Collaborate Disseminate
In most cases, cutting pin headers is a pretty simple job to tackle with a pair of cutters or even your bare fingers. But if you’re doing a lot of …read more Continue reading Automate Your Pin Header Chopping Chores Away
In most cases, cutting pin headers is a pretty simple job to tackle with a pair of cutters or even your bare fingers. But if you’re doing a lot of …read more Continue reading Automate Your Pin Header Chopping Chores Away
Clocks are such mundane objects that it’s sometimes hard for them to grab your attention. They’re there when you need them, but they don’t exactly invite you to watch them …read more Continue reading Flip-Segment Digital Clock is a Miniature Mechanical Marvel
The seven-segment display may be a bit prosaic after all these years, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to spice it up. Coming up with a mechanical version of …read more Continue reading A One-Servo Mechanical Seven-Segment Display
[Erik Knutsson] is stuck inside with a bunch of robot parts, and we know what lies down that path. His Open Personal Assistant Robotic Platform aims to help out around the house with things like filling pet food bowls, but for now, he is taking one step at a time …read more
We’re not sure what to call this one. Is it a circuit sculpture? Sort of, but it moves, so perhaps it’s a kinetic circuit sculpture. Creator [Tomohiro Tsuchita] calls it “something beautiful but totally useless,” which we find a tad harsh. But whatever you call it, we think this mechanical …read more
Continue reading Mechanical Seven-Segment Display Mixes Art with Hacking
Long cables are only neat once – before they’re first unwrapped. Once that little cable tie is taken off, a cable is more likely to end up rats-nested than neatly coiled.
Preventing that is the idea behind this 3D-printed cable reel. The cable that [Kevin Balke] wants to make easier to deal with is a 50 foot (15 meters) long Vive lighthouse sync cable. That seems a bit much to us, but it makes sense to separate the lighthouses as much as possible and mount them up high enough for the VR system to work properly.
[Kevin] put a good …read more
Continue reading Geared Cable Winder Keeps Vive Sync Cable Neatly Wound
We were musing upon the relative paucity of education with respect to the fundamentals of electronic circuitry with discrete semiconductors, so we thought we’d do something about it. So far we’ve taken a look at the basics of transistor biasing through the common emitter amplifier, then introduced a less common configuration, the common base amplifier. There is a third transistor amplifier configuration, as you might expect for a device that has three terminals: the so-called Common Collector amplifier. You might also know this configuration as the Emitter Follower. It’s called a “follower” because it tracks the input voltage, offering …read more
Continue reading Biasing That Transistor: The Emitter Follower
Some folks just can’t leave well enough alone, and that often ends up being a good thing. Such is the case with this 3D-printed compressed air engine, which just keeps getting better.
The design has changed a lot since we first covered [Tom Stanton]’s attempts at reviving the powerplant from the glory days of the Air Hogs line of toys, which he subsequently built a plane around. The engine was simple, with a ball valve that admitted air into the cylinder when a spring mounted to the top of the piston popped it out of the way. That spring has …read more
Continue reading Cams and Pushrods Improve 3D-Printed Compressed Air Engine
Everyone knows how to make a POV laser display — low-mass, first-surface mirrors for the X- and Y-axes mounted on galvanometers driven rapidly to trace out the pattern. [Evan Stanford] found a simpler way, though: a completely mechanical laser show from 3D-printed parts.
The first 10 seconds of the video below completely explains how [Evan] accomplished this build. A pair of custom cams wiggles the laser pointer through the correct sequences of coordinates to trace the desired pattern out when cranked by hand through a 1:5 ratio gear train. But what’s simple in concept is a bit more complicated to …read more
Continue reading A Mechanical Laser Show with 3D-Printed Cams and Gears