Hi-speed circuit bending
Klubmoozak posted this vid documenting a typical bending process, complete with scrap-paper schematics, enclosure dremeling, and a final product demo. [via Matrixsynth]
How it’s made
How PCBs are routed
One hour of PCB routing with EAGLE, compressed to seven minutes, over at adafruit.
Lego model of industrial pallet handler
OK, Jay, this clip takes a bit of set-up. Basically, it’s a model of a factory-floor machine for moving pallet around a square assembly line. You put a pushing arm at each corner of the square and trigger them alternately in caddy-corner pairs. S
Mark’s violin update
Mark Williams’ electric violin, which he has been building over the past few months is nearly complete. Other than the neck and a few other items, the whole instrument has been scratch built, mostly at the Boston Fab Lab. He has a nice gallery of photos detailing the build.
I’m almost finished painting it, and I just string it all up for the first time since the project exposition to test out the new pickup magnets. It works GREAT! So amazing to play something I’ve built from the ground up. Just have to finish the fingerboard and bridge and then wait for the paint to finish curing so I can buff and polish it.
Very small hollow metal spheres
Tiny metal spheres are needed for tiny ball valves and tiny ball bearings, which are needed for all kinds of miniaturized machines. Hollow spheres are lighter, and thus have less inertia, and thus can be made to move faster in these very small applications, where response time is often critical. But how do you make a hollow metal sphere 2mm across? Turns out you can do it with one of the lost foam processes I’m always going on about. Tiny styrofoam beads are first coated with fine metal powder and a binder, then heat-treated to evaporate both binder and bead, leaving only a fragile hollow metal powder shell, which is then sintered into a continuous shell at higher temperature. The sintered shells can then be polished in a tumbler to the same exterior finish as regular ball bearings.
The Mummy’s “Book of The Dead” prop
We recently had a question from a reader about this prop. “Connie” wrote in wanting to know how to replicate the mechanism that, in the movie, is used to unlock The Book’s cover. Never having seen The Mummy, I went into research mode and enqueued it from Netflix. Then I watched it. Big mistake.
But, you know, to each his or her own. And “The Book of the Dead,” with its ornate clasps and intricate star-shaped key, is admittedly an awesome prop. The scene Connie is referring to, I believe, occurs at almost exactly one hour into the “Deluxe Edition” cut of the film, and shows the intrepid but remarkably foolish archeologists inserting the aforementioned star-shaped key into a correspondingly star-shaped opening in the book’s cover, turning it, and thereby releasing the spring-loaded cover clasps and, with them, all manner of unpleasant whatnot.
So I started Googling around, looking for dweebs enthusiasts that might have already built such a thing. And while I did not find any working mechanical replicas of the prop, I did discover the remarkably beautiful static replica shown in the photo at the top of this post by Jeff Stelter of Stelter Creative Woodworks.
My people call them maize mazes
Cool post over on Hack-A-Day about corn maze entrepreneur Scott Skelly, shown above with his trusty GPS-enabled riding lawn mower. Scott explains his maize-maze-making process thusly:
A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!
