Author Archives: Moritz Walter

3D Printing Real People Is Scary

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There are only two ways of creating two perfect copies of a person: 3D printing and twins. 3D printing magician [Simon] the Sorcerer 3D-printerer uses his secret knowledge to create the perfect illusion: A 3D-printing-real-people prank.

You may have become skeptical about claims made by the marketing campaigns behind new 3D printers, but non-tech-savvy customers of department stores believe anything. [Simon] tells them he can scan a real person and 3D-print a life-sized copy in minutes. Moreover, the copy is almost indistinguishable from the original. It also responds to simple voice commands, walks around and does the robot.

The prank …read more

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Treadmill To Belt Grinder Conversion Worked Out

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[Mike] had a bunch of disused fitness machines lying around. Being a skilled welder, he decided to take them apart and put them back together in the shape of a belt grinder.

In particular, [Mike] is reusing the height-adjustment guide rail of an old workout bench to build the adjustable frame that holds the sanding belt. A powerful DC motor including a flywheel was scavenged from one treadmill, the speed controller came from another. [Mike] won’t miss the workout bench: Once you’re welding a piece of steel tube dead-center on a flywheel, as happened for the grinder’s drive wheel, you …read more

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Fashion Mannequin Is Fiberglass Reinforced Paper Craft

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[Leah and Ailee] run their own handmade clothing business and needed a mannequin to drape their creations onto for display and photography. Since ready-made busts are quite pricey and also didn’t really suit their style, [Leah] set out to make her own mannequins by cleverly combining paper craft techniques and fiberglass.

[Leah] started by looking for suitable 3D models as a base for her design. The right one was found on opengameart.com, loaded into Blender, and underwent a few serious modifications including heavy use of the decimate tool before it became a stylish low-poly bust.

The reduced number of triangles …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Tongue Vision

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Visually impaired people know something the rest of us often overlooks: we actually don’t see with our eyes, but with our brains. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ray Lynch] is building a tongue vision system, that will help blind people to see through one of the human brain’s auxiliary ports: the taste buds.

The concept of tongue vision has already been proven. Brainport, a tongue vision system invented by Paul Bach-y-Rita is already available to patients. However, what’s missing is a low-cost open-source hardware alternative that makes the technology available to patients who can’t afford the $10,000 product. [Ray] set …read more

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3D Printering: Trinamic TMC2130 Stepper Motor Drivers

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Adjust the phase current, crank up the microstepping, and forget about it — that’s what most people want out of a stepper motor driver IC. Although they power most of our CNC machines and 3D printers, as monolithic solutions to “make it spin”, we don’t often pay much attention to them.

In this article, I’ll be looking at the Trinamic TMC2130 stepper motor driver, one that comes with more bells and whistles than you might ever need. On the one hand, this driver can be configured through its SPI interface to suit virtually any application that employs a stepper motor. …read more

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Hallucinating Machines Generate Tiny Video Clips

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Hallucination is the erroneous perception of something that’s actually absent – or in other words: A possible interpretation of training data. Researchers from the MIT and the UMBC have developed and trained a generative-machine learning model that learns to generate tiny videos at random. The hallucination-like, 64×64 pixels small clips are somewhat plausible, but also a bit spooky.

The machine-learning model behind these artificial clips is capable of learning from unlabeled “in-the-wild” training videos and relies mostly on the temporal coherence of subsequent frames as well as the presence of a static background. It learns to disentangle foreground objects from …read more

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Hallucinating Machines Generate Tiny Video Clips

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Hallucination is the erroneous perception of something that’s actually absent – or in other words: A possible interpretation of training data. Researchers from the MIT and the UMBC have developed and trained a generative-machine learning model that learns to generate tiny videos at random. The hallucination-like, 64×64 pixels small clips are somewhat plausible, but also a bit spooky.

The machine-learning model behind these artificial clips is capable of learning from unlabeled “in-the-wild” training videos and relies mostly on the temporal coherence of subsequent frames as well as the presence of a static background. It learns to disentangle foreground objects from …read more

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The Healthy Maker: Tackling Vapors, Fumes And Heavy Metals

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Fearless makers are conquering ever more fields of engineering and science, finding out that curiosity and common sense is all it takes to tackle any DIY project. Great things can be accomplished, and nothing is rocket science. Except for rocket science of course, and we’re not afraid of that either. Soldering, welding, 3D printing, and the fine art of laminating composites are skills that cannot be unlearned once mastered. Unfortunately, neither can the long-term damage caused by fumes, toxic gasses and heavy metals. Take a moment, read the material safety datasheets, and incorporate the following, simple practices and gears into …read more

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Catching Lightning With High Voltages And A Kite

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Flying a kite on a stormy day is not the wisest thing to do, except, of course, you’re intentionally trying to catch a lightning bolt. The guys from [kreosan] replicated the famous experiment, with which Benjamin Franklin once set out to prove the electrical nature of lightning.

After their first attempt to attract lightning bolts in a storm by flying a kite attached to a grounded metal wire, which surprisingly did not yield a catch, they came up with an even scarier setup: They hooked up the wire to the high-voltage rail of a well-grounded television tube to bias it …read more

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