but there is one catch: you must select all the objects in a part before saving. Right now, our ‘thing’ is made of two parts – the weird circle thing with a slot, and the dome thing with a hole and counter bore. We could export both these parts together, but that’s rather inelegant. Select Union, click both parts, and hit enter. Then export to .STL.
Will you look at that. We made a thing. You also just learned AutoCAD and the Escape key on your keyboard is crying. Compared to the previous tutorial of making a thing with OpenSCAD, designing a 3D printable object with AutoCAD isn’t more difficult, it’s just different. Next week, sometime after Christmas, we’ll check out some more 3D design software and make our ‘thing’ once again. If you have any suggestions on what software I should feature, drop a note in the comments. I lost the Post-It that had all the softwares I was planning to use. Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Hackaday Columns   |
| 6:01a | Fubarino Contest: The Problem Of Being Very Good At Foosball
[Sebastian] came up with a solution to this problem: a KickerClock – something between a chess clock and an automated score keeper for foosball. The device has two seven-segment displays for each team, and a countdown timer for both of the four and a half minute rounds. All the documentation is up in [Sebastian]‘s Google Drive, and he plans on adding a few neat features such as automated score keeping. The easter egg for this submission? The buttons for scoring each goal are used as combination lock. By scoring eight black team goals (H=8), one silver team goal (A=1), three black goals (C=3), and eleven silver goals (K=11), the Hackaday URL shows up on the seven-segment displays. Extremely well hidden, and a great way to efficiently waste time at work. Video of the KickerClock, and the easter egg, available below. This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!
Filed under: contests   |
| 9:00a | Holograms With The New Kinect
The Xbox One is out, along with a new Kinect sensor, and this time around Microsoft didn’t waste any time making this 3D vision sensor available for Windows. [programming4fun] got his hands on the new Kinect v2 sensor and started work on a capture system to import anything into a virtual environment. We’ve seen [programming4fun]‘s work before with an extremely odd and original build that turns any display into a 3D display with the help of a Kinect v1 sensor. This time around, [programming] isn’t just using a Kinect to display a 3D object, he’s also using a Kinect to capture 3D data. [programming] captured himself playing a few chords on a guitar with the new Kinect v2 sensor. This was saved to a custom file format that can be played back in the Unity engine. With the help of a Kinect v1, [programming4fun] can pan and tilt around this virtual model simply by moving his head. If that’s not enough, [programming] has also included support for the Oculus Rift, turning the Unity-based virtual copy of himself into something he can interact with in a video game. As far as we can tell, this is the first build on Hackaday using the new Kinect sensor. We asked what everyone was going to do with this new improved hardware, and from [programming]‘s demo, it seems like there’s still a lot of unexplored potential with the new Xbox One spybox.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQZQeCumz Filed under: Kinect hacks   |
| 12:01p | Repairing a Non-Serviceable Welding Hood
[Unixgeek] owns an Optrel welding hood, which contains a lens that auto-adjusts for various welding tasks. It stopped working properly, and this hood is “Non-Serviceable”, so he had to either throw it away or hack it. The problem was that he knew it contained batteries, but they weren’t accessible. Using his milling machine, he was able to fix it himself. After removing the outer layer of plastic [Unixgeek] found that it was filled with foam. With continued milling he finally uncovered the batteries. They are standard CR2330 cells, so he could easily replace them, or set up a separate battery holder. We like seeing this sort of hack, as simple as it is, because of how much we truly hate devices with planned obsolescence built in. This is a >$300 safety device that gets broken when some coin cells finally die. Any sort of hack to keep people from having to throw away their devices is a good thing. Do you have a favorite planned obsolescence hack? Share it in the comments! Filed under: tool hacks   |
| 3:00p | The World’s First Autonomous Flapping MAV
[Ferdinand] sent in a tip about the very cool DelFly Explorer, built by researchers at Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology, which is claimed to be the world’s first autonomous, flapping micro air vehicle. While it doesn’t fly like a typical ornithopter, the specs will convince you not to care. It has an 28 cm wingspan and weighs 20 grams, which includes motors, a battery, two cameras, and an autopilot. The autopilot uses accelerometers and a gyroscope, plus a barometer for altitude measurement. You can see the on-board video at the 35-second mark on the video (after the break). They are incredibly noisy images, but apparently the researchers have come up with some algorithms that can make sense of it. Put it all together, and you have a machine that can take off, maintain altitude, avoid obstacles, and fly for nine minutes. We’ve seen a cool ornithopter design before, and even a thrust vectoring plane, but this surpasses both projects. It’s pretty incredible what they have been able to fit into such a small design.
