Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Friday Hack Chat: Simulating Analog

Posted on by

Simulation is a valuable tool for any hardware developer. Instead of building hardware for a long debugging session, you can emulate a microcontroller and blink your lights with some Javascript. Instead of working on a Bluetooth protocol for your fitness wearable, you can just whip up some Javascript and get it working that way. Once all your Javascript is in order, then you can finally move over to hardware. It saves development time, and it saves money.

But this is all digital. What do you do if you’re working on an analog system? Lucky for you, there’s a system built …read more

Continue reading Friday Hack Chat: Simulating Analog→

Neon Display for a Vacuum Tube Calculator

Posted on by

When it comes to vintage displays, everyone gravitates to Nixies. These tubes look great, but you’re dealing with a certain aesthetic with these vintage numeric tubes. There is another option. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [castvee8] is making seven-segment displays out of vintage neon lamps. It looks great, and it’s the basis of an all-vacuum tube calculator.

The core of this build are a few tiny NE-2 neon bulbs. These are the same type of bulbs you’ll find in old indicators, and require somewhere around 100 volts to fire. These bulbs are then installed in a 3D-printed frame, giving [castvee] …read more

Continue reading Neon Display for a Vacuum Tube Calculator→

Cutting Edge of 3D Printing Revealed At Last Weekend’s Midwest RepRap Festival

Posted on by

The last three days marked the 2018 Midwest RepRap Festival. Every year, the stars of the 3D printing world make it out to Goshen, Indiana for the greatest gathering of 3D printers and printing enthusiasts the world has ever seen. This isn’t like any other 3D printing convention — everyone here needs to take the time to get to Goshen, and that means only the people who want to be here make it out.

Over the weekend we covered some amazing hacks and printer builds from MRRF. The ‘BeagleBone On A Chip’ has become a complete solution for a 3D …read more

Continue reading Cutting Edge of 3D Printing Revealed At Last Weekend’s Midwest RepRap Festival→

Hackaday Links: March 25, 2016

Posted on by

File this one under, ‘don’t do this yourself, but we’re glad they filmed it.’ [Denis Koryakin] flew a quadcopter to 10km, or about 33,000 feet. This was just an experiment to see if it was possible. A few items of note from the video: this thing was climbing at 14-15 m/s when it first took off. It was barely climbing at 2 m/s at 10km. Second: it was really, really cold. The ground temperature was -10 C, and temperatures at 8km reached -50 C. Density altitude is on this guy’s side, and I don’t know if this would be possible …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: March 25, 2016→

Turning The Beaglebone On A Chip Into A 3D Printer Controller

Posted on by

It’s understood that 3D printers and CNC machines need to control motors, but there are a few other niceties that are always good to have. It would be great if the controller board ran Linux, had support for a nice display, and had some sort of networking. The usual way of going about this is either driving a CNC machine from a desktop, or by adding a Raspberry Pi to a 3D printer.

The best solution to this problem is to just drive everything from a BeagleBone. This will give you Linux, and with a few motor drivers you can …read more

Continue reading Turning The Beaglebone On A Chip Into A 3D Printer Controller→

Hands On With Filament Splicing Robots

Posted on by

The future of 3D printing, it seems, is in multimaterial filament printers. The Prusa I3 multimaterial upgrade exists, and this weekend at MRRF E3D announced their amazing multihead printer. Multimaterial printing will get you mechanical parts with the properties you want, like wheels with grippy treads and strong hubs. It will give you easily removable support material. The most popular use, though, is bound to be multicolor prints. It’s easier to do, as you’re really only working with either ABS or PLA, and if you’re really clever, you can squeeze everything through a single nozzle.

While there are some very …read more

Continue reading Hands On With Filament Splicing Robots→

E3D Introduces Tool Changing 3D Printer

Posted on by

E3D has introduced their latest answer to multimaterial printing at the Midwest RepRap Festival this weekend. Their research project into a 3D printer with the ability to change toolheads is the latest advancement in multimaterial printing. It’s a work of engineering brilliance, and they’ve already written up their teardown on how this all came to be.

While milling machines and other fancy industrial CNC have had tool changing for decades, and the subject has been pursued by the RepRap community for a few years now, it really hasn’t caught on. The question then is, what is tool changing on a …read more

Continue reading E3D Introduces Tool Changing 3D Printer→

Join Hackaday At The Midwest RepRap Festival This Weekend

Posted on by

What time is it? It’s Midwest RepRap Festival time, and it’s happening this weekend in beautiful Goshen, Indiana. It’s free, it’s open to everyone, and it’s the greatest 3D printer convention on Earth.

What’s so great about MRRF? This is where the latest products in the 3D printing space are launched. A few years ago, E3D announced their dual extrusion head at MRRF. This is where the world first got a look at the Bondtech extruder. This is where E3D announced their Titan extruder, and this is where the world got its first look at the Lulzbot Taz 6. If …read more

Continue reading Join Hackaday At The Midwest RepRap Festival This Weekend→

Everyone Needs A Personal Supercomputer

Posted on by

When you think of supercomputers, visions of big boxes and blinkenlights filling server rooms immediately appear. Since the 90s or thereabouts, these supercomputers have been clusters of computers, all working together on a single problem. For the last twenty years, people have been building their own ‘supercomputers’ in their homes, and now we have cheap ARM single board computers to play with. What does this mean? Personal supercomputers. That’s what [Jason] is building for his entry to the Hackaday Prize.

The goal of [Jason]’s project isn’t to break into the Top 500, and it’s doubtful it’ll be more powerful than …read more

Continue reading Everyone Needs A Personal Supercomputer→

Friday Hack Chat: All About The Hackaday Prize

Posted on by

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking all about the Hackaday Prize. Our guests for this week’s Hack Chat are Alberto Molina and Elecia White.

Elecia White was a Hackaday Prize judge in 2015 and 2016, and she’ll be discussing what makes a standout entry from a judging perspective. Elecia is an embedded software engineer at Logical Elegance, Inc., author of Making Embedded Systems, and host of the Embedded.fm podcast.

Alberto Molina won the Grand Prize of the 2016 Hackaday Prize with Dtto, an Open Source, self-reconfiguring rescue robot that Alberto is continuing to develop.  Alberto is an Electronic engineer …read more

Continue reading Friday Hack Chat: All About The Hackaday Prize→