Collaborate Disseminate
If we really want wearable computing to take off as a concept, we’re going to need lightweight input devices that can do some heavy lifting. Sure, split ergo keyboards are awesome. But it seems silly to restrict the possibilities of cyberdecks by limiting the horizons to imitations of desk-bound computing …read more
With the rise of affordable 3D printers, we just don’t see the projects in Tic Tac boxes that we used to. That’s kind of a shame. Not only are you upcycling existing plastic when you use one, they’re decently sized component vessels for pocket builds such as [rgco]’s portable magnetometer, …read more
Sometimes it seems as though everything old is new again. The earliest computers used magnetic memory such as magnetic core. As practical as that was compared to making for example each bit of memory be a vacuum tube or relay flip flop, newer technology such as SRAM and DRAM displaced …read more
Continue reading Spintronic RAM Gets a Little Closer to SRAM
Perhaps you’ve played a flight simulator before, using something like a mouse and keyboard. That’s a fine experience, but like any other activity you can get a lot more out of it if you put a little more effort into the experience. Some will upgrade to a joystick for a …read more
Continue reading Better Simulators With Homemade Potentiometers
Pivots for e-textiles can seem like a trivial problem. After all, wires and fabrics bend and flex just fine. However, things that are worn on a body can have trickier needs. Snap connectors are the usual way to get both an electrical connection and a pivot point, but they provide only a single conductor. When [KOBAKANT] had a need for a pivoting connection with three electrical conductors, they came up with a design that did exactly that by using a flexible circuit board integrated to a single button snap.
This interesting design is part of a solution to a specific …read more
Continue reading Three-Conductor Pivot for E-Textiles is Better Than Wires
Some ideas are real head-scratchers from a design standpoint: Why in the world would you do it that way? For many of us, answering that question often requires a teardown, which is what [Ben Katz] did when this PCB motor-powered weed whacker came across his bench. The results are instructive on what it takes to succeed in the marketplace, or in this case, how to fail.
The unit in question comes from an outfit called CORE Outdoor Power. The line trimmer was powered by a big lithium-ion battery pack, but [Ben] concentrated on the unique motor for his teardown. After …read more
Continue reading Teardown Shows Why Innovative Designs Sometimes Fail
Off-the-shelf components are great; the world and our work simply wouldn’t be the same without. But one of the constraints is that one has to design around them, and that’s what led [Antonio Ospite] to create a parametric design in OpenSCAD for a 3D printed holder which snugly fits a number of magnetic spheres around its diameter.
If that sounds a bit esoteric, it will become much clearer in the context of [Antonio]’s earlier work in making a DIY rotary encoder out of a ring of magnetic spheres. He found that such a ring in front of two Hall effect …read more
Continue reading OpenSCAD handles the Math in 3D Printed Holder for Magnetic Spheres
When it comes to rotary encoders, there are plenty of options. Most of them involve putting a credit card number into an online vendor’s website, though, and that’s sometimes just not in the cards. In that case building your own, like this encoder using magnetic spheres, is a pretty cool way to go too.
If he’d had less time to spare, we imagine [Antonio Ospite] would have gone for a commercial solution rather than building an encoder from scratch. Then again, he says his application had noise considerations, so maybe this was the best solution overall. He had some latching …read more
Continue reading Magnetic Spheres Line Up for Rotary Encoder Duty
Driving a brushless motor requires a particular sequence. For the best result, you need to close the loop so your circuit can apply the right sequence at the right time. You can figure out the timing using a somewhat complex circuit and monitoring the electrical behavior of the motor coils. Or you can use sensors to detect the motor’s position. Many motors have the sensors built in and [Electronoobs] shows how to drive one of these motors in a recent video that you can watch below. If you want to know about using the motor’s coils as sensors, he did …read more
Continue reading Completely Scratch-Built Electronic Speed Controller
Some time before experimenting with MRI machines and building his own CT scanner, [Peter Jansen] wanted to visualize magnetic fields. One of his small side projects is building tricoders — pocket sensor suites that image everything — and after playing around with the magnetometer function on his Roddenberry-endorsed tool, he decided he had to have a way to visualize magnetic fields. After some work, he has the tools to do it at thousands of frames per second. It’s a video camera for magnetic fields, pushing the boundaries of both magnetic imaging technology and the definition of the word ‘camera’.
When …read more