Author Archives: Will Sweatman

Huge 3D Printer Ditches Lead Screw for Belt Driven Z Axis

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The vast majority of desktop 3D printers in use today use one or more lead screws for the Z-axis. Sometimes you need to think outside of the box to make an improvement on something. Sometimes you need to go against the grain and do something that others wouldn’t do before you can see what good will come out of it. [Mark Rehorst] had heard the arguments against using a belt drive for the Z-axis on a 3D printer build:

  1. The belt can stretch, causing inaccurate layer height.
  2. If power fails, gravity will totally ruin your day.

He decided to go …read more

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LED Christmas Tree Is Perfect Holiday Build

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Soon the most wonderful time of the year will be upon us. Families all over the globe will gather together to exchange gifts, eat good food and enjoy some quality time with each other. For many, it will be the first time they’ve seen each other since the last holiday season. For us hackers –  this translates to a time we get to talk about ourselves and show off a little about what we do. Been taking it easy this year? Have no hacks to talk about? Well, it’s not too late! Break out the soldering iron and whip up …read more

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POV Display is FAN-tastic

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Persistence-of-vision displays come in all shapes and sizes. But when you get a couple of [Bruce Land’s] students involved, well let’s just say they tend to up the ante. When [Emily] and [Han] decided to make a POV display for their next class project, they did so with style. Unsatisfied with smaller displays they saw on YouTube – they decided to make a larger one out of an old box fan and a DotStar LED strip, which are similar to NeoPixels except they use SPI, which means you can update the LEDs at a much faster rate. This makes them …read more

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Floating Death Star Is Just In Time

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Unless you’ve been living under a high voltage transformer, you’re aware of the latest release in the Star Wars Saga.  [John] has a relative that is clearly a big Star Wars fan, so he set about to build them the perfect Christmas present – a levitating Death Star! Instead of reinventing the wheel, [John] decided to start off with a magnetically levitating model of the Earth –  a globe. He then took a Death Star mood lamp and gracefully cut it half with his trusty Dremel.

A nice twist for the mood lamp is that it was powered by a …read more

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Read Home Power Meters With RTL-SDR

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[k-roy] hates electricity. Especially the kind that can be lethal if you’re not careful. Annoyed by the constant advertisements for the popular Sense Home Energy monitors (which must be installed in the main breaker box by an electrician), [k-roy] set out to find a cheaper and easier way. He wondered how the power company monitored his meter, and guessed correctly that it must be transmitting the information wirelessly. Maybe he could just listen in?

Using a cheap RTL-SDR, it didn’t take long for [k-roy] to tap into this transmission and stumbled across the power readings for his entire neighborhood using …read more

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Grabbing Weather and Traffic Overlays from iHeartRadio

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When the older of us think of radio, we think of dialing in an FM or AM station.  Giant broadcast towers strewn throughout the countryside radiated electromagnetic waves modulated with music, talk and sports across our great land. Youngsters out there might be surprised that such primitive technology still exists. Though the static of an untuned AM receiver might be equivalent to the dial tone of a 56K modem, it’s still a major part of our society.

Like all technology, radio has transitioned to faster and better ways of sending information. Today we have digital radio stations – one of …read more

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Powering Your Mining Rig The Right Way

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It happens to the best of us. We power up our project and immediately run into issues. Be it spotty communication or microcontroller reset or any number of bugs that have us mystified and picking though our code… only to find that it’s a power supply issue. Anyone who has tried doing Raspberry Pi stuff and depended on the USB power from their PC has certainly been bit by this.

It’s the same with larger, more power hungry projects as well. [Nerd Ralph] has been running a mining rig for a few years now, and has learned just how important …read more

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Generate Random Numbers The Hard Way

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Your job is to create a random number generator.

Your device starts with a speaker and a membrane. On this membrane will sit a handful of small, marble-size copper balls. An audio source feeds the speaker and causes the balls to bounce to and fro. If a ball bounces high enough, it will gain the opportunity to travel down one of seven copper tubes. Optical sensors in each of the tubes detect the ball and feed data to an Ardunio Mega. When the ball reaches the end of the tube, a robotic hand will take the ball and put it …read more

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Keep Track Of Your Weight While Sleeping

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When the average person looks at a bed, they think about sleeping. Because that’s what beds are for. You cover them with soft, warm cloths and fluffy pillows and you sleep on them. [Peter] is not your average person. He’s a maker. And when he looks at a bed, he thinks about giving it the ability to track his weight.

The IKEA bed has four Chinese-made TS-606 load cells under each foot with custom aluminum enclosures. Each one goes to an HX711 analog-to-digital converter, which offers a 24 bit resolution. These feed an Arduino Nano which in turns connects to …read more

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Rock Out With The Nod Bang

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In our years here on Hackaday, we’ve seen our fair share of musical hacks. They even have their own category! (Pro Tip – you can find it under the drop down menu in the Categories section). But this one takes the cake. [Andrew Lee] is a student at New York University who had a task of creating a project for his physical computing class. In about 60 days time; he went from dinner napkin sketch to working project. The project is quite interesting – he’s made an instrument that plays music as you move your head.

It works as you …read more

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