Collaborate Disseminate
While the impulse to solving problems in complex systems is often to grab a microcontroller and some sensors to automate the problem away, interfacing with the real world is often …read more Continue reading Occam’s Razor: Gardening Edition
When shooting archery, if you want to be accurate, you need arrows of uniform specification and quality. One important part of this is making sure each arrow has a spine …read more Continue reading Building An Electronic Tester For Measuring Arrow Stiffness
Fishing is generally thought of as a relaxing and laid-back activity, but it still requires a certain amount of physical strength and dexterity. This can be a problem for older anglers or those with physical disabilities. To bring back the simple joy of fishing to those who may no longer …read more
Candy-sorting robots are in plentiful supplies on these pages, and with good reason — they’re a great test of the complete suite of hacker tools, from electronics to machine vision to mechatronics. So we see lots of sorters for Skittles, jelly beans, and occasionally even Reese’s Pieces, but it always …read more
Continue reading “Hey, You Left the Peanut Out of My Peanut M&Ms!”
If you’re serious about engineering the things you build, you need to know the limits of the materials you’re working with. One of important way to characterize materials is to test the tensile strength — how much force it takes to pull a sample to the breaking point. Thankfully, with …read more
Continue reading Tensile Testing Machine Takes 3D Printed Parts to the Breaking Point
What is this world coming to when you spend seven bucks on a digital scale and you have to completely rebuild it to get the functionality you need? Is nothing sacred anymore?
Such were the straits [Jan Henrik] found himself in with his AliExpress special, a portable digital scale that …read more
Continue reading Cheap Lab Balance Needs Upgrades, Gets Gutted Instead
We often like to say that if something is worth doing, then it’s worth overdoing. This automatic cat feeder built by [krizzli] is a perfect example of the principle. It packs in far more sensors and functions than its simple and sleek outward appearance might suggest, to the point that …read more
Continue reading Automated Cat Feeder Leaves Little to Chance
It always gives us a sense of wonder when we realize that what would be a simple task for a human child is a big deal for a computer. For example, if you asked someone if you or someone else was in bed, that’s a pretty simple thing to check. …read more
Continue reading Does Your Home Assistant Know When You are Sleeping?
March 14th is “Pi Day”, for reasons which should be obvious to our more mathematically inclined readers. As you are not reading this post on March 14th, that must mean we’re either fashionably late to Pi Day 2019, or exceptionally early for Pi Day 2020. But in either event, we’ve …read more
Here’s a neat trick for your next 3D-printer build or retrofit: a Z-axis sensor using a DIY strain gauge made from SMD resistors. We’re betting it could have plenty of other applications, too.
Conventional load cells, at least the ones you can pick up cheaply from the usual sources or harvest from old kitchen or bathroom scales, are usually way too big to be used on the extruder of a 3D-printer. [IvDm] wanted to build a touch sensor for his Hybercube printer, so he built his own load cell to do it. It consists of four 1000 ohm SMD resistors …read more
Continue reading Quartet of SMD Resistors Used to Sense Z-Axis Height