Author Archives: Moritz Walter

Bewegungsfelder Is A Wireless IMU Motion Capturing System

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For several years, hackers have been exploring inertial measurement units (IMUs) as cheap sensors for motion capturing. [Ivo Herzig’s] final Diploma project “Bewegungsfelder” takes the concept of IMU-based MoCap one step further with a freely configurable motion capturing system based on strap-on, WiFi-enabled IMU modules.

The Bewegungsfelder system consists of multiple, ESP8266-powered standalone IMU sensor nodes and a motion capturing server. Attached to a person’s body (or anything else) the nodes wirelessly stream the output of their onboard MPU6050 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope to a central motion capturing server. A server application translates the incoming data into skeletal animations, visualizes them as …read more

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Sewbo Robot Sews Up Automated Garment Manufacturing

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While robots enter other industries in herds, the assembly of garments has long been a tedious, human privilege. Now, for the first time, a robot has sewn an entire, wearable piece of garment. Sewbo, an industrial robot programmed to tackle the tricky task, assembles clothes and makes it look easy.

Despite their precision, robots still lack the cognitive abilities and motoric skills to process soft fabrics reliably. Sewbo tackles this by impregnating the fabric with PVA, a non-toxic biodegradable polymer. The temporarily stiffened fabric then can be processed as if it were sheet metal. It can be welded, molded, and …read more

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Building An Electric Longboard From Scratch

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Step one to most electric longboard builds is typically the acquisition of a foot operated longboard, with step two being the purchase of a ready-made motor bracket to electro-convert the strenuous vehicle. Not so [Matt Carl’s] scratch-built electric longboard, which starts out with four 1/8″sheets of baltic birch.

After copying his paper template to the wood, [Matt] applies wood glue to the sheets and squeezes them tightly together in a custom, concave press mould, where they are left to dry under heavy weight plates. After drying, the curved laminate is cut out with a jigsaw, sanded and painted.

For adequate …read more

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This EAGLE Script Gets Quotes For Your Boards

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Weary of manually entering manufacturing parameters into PCBShopper’s web form, [Jeremy Ruhland] created an awesome shortcut: His ULP script lets you obtain quotes from 26 PCB manufacturers around the world directly from your EAGLE board layout.

The script extracts all relevant data from your layout, including board size, the layer count, minimum trace widths and hole diameters. It then let’s you specify a few more in a tidy dialogue before sending you to PCBShopper.com with a custom query for board quotes.

It works like a charm, and [Jeremy] also plans to add a shortcut button to the EAGLE layout editor’s …read more

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SNES Micro Is A Pi Z Of Art

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Clay is a shapeless raw material that’s waiting to be turned into awesomeness by your creativity. So is the Raspberry Pi. [Dorison Hugo] brought the two together in his artfully crafted SNES micro – a tiny retro gaming console sculpted from clay.

For his build, [Dorison] assembled two halves of a little case from sheet plastic, which both together have about the size of the components that will go inside the sculpture: a Raspberry Pi Zero and a USB hub. He then moulded clay on the outside of the two halves, using them as a scaffold for the actual case. …read more

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Overhauling The ESP8266’s Flash Memory Handling

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If you’ve ever corrupted a flash memory on a power failure, you’ll be glad to hear that the ESP8266 SDK implements a very secure and almost infallible read/write management for its flash memory. The catch: It’s also very wasteful. For a single memory block of stored data, three memory blocks of physical flash memory are occupied. [Peter Scargill] enlightens us with a better solution.

When the ESP8266 writes data to its external flash memory, for example during an OTA update, it can’t simply overwrite the block holding the currently running program — it needs to write that data to a …read more

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3D Printering: XT-CF20 Carbon Fiber Filament Review

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ColorFabb’s XT-CF20 is one of the more exotic filaments for adventurous 3D printerers to get their hands on. This PETG based material features a 20% carbon fiber content, aspiring to be the material of choice for tough parts of high stiffness. It’s a fascinating material that’s certainly worth a closer look. Let’s check it out!

An Abrasive Fellow

The high amount of carbon fibers makes this material extremely abrasive, so I obtained a hardened steel nozzle for my E3Dv6 hotend to print it without harming my brass nozzles. It’s also worth mentioning that the filament is capable of cutting …read more

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Vintage 16mm Film Editor Is Now Retro Arcade

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When [Douglas Welcome] found a disposed Kalart Craig 16 mm Projecto-Editor on the curb, he knew it was destined for retro-greatness. This vintage looking device was once used to view and cut 16 mm film strips, and still in mint condition, it was just too cool to pass up. With help of a similarly historic Raspberry Pi 1 Model B, and a little LCD screen, [Douglas] now turned the little box into an awesome retro arcade game console

[Douglas] removed the original optics and lamp from the Projecto and replaced the ground glass screen with a color LCD from a …read more

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Carbon Nanotube Transistors Are On The Passing Lane

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There are many obstacles in the way to turning carbon nanotubes into something useful. Materials engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now brought carbon nanotubes (CNTs) one step closer to becoming practically applicable for semiconductor electronics. In particular, the team managed to assemble arrays of carbon nanotube transistors that outperform their silicon-based predecessors.

One obstacle the researchers had to overcome were metallic impurities, which are present in arc-discharge-generated carbon nanotubes and practically short-circuit the materials semiconducting properties. To get rid of these impurities, the researchers developed a sorting mechanism based on a solution of polymers which wrap around the …read more

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Flying A Normally-Sized Drone With A Nano-Drone’s Brain

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Drones come in all shapes and size, and [Kedar Nimbalkar] was wondering if the guts of a tiny Cheerson CX-10 nano-drone could take off with a larger body, leading to an interesting brain transplant experiment.

For his test, [Kedar] acquired a CX-10 and the body of a larger Syma X5SW drone. After gutting the CX-10 for its LiPo battery and circuit board, which features an STM32 ARM-core MCU, a 6-axis IMU and the wireless transmitter, [Kedar] studied the datasheet of the onboard SQ2310ES driver MOSFETs. He figured that with a maximum continuous current rating of 6A, they would probably be …read more

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