It seems like every year, it gets a bit easier to build your own CNC. From the Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) project of the early 1990s to Arduinos running Grbl in the late 2000s, the open source community has moved ahead in leaps and bounds. Grbl is at its core firmware that interprets G-code and […]
TEENSY CONTROLLER FOR POWERFUL CNCS Continue Reading
We suppose it’s a bit early to call it just yet, but we definitely have a solid contender for Father of the Year. [DIY_Maxwell] made a light-up hockey game for his young son that looks like fun for all ages. Whenever the puck is hit with the accompanying DIY hockey stick (or anything else), it lights up
DAD SCORES BIG WITH DIY INDOOR HOCKEY GAME Continue Reading
Today it is pretty easy to build a robot with an onboard camera and have fun manually driving through that first-person view. But builders with dreams of autonomy quickly learn there is a lot of work between camera installation and autonomously executing a “go to chair” command. Fortunately we can draw upon work such as View
ROBOTS LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND THEIR SURROUNDINGS Continue Reading
A mechanical and manufacturing engineer by day, [Tyler Collins] taught himself electronics and firmware development in his spare time and created an open source Lego controller called Evlōno One. It is based on the STM32 and Arduino ecosystems, and compatible with a impressive variety of existing Lego controllers, sensors and actuators. [Tyler] encountered Lego Mindstorms while helping in
OPEN SOURCE LEGO CONTROLLER Continue Reading
User [mircemk] presents his “MiliOhm Meter” project which you can build with an Arduino, a handful of common parts from your lab, and a cigar box. It doesn’t get much simpler than this, folks. While this is something you won’t be getting calibrated with NIST traceability, it looks like a fun and quick project that’s more than
QUICK AND SIMPLE MILLIOHMMETER Continue Reading
What is it about useless machines that makes them so attractive to build? After all, they’re meant to be low-key enraging. At this point, the name of the game is more about giving that faceless enemy inside the machine a personality more than anything else. How about making it more of a bully with laughter
USELESS BOX WITH ATTITUDE ISN’T ENTIRELY USELESS Continue Reading
A research team at Imperial College London have created a new aerial sensor deployment system which uses a drone capable of firing Sense darts into tree trunks for data collection from hard to reach locations. The drone firing mechanism uses a compressed spring together with a shape-memory alloy (SMA) trigger to fire the sensor pods
Drone fires Sense darts for data collection in hard to reach locations Continue Reading
Hackers love a good clock build, but its longer term cousin, the calendar, is more seldom seen in the wild. Regardless, they can be just as useful and elegant a project, as this cryptic design from [Wolfspaw] demonstrates. The project consists of a series of rotating wheels, displaying a series of arcane symbols. When the markings
CRYPTIC CALENDAR MAKES FOR A USEFUL WALL ORNAMENT Continue Reading
What could be more terrifying than ghosts, goblins, or clowns? How about a shapeless pile of fright on your bedroom floor that only moves when you’re not looking at it? That’s the idea behind [Sciencish]’s nightmare robot, which is lurking after the break. The Minecraft spider outfit is just a Halloween costume. In this case, “looking
NIGHTMARE ROBOT ONLY MOVES WHEN YOU LOOK AWAY Continue Reading
If you have any kind of business, chances are it involves stickers at some point in the process. More accurately it involves you peeling the backs off of sticker after sticker, slowly wasting time and working your way toward a repetitive stress injury. Why do that to yourself when you could have a machine do it
AN AUTOMATIC LABEL DISPENSER FOR QUICKER STICKERS Continue Reading