Filed under: drone hacks   |
| 6:01p | Software Advice for Anyone Thinking About a CNC Router
Excellent results can come from a small CNC router, but don’t forget the software! CNC tools, whatever their flavor, can greatly enhance your “making” or DIY ability. My current tool of choice is a CNC router. Being familiar with a manual milling machine, the concept seemed similar, and the price of these is quite reasonable when compared to some other tools. As described in this post, my machine is a Zen Toolworks model, but there are certainly other options to visit like this Probotix V90 model noted recently in this post. Although any number of CNC router models look great in videos and pictures, rest assured that even the best machines require some patience to get one running satisfactorily. Setting up the machine can be a challenge, as well as figuring out what your machine is capable of, but one thing that might slip peoples’ minds is the software involved. Read on to find out With a CNC router run by a computer (as opposed to a dedicated controller), you have three parts in your tool chain: Computer aided design (CAD), computer aided manufacturing (CAM), and a machine controller package. There are free and paid versions of each of these. Design Your Part Design courtesy of ESTLcam and my idea to shrink the knife block to make a “warrior dart holder.” The first step is to draw your part. To generate my part drawings, I’ve experimented with Inkscape, a vector graphics editor, and Draftsight, which is more or less free AutoCAD. Inkscape is a really cool program for generating more artistic pieces, like this random tree that I cut a while ago. If you want to do something more dimensionally-driven, my preferred tool is Draftsight. I’m very familiar with AutoCAD, and it’s available for Linux, Mac and Windows. If you want to get into 3D design, Sketchup seems to be more-or less the standard for casual makers/hackers/etc. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled or brainwashed by quite a few years of working with Pro/E, and Solidworks to a much smaller extent, because I found Sketchup frustrating. I find Pro/E (now Creo) frustrating as well at times, but I’m paid for that frustration. Regardless of what style or design program you choose, if you’re not familiar with the format, plan to spend a decent amount of time figuring out how to generate your parts. Generate Gcode Meshcam screen per my review G-Code, unlike what some mid 90′s rappers would have you believe, stands for General Code, and is what directly controls a CNC machine. You can write G-Code by hand, and for very simple circles or lines, this might be practical. For most circumstances, however, G-Code is much easier to produce using a CAM program to translate your CAD model into this format. I’ve tried out several packages, and all have their advantages and disadvantages: Along with actually learning the software, you’ll need to consider what kind of speed your machine can actually handle, and what to do so you don’t “crash” your machine. Your CAM program is where you set up your feeds, speeds, depth of cut, and other parameters. Control Your Router Mach3 to control your router Once your CAM program spits out possibly several thousand lines of G-Code, your machine control software is what gets everything moving. I use Mach3, which seems to be a common program for hobby machine control. Like everything else, it has a learning curve, but overall I’m quite happy with how it performs. One weakness I ran into with this (and that is probably true of other programs) is that you need an actual parallel port for it to work properly (not a USB-parallel adapter), and it’s not supposed to be run on a notebook because of possible power management issues. I’m sure there are workarounds, but in the interest of saving time, it might be a good idea to just dust off (or purchase) an old computer to run it on. It will run comfortably on slightly antiquated machines, so for $150 or so, you can have a computer that will run your router. Another option would be LinuxCNC. When I started leaning CNC, I was almost entirely unfamiliar with Linux. The challenge of leaning a new OS along with a new router seemed like too steep of a learning curve, so I haven’t tried this option. As I use Ubuntu quite a bit now, I might take a different track today. If you have worked extensively with LinuxCNC please share you experiences by leaving a comment below. To wrap things up, here’s two CNC videos that I’ve made. The first is me engraving a Tiger Paw, whereas the second video is a tutorial I did on how to engrave a logo using Inkscape. A CNC machine is a great addition to any shop, but as I hope I’ve pointed out here, not without its challenges!
Please note that separate from this post, I have received special pricing and/or samples in order to try out products from the companies representative of Zen Toolworks, Mach3, ESTLcam, and MeshCAM. Jeremy Cook is a Mechanical Engineer with a degree from Clemson University, and works in manufacturing and process automation. Additionally, Jeremy is an avid maker and former Hackaday staff writer. When he’s not at work or in the garage, you can find him on Twitter @JeremySCook, his projects blog JCoPro.net, or on his photography-related blog DIYTripods.com. Filed under: cnc hacks, Featured, tool hacks   |
| 9:00p | IR Theremin Speaks In Four Voices
At the end of every semester, we get a bunch of cool and well-documented student projects from Cornell’s ECE4760 class. [Scott] and [Alex]‘s infrared theremin is no exception. The classic theremin design employs each of the player’s hands as the grounded plate of a variable capacitor in an LC circuit. For the pitch antenna, this circuit is part of the oscillator. For the volume antenna, the hand capacitor detunes another oscillator, changing the attenuation in the amplifier. [Scott] and [Alex] put a twist on the theremin by using two IR sensors to control volume and pitch. The sensors compute the location of each hand and output a voltage inversely proportional to its distance from the hand. An ATMega1284P converts the signal to an 8-bit binary number for processing. They built four voices into it that are accessible through the push-button switch. The different voices are created with wave combinations and modulation effects. In addition to Classic Theremin, you can play in pure sine, sawtooth, and FM modulation. If you’re just not that into microcontrollers, you could build this digital IR theremin instead. If you find IR theremins soulless or plebeian, try this theremincello.
[Thanks Bruce] Filed under: Microcontrollers, musical hacks   |
In 
[Sebastian] works at an engineering company testing car ECUs, head units, and all the confusing wiring harnesses found in the modern-day automobile. It’s good work, but not exactly fun, so [Sebastian]‘s bosses bought a foosball table so the employees could unwind. The foosball tables have been there for several years, and now everyone at the company is really, really good at twirling little football players on a stick. With their current rule set (at least 6 goals and 2 goals ahead), matches last at least twenty minutes.
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