Collaborate Disseminate
Some projects take but a single glance for you to know what inspired them in the first place. For this over-engineered robotic bottle opener, the obvious influence was a combination of abundant free time and beer. Plenty of beer.
Of course there are many ways to pop the top on …read more
Continue reading Over-Engineered Bottle Opener Takes the Drudgery out of Drinking
On the face of it, making a clock that displays the time by moving a pointer along a linear scale shouldn’t be too hard. After all, steppers and linear drives should do the job in a jiffy. Throw an Arduino in and Bob’s your uncle, right?
Wrong. At least that’s …read more
It goes without saying that we love to see all the clever ways people have come up with to populate their printed circuit boards, especially the automated solutions. The idea of manually picking and placing nearly-microscopic components is reason enough to add a pick and place to the shop, but …read more
Continue reading Printable, Castable Feeders Simplify Pick-and-Place Component Management
Zip ties, Ty-Raps, cable ties; call them what you will, but it’s hard to imagine doing without these ubiquitous and useful devices. Along with duct tape and hot glue, they’re part of the triumvirate of fasteners used to solve nasty problems quickly and cheaply. They’re next up on the list of mechanisms we find fascinating, and as it turns out, there’s more to these devices than meets the eye.
Like so many products that we take for granted today, the cable tie was invented to solve problems in the aerospace industry. In the prewar years, airplanes …read more