[Johannes] just sent us a tip about his small plotter that plots out the current time.
[Johannes] small clock plotter uses a dry wipe pen to write out the time on a small piece of dry erase board. The design is Made of three small 9g servos, with one to lift the pen off the writing surface and the other two to control a pair of connected jointed arms for the x and y-axis.
The little robot painstakingly wipes away the previous time before scrawling the current time in its place (with minute accuracy).
[Johannes] had hackability in mind when creating this project, making sure to keep to standard parts and making the code and design files available. The hardware for the build can be laser cut or 3D printed. The Arduino sketch can be found on GitHub and the design files can be found on Thingiverse. There are more detailed build instructions on Nuremberg’s FabLab page (translated). Continue reading “A Clock That Plots Time”
Last super bowl Sunday, instead of checking the game, [Mattw] decided to extend a design and make a PCB of a trinket clone. [Mattw] altered a trinket clone design by [Morgan
Penfield Redfield] to shrink it down, perforated the USB connector to allow for easy removal and put most of the parts on a single layer.
After finalizing the design, [Mattw] put it into the LPKF Protolaser S that Seattle’s Metrix Create Space has. For those of you who don’t know, the LPKF protolaser uses a laser to directly ablate off the copper from the boards. This makes prototyping much faster without the need for a lot of nasty chemicals.
About six minutes in the Protolaser, some component placement by hand followed by a run through their reflow oven and [Mattw] had three boards ready to be tested. All told, about 4 hours from start to finish.
The end circuit looks great and the LPKF protolaser gives us a case of serious tool envy. If you’re like us and don’t have access to the fancy laser you might try our hand at this high-resolutino photo-etch process.
[Spock] wanted to do a little reverse engineering of his Miele brand remote control vacuum cleaner, so he broke out his DVB-T SDR dongle to use as a spectrum analyser. Sure enough, he found a 433.83Mhz signal that his vacuum cleaner remote control was using, but to his surprise, he found a stray
QAM256 signal when he expected an ASK only one.
After a little detective work, [Spock] eventually tracked it down to a cheap weather station he had forgotten about. The protocol for the weather station was too compelling for him to go back to his vacuum cleaner, though. After
downloading an rc-switch Arduino library and making a quick stop at his local radio shack to get a 433.92 radio receiver to decode the signal, he reverse engineered the weather station so he could digitally record the temperature output. The Arduino rc-switch library proved unable to decode the signal, but some Python work helped him get to the bottom of it.
With software defined radio becoming more accessible and common place, hacks like these are a nice reminder just how wired our houses are becoming.