Category Archives: scale

Every Shop Needs A Giant Wooden Utility Knife

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Generally speaking, we don’t cover that many woodworking projects here at Hackaday. What’s the point? It’s bad enough that wood reminds us of the outside world, but it hardly ever blinks, and forget about connecting it to Wi-Fi. This doesn’t seem to bother you fine readers, so we have to assume most of you feel the same way. But while we might not always “get” large woodworking projects around these parts, we’re quite familiar with the obsession dedication required to work on a project for no other reason than to say you managed to pull it off.

On that note, …read more

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3D Printers Get a Fuel Gauge: Adding a Filament Scale to OctoPrint

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It seems a simple enough concept: as a 3D printer consumes filament, the spool becomes lighter. If you weighed an empty spool, and subtracted that from the weight of the in-use spool, you’d know how much filament you had left. Despite being an easy way to get a “fuel gauge” on a desktop 3D printer, it isn’t something we often see on DIY machines, much less consumer hardware. But with this slick hack from [Victor Noordhoek] as inspiration, it might become a bit more common.

He’s designed a simple filament holder which mounts on top of an HX711 load cell, …read more

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Linear Clock is a Different Way to Look at Time

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There are usually two broad user interfaces for clocks. On the one hand you’ve got the dial clock, the default display for centuries, with its numbered face and spinning hands. The other mode is some form of digital clock, where the current time is displayed directly as alphanumeric characters. They’re both useful representations of time, but they both have their limits.

Here’s a third model — the linear clock. [Jan Derogee] came up with it thanks to the inspiration of somewhat dubious run-ins with other kinds of clocks; we feel like this introductory video was made with tongue firmly planted …read more

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Hackaday Links: March 4, 2018

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Guess what’s happening next weekend? The SoCal Linux Expo. SCALE is in its 16th year, and is the second greatest convention happening this year at the Pasadena Convention Center. The first, of course, is AlienCon this summer, with a special guest appearance by the guy with the hair on Ancient Aliens. What’s cool at SCALE? Tons of stuff! Tindie and Hackaday will have a booth, you’ll be able to check out the new stuff from System 76, and this is where I first picked up my most cherished possession, a Microsoft (heart) Linux sticker. NEED A TICKET? Cool, use the …read more

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Keep Track Of Your Weight While Sleeping

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When the average person looks at a bed, they think about sleeping. Because that’s what beds are for. You cover them with soft, warm cloths and fluffy pillows and you sleep on them. [Peter] is not your average person. He’s a maker. And when he looks at a bed, he thinks about giving it the ability to track his weight.

The IKEA bed has four Chinese-made TS-606 load cells under each foot with custom aluminum enclosures. Each one goes to an HX711 analog-to-digital converter, which offers a 24 bit resolution. These feed an Arduino Nano which in turns connects to …read more

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Load Cells Tell You to Lay Off the Donuts

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Our old algebra teacher used to say, “You have to take what you know and use it to get what you don’t know.” That saying always reminds of us sensors that convert physical quantities into things our microcontrollers can measure. Sometimes the key to a project is knowing what kind of sensor will read the physical properties of the system you are interested in. If that physical property is weight, you can use what is known as a load cell. [DegrawSt] uses four 50 kg load cells to create a bathroom scale using an Arduino.

Load cells typically contain strain …read more

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Deploy an Auto-Scaled BIG-IP VE WAF in AWS

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Today let’s look at how to create and deploy an auto-scaled BIG-IP Virtual Edition Web Application Firewall by using a Cloud Formation Template (CFT) in AWS. CFTs are simply a quick way to spin up solutions that otherwise, you may have to create manually. The idea behind this CFT is it is going to create […] Continue reading Deploy an Auto-Scaled BIG-IP VE WAF in AWS→

And the Grandfather of the Year Award Goes to…

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Hacker dads often have great plans for all the fun projects they’ll build for their kids. Reality often intrudes, though, creating opportunities for hacker grandfathers who might have more time and resources to tackle the truly epic kid hacks. Take, for instance, [rwreagan] and the quarter-scale model railroad he built for his granddaughter.

Taking inspiration from a 1965 issue of Popular Mechanics, grandpa hit this one out of the park. Attention to detail and craftsmanship are evident from the cowcatcher to the rear coupler of this 4-2-0 steam engine replica, and everywhere along the 275 feet of wooden track — …read more

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