Author Archives: Donald Papp

DIY Vacuum Table Enhances PCB Milling

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CNC milling a copper-clad board is an effective way to create a PCB by cutting away copper to form traces instead of etching it away chemically, and [loska] has improved that process further with his DIY PCB vacuum table. The small unit will accommodate a 100 x 80 mm board size, which was not chosen by accident. That’s the maximum board size that the free version of Eagle CAD will process.

When it comes to milling PCBs, double-sided tape or toe clamps are easy solutions to holding down a board, but [loska]’s unit has purpose behind its added features. The …read more

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Screen Shake In VR, Minus The Throwing Up

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In first-person games, an effective way to heighten immersion is to give the player a sense of impact and force by figuratively shaking the camera. That’s a tried and true practice for FPS games played on a monitor, but to [Zulubo]’s knowledge, no one has implemented traditional screen shake in a VR title because it would be a sure way to trigger motion sickness. Unsatisfied with that limitation, some clever experimentation led [Zulubo] to a method of doing screen shake in VR that doesn’t cause any of the usual problems.

Screen shake doesn’t translate well to VR because the traditional …read more

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To Make Reproduction Train Whistles, The Old Ways Are Best

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Late last year, artist [Steve Messam]’s project “Whistle” involved 16 steam engine whistles around Newcastle that would fire at different parts of the day over three months. The goal of the project was bring back the distinctive sound of the train whistles which used to be fixture of daily life, and to do so as authentically as possible. [Steve] has shared details on the construction and testing of the whistles, which as it turns out was a far more complex task than one might expect. The installation made use of modern technology like Raspberry Pi and cellular data networks, but …read more

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Project Shows How To Use Machine Learning to Detect Pedestrians

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Most people are familiar with the idea that machine learning can be used to detect things like objects or people, but for anyone who’s not clear on how that process actually works should check out [Kurokesu]’s example project for detecting pedestrians. It goes into detail on exactly what software is used, how it is configured, and how to train with a dataset.

The application uses a USB camera and the back end work is done with Darknet, which is an open source framework for neural networks. Running on that framework is the YOLO (You Only Look Once) real-time object detection …read more

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Years Don’t Dim The Shine of These Curious Gadgets

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[Maarten Tromp] recently took the time to document some of the unusual and creative electronic projects he received as gifts over the years. These gadgets were created in the early 2000’s and still work flawlessly today. Two of our favorites are shown here: Hardware Tetris Unit (shown in the image above) and Heap of Electronic Parts.

Heap of Electronic Parts was a kind of hardware puzzle and certainly lives up to its name. It’s a bunch of parts soldered in a mystifying way to the backs of four old EPROMs — the chips with the little window through which …read more

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Making an Ultrasonic Cutter for Post-processing Tiny 3D Prints

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An ultrasonic knife is a blade that vibrates a tiny amount at a high frequency, giving the knife edge minor superpowers. It gets used much like any other blade, but it becomes far easier to cut through troublesome materials like rubber or hard plastics. I was always curious about them, and recently made my own by modifying another tool. It turns out that an ultrasonic scaling tool intended for dental use can fairly easily be turned into a nimble little ultrasonic cutter for fine detail work.

I originally started thinking about an ultrasonic knife to make removing supports from SLA …read more

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Making an Ultrasonic Cutter for Post-processing Tiny 3D Prints

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An ultrasonic knife is a blade that vibrates a tiny amount at a high frequency, giving the knife edge minor superpowers. It gets used much like any other blade, but it becomes far easier to cut through troublesome materials like rubber or hard plastics. I was always curious about them, and recently made my own by modifying another tool. It turns out that an ultrasonic scaling tool intended for dental use can fairly easily be turned into a nimble little ultrasonic cutter for fine detail work.

I originally started thinking about an ultrasonic knife to make removing supports from SLA …read more

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Turning LEGO Blocks into Music with OpenCV

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We’re not sure what it is, but something about LEGO and music go together like milk and cookies when it comes to DIY musical projects. [Paul Wallace]’s Lego Music project is a sequencer that uses the colorful plastic pieces to build and control sound, but there’s a twist. The blocks aren’t snapped onto anything; the system is entirely visual. A computer running OpenCV uses a webcam to watch the arrangement of blocks, and overlays them onto a virtual grid where the positions of the pieces are used as inputs for the sequencer. The Y axis represents pitch, and the X …read more

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See How Paper Maché Sculptor Uses Cloth for Tricky Spots

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When is paper maché not paper maché? When it is cloth, of course. [Dan Reeder] has been putting his own spin on paper maché art since the 70s and demonstrates the technique of using cloth for tricky spots in his outstanding sculpture of an Ice Dragon. Thin strips of cloth are used just as paper would be, but give a much different structure and grant natural-looking folds to spots like eyelids, nostrils, and lips.

[Dan] feels that paper maché is an under-utilized and under-rated medium, and he puts out some stunning work on his blog as well as his YouTube …read more

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When Unfolding An STL In Software, Math Isn’t The Tricky Part

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Some time ago, [Trammell Hudson] took a shot at creating a tool that unfolds 3D models in STL format and outputs a color-coded 2D pattern that can be cut out using a laser cutter. With a little bending and gluing, the 3D model can be re-created out of paper or cardboard.

There are of course other and more full-featured tools for unfolding 3D models: Pepakura is used by many, but is not free and is Windows only. There is also a Blender extension called Paper Model that exists to export 3D shapes as paper models.

What’s interesting about [Trammell]’s project …read more

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