Author Archives: Gerrit Coetzee

A CNC You Could Pop-Rivet Together

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You have to be careful with CNC; it’s a slippery slope. You start off one day just trying out a 3D printer, and it’s not six months before you’re elbow deep in a discarded Xerox looking for stepper motors and precision rods. This is evident from [Dan] and his brother’s angle aluminum CNC build.

Five or six years ago they teamed up to build one of those MDF CNC routers. It was okay, but really only cut foam. So they moved on to a Rostock 3D printer. This worked much better, and for a few years it sated them. However, …read more

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Build a Shapeoko The Hard Way

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[Caleb Peters] looked at the Shapeoko 3 CNC kit, a kit designed to make building an entry level CNC router a possibility for anyone, a kit to take the guesswork out of the equation, a kit that removes all those difficult technical barriers. He looked at all of that ease and thought, “nah.” He wanted to learn! So he decided to build one the hard way. Like the early American Pioneers, he’d build his Shapeoko from scratch, suffering piously all the while.

His goal was to build an improved iteration of the Shapeoko 3, for less than the price of …read more

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Mosaic Palette: Single Extruder Multi-Color and Multi-Material 3D Printing

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Lots of solutions have been proposed and enacted for multi-color and multi-material 3D printing, from color mixing in the nozzle to scripts requiring manual filament change. A solution proposed fairly early on was to manually splice the filament together, making a custom spool. The printer would print as normal, but the filament would change color. This worked pretty well, but it was tedious and it wasn’t entirely possible to control where the color change happened on the model.

You’ll find some examples of the more successful manual splicing hacks in the pictures below. Scroll down a bit further to find …read more

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[HomoFaciens] Shows Off With DIY Paper Printer

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[HomoFaciens] is always making us feel silly about our purchases. Did we really need to buy a nice set of stepper motors for that automation project? Couldn’t we have just used some epoxy and a threaded rod to make an encoder? Did we need to spend hours reading through the documentation for an industrial inkjet head? Couldn’t we just have asked ourselves, “What would [HomoFaciens] do?” and then made a jailhouse tattoo gun attached to a broken printer carriage and some other household tech trash?

In his continuing work for his Hackaday prize entry, which we have covered before, his …read more

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Prusa Shows Us the New i3 MK2 3D Printer and Where the Community is Headed

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Josef Prusa’s designs have always been trustworthy. He has a talent for scouring the body of work out there in the RepRap community, finding the most valuable innovations, and then blending them together along with some innovations of his own into something greater than the sum of its parts. So, it’s not hard to say, that once a feature shows up in one of his printers, it is the direction that printers are going. With the latest version of the often imitated Prusa i3 design, we can see what’s next.

The printers from Prusa research are my recommendation for anyone …read more

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Hacker’s Toolbox: The Handheld Screw Driver

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The handheld screw driver is a wonderful tool. We’re often tempted to reach for its beefier replacement, the power drill/driver. But the manually operated screw driver has an extremely direct feedback mechanism; the only person to blame when the screw strips or is over-torqued is you. This is a near-perfect tool and when you pull the right screwdriver from the stone you will truly be the ruler of the fastener universe.

A Bit of Screw Driver History:

In order to buy a good set of screw drivers, it is important to understand the pros and cons of the geometry behind …read more

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FPGA Powers Blazingly Fast LED Matrix Audio Visualizer

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[Sam Miller], [Sahil Gupta], and [Mashrur Mohiuddin] worked together on a very fast LED matrix display for their final project in ECE 5760 at Cornell University.

They started, as any good engineering students, by finding a way to make their lives easier. [Sam] had built a 32×32 LED matrix for another class. So, they made three more and ended up with a larger and more impressive 64×64 LED display.

They claim their motivation was the love of music, but we have a suspicion that the true reason was the love all EEs share for unnaturally bright LEDs; just look at …read more

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The Hacker is The Future of the Prosthetic: Hackers Helping Those In Need

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In the show Full Metal Alchemist, there’s a city called Rush Valley whose main and only business are the high performance prostheses called Automail. Engineers roam the street in Rush Valley; the best have their own shop like that of the high-end clothiers in Saville Row. Of course; it’s all fantasy set in a slightly ridiculous Japanese cartoon, but while walking through this year’s Maker Faire I began to wonder if is a future that may come to be.

The problem with prosthetics is the sheer variety of injuries, body types, and solutions needed. If an injury is an inch …read more

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Hacking The Tesla Model S Rear Drive Unit

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[Jason Hughes] is a big fan of Tesla, he’s spent a lot of time hacking on them to figure out what fancy things the automaker is up to. His most recent adventures are with the rear drive unit of a Tesla Model S.

[Jason] has had some fame in the Tesla community before; his most publicized hack was finding the model number for Tesla’s next edition of their car hashed away in the firmware. For this project he procured a rear drive unit from… somewhere, and with some help got it onto his bench at home.

His first steps were …read more

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Robot Moth Is Learning to Fly Like A Real Moth

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Harvard University has had the flying robot insect market covered for a long time. However, their robot bee, while cool, was starting to bum them out. They wanted to put the battery and brain on the robocritter and have it fly around without a tether. Technology just wasn’t moving fast enough for them, so they’ve picked a different bug, this time a moth.

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is known for its Flying Winged Micro Air Vehicles or FWMAV. Which is a pretty good example of what happens when you let engineers name things. This …read more

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