Category Archives: motor driver

Improving Cheap Laser Engravers For PCB Fabrication

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A few months ago, [Marco] picked up a cheap, cheap, cheap laser engraver from one of the familiar Chinese resellers. It’s a simple affair with aluminum extrusions, a diode laser, and a control board that seems like it was taken from a 3D printer controller designed five years ago. Now, [Marko] is building some upgrades for this engraver and his PCB production skills have gone through the roof.

The laser engraver [Marko] picked up is called the EleksMaker, and lucky for him there are quite a few upgrades available on Thingiverse. He found two 3D printable parts, one that keeps …read more

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Super-small Robotic Joints Don’t Exist? They Do Now!

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[Tim] needed very small, motorized joints for a robot. Unable to find anything to fit the bill, he designed his own tiny, robotic joints. Not only are these articulated and motorized, they are designed to be independent – each containing their own driver and microcontroller.

None of the photos or video really give a good sense of just how small [Tim]’s design is. The motor (purple in the 3D render above, and pictured to the left) is a sub-micro planetary geared motor with a D shaped shaft. It is 6mm in diameter and 19mm long. One of these motors is …read more

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One Man, A Raspberry Pi, and a Formerly Hand Powered Loom

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[Fred Hoefler] was challenged to finally do something with that Raspberry Pi he wouldn’t keep quiet about. So he built a machine assist loom for the hand weaver. Many older weavers simply can’t enjoy their art anymore due to the physical strain caused by the repetitive task. Since he had a Pi looking for a purpose, he also had his project.

His biggest requirement was cost. There are lots of assistive looms on the market, but the starting price for those is around ten thousand dollars. So he set the rule that nothing on the device would cost more than …read more

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