Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Teenage Engineering The Raspberry Pi

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The Teenage Engineering OP-1 is a tiny, portable synthesizer loaded up with 4-track recording, a sampler, sequencers, and a quite good synthesis engine. It also fits in your pocket and looks like a calculator built in West Germany. As you would expect with a synth/sampler/sequencer, you can save sounds, tracks, and other creations to a computer. [Doug] thought if you can connect it to a laptop, you can also connect it to a Raspberry Pi. He created an all-in-one storage solution for the OP-1 using only a Pi and a small character LCD.

The process of connecting the Pi to …read more

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A Floppy Drive For Apple’s Pippin

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The Pippin was Apple’s first and last foray into gaming consoles. At its heart, the Pippin was a strange ‘multimedia device’ with a CD-ROM, the potential for Internet access, a few neat controllers, and the guts of a very bare-bones PowerPC Macintosh. Think of a cross between a 3DO and WebTV, and you’ll get an idea of what Apple was trying to build here.

The Pippin is rare, and that means the related accessories, ranging from magneto-optical drives to floppy drives, are incredibly hard to come by. Now, one of those peripherals isn’t rare anymore; [Pierre] has cloned the …read more

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Rolling Around A 4th Axis

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[Perry] was interested in adding a 4th axis to his CNC machine, but not very excited at the prospect of spending hundreds of dollars on the parts and electronics to make it work. There is a very clever and very inexpensive way to add a 4th axis to a CNC machine, though, and after a bit of fabrication, he was able to add a ‘rolling’ 4th axis to his machine.

The idea for this build comes from [Bob] over on the CNC Shark forums. Instead of adding a motor to rotate a work piece around, [Bob]’s build simply mounts it …read more

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Rolling Around A 4th Axis

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[Perry] was interested in adding a 4th axis to his CNC machine, but not very excited at the prospect of spending hundreds of dollars on the parts and electronics to make it work. There is a very clever and very inexpensive way to add a 4th axis to a CNC machine, though, and after a bit of fabrication, he was able to add a ‘rolling’ 4th axis to his machine.

The idea for this build comes from [Bob] over on the CNC Shark forums. Instead of adding a motor to rotate a work piece around, [Bob]’s build simply mounts it …read more

Continue reading Rolling Around A 4th Axis→

Hackaday Links: September 3, 2017

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The TI-83, TI-84, and TI-86 have been the standard graphing calculators in classrooms for two decades. This is the subject of an xkcd. Now, hopefully, there’s a contender for the throne. Numworks is a graphing calculator that looks like it was designed in at least 2006 (so very modern), and apparently, there’s a huge community behind it.

Juicero is shutting down. No one could have seen this one coming. The Juicero was a $700 press that turned proprietary, DRM’ed juice packs into juice and garbage. It was exquisitely engineered, but it turns out very few people want to spend thousands …read more

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New Part Day: Pluggable ESP Modules

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Almost exactly four years ago, we came across a really neat module for sale on SeeedStudios. It was a $5 WiFi chip, able to connect your microcontroller project to the Internet with just a handful of wires and a few AT commands. This was the ESP8266, and it has since spawned an entire ecosystem of connected devices.

Now, there’s a new version of the ESP8266 that simply showed up on the Seeed website. Officially, it’s called the, ‘ESP8285 01M Wi-Fi SoC Module’, but you might as well start calling it ‘the Pluggable ESP module’. It’s the smallest ESP8266 module yet …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An E-Ink Calendar

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E-ink displays are becoming almost common in DIY electronics circles, and now we have very capable, low-power microcontrollers, some of which feature some sort of wireless connectivity. Combine these two, and you have the potential for a basic information screen — a low-power device that always displays some sort of relevant information, whether it’s the date or the weather.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Wenting] and [Dong] are building an e-ink calendar. It’s a calendar, it displays bitmaps, it can display the time, and with a little more hacking it can display the weather, current traffic, or train schedule. If …read more

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XYZ Printing Unveils Inkjet-Based Filament Printer

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XYZ Printing, makers of the popular da Vinci line of 3D printers, have just released one of the holy grails of desktop 3D printing. The da Vinci Color is a full-color, filament based printer. How does this work? A special filament (Color PLA, although this filament is white in color) is extruded through a nozzle like any other 3D printer. Color is then added layer by layer by a system of inkjets in the head of the printer. Yes, it’s a full-color 3D printer, and yes, people have been suggesting this type of setup for years. This is the first …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Kiln

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For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Matt] is building a small kiln for melting metals and firing clay.  He’s making this kiln out of materials anyone can acquire — dirt and a bit of nichrome wire.

Most kiln builds you’ll find on the Internet use fancy refractory bricks and other materials you may not have in your back yard. [Matt]’s project is entirely DIY, and starts with a large pile of dirt and rocks. Aftter shaking off the sifted dirt, washing the rocks, straining off the gravel, getting rid of the sand, and siphoning off the water, [Matt] has a big …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Making in Shenzhen

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China is an amazing land of opportunity, and if you want to build anything, you can build it in Shenzhen. This city that was just a small fishing village a few decades ago has grown into a cyberpunk metropolis of eleven million and has become the manufacturing capital of the world. You’re probably reading this on a device made somewhere around Shenzhen.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about manufacturing in Shenzhen. We’re bringing in a very special guest for this one: [Naomi Wu] is a Cantonese DIY maker, professional web dev, transhumanist, electronics reviewer, …read more

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