Hackday Links: March 16, 2012

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Shamrock hat

[Josh] whipped up a shamrock themed hat by adding an outline of green LEDs to this bowler. Just remember, don’t drink and solder. Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!

Battery-powered Xmas lights can be more useful

[Karl] took a string of mostly useless battery-powered Christmas lights and found a good use for them. He replaced the stock board with a boost convert and uses the two AA batteries as a 5V power supply when mains power isn’t handy.

3D printed appliance repair

The broken plastic piece seen here keeps a dishwasher closed while running. The part couldn’t be sourced by a repairman but the best solution turned out to be printing a perfect replacement part.

Generating labels for resistor storage

[Darrell] picked up a surplus test-tube rack to use as resistor storage. It’s a great system, but his Ruby script that uses LaTeX to generate color-coded labels is a really nice touch as well.

DeLorean quadcopter build log

No, it’s not a dupe. [Alp_X] found the link to a build log for the DeLorean quadcopter that headlined our last Links post. It’s in Russian but the machine translation should help a bit.

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Squeezing the juice out of some AA batteries

February 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Ray’s] breadboard power supply lets you drain the last traces of power from ‘dead’ AA batteries. Electronics that are powered off of disposable alkaline batteries have a cutoff voltage that usually leaves a fair amount of potential within. Since many municipal recycling programs don’t take the disposables (you’re just supposed to throw them in the trash!) we love the idea of squeezing them for prototyping use.

His design uses just one IC, the MCP1640, along with a handful of passive components. The chip is a boost converter with a startup voltage of just 0.65V, which means the batteries themselves – normally starting life above 1.5V – can be used until they drop to about 0.3V each.

Above you can see the kit he is selling. But it’s an open source project and the circuit is so simple we’re sure you can build your own. Add that boost converter chip to your next parts order for around $0.40.

[Ray] made a nice demo video for the device which you can see embedded after the break.

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Cockroft-Walton Multiplier can output positive or negative voltage

February 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve already dipped your toes into high-voltage power supply pool you may be thirsty for a bit more knowledge. Here’s a neat illustration of how to build a voltage multiplier that can output a positive or negative supply. It is based on a design known as the Cockroft-Walton Multiplier. It’s the add-on housed in the plastic box seen in the image above. It uses diodes and capacitors in an orientation very common for generating high voltages. In fact, the same thing can be found in that high-voltage bulletin board. The place this differs is when it comes to connecting the multiplier to the PSU.

If you look closely you can see one red and one black banana plug jack poking out the end of the plastic container. There is also a pair of these on the other end. The multiplier has been designed so that reconfiguring the inputs and outputs changes how it works. Each jack has been labeled with one possible input and one output. Choose the desired output (DC+ or DC-) and then follow the labels for the rest of the connections.

What can you do with this setup? Check out the clip after the break that shows it powering a lifter.

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The Ultimate Breadboard – a prototyping station that has it all

February 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

ultimate-breadboard

[Claudio] was working on a homebrew oscilloscope project when he started thinking about how unsuitable a standard breadboard is for a large-scale project. Rather than adding components on top of components until they became what he lovingly calls a “fragile, unforgiving crapstack”, he decided to build himself the Ultimate Breadboard.

He packed so much into his design, that it’s honestly hard to know where to begin describing it. Aside from an appropriately large breadboarding surface embedded in the center of the console, he added a power supply to the left hand side, which sits just below an Avr-Net-IO board. The right side of the console features an Arduino NG, and a pair of level converters. He also added some LED-based VU meters, a couple of 7-segment displays, an LCD display, an analog voltmeter, along with plenty of I/O connectors.

The Ultimate Breadboard might look a bit daunting at first, but it seems like an awesome setup on which to do any sort of prototyping. Be sure to check out the video below for more details and to see [Claudio] give a tour of the device.

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