Pleasing results from a CNC mill project

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Roy] is getting to the end of his second CNC mill project and finally seeing some results. Here you can see a bear he milled in some floural foam.

The project started out as an Arduino-based pen plotter. It move the pen along one axis, and the drawing surface along another, with the third axis allowing the pen to be lifted and repositioned. With that in his back pocket he went all out and began what he calls the Mark II. He used T-slot aluminum for the frame, which really helped when it came to aligning the linear rod supports for each axis. After a lot of drilling, and tapping he managed to bring each axis on line one at a time. A pre-fab CNC driver kit drives the stepper motors, making them groan as they do their work. hear it for yourself in the test video after the break were the machine is first tested as a pen plotter.

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Quieting a pendulum clock every night

April 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Vinnie] has a wonderful old clock from his grandmother; it’s an exquisite antique with a real mechanical movement and a charming set of bells that ring every hour. Unfortunately, those chimes are a bit of a disturbance to neighbors at 2 o’clock in the morning. Previously, [Vinnie] had been stopping the clock every evening, and hoped he would remember to start the pendulum in motion 12 hours later. This was a chore, so he decided to automate the process.

The build is simple and clever; a small stepper motor is mounted in the clock just underneath the pendulum. Every 12 hours, the stepper motor moves a lever and slowly stops the pendulum over the course of a dozen or so seconds, silencing the clock movement. Twelve hours later, the motor turns again setting the pendulum in motion.

The parts count for this build is very low – basically just an ATmega88, a Darlington array to drive the stepper, and a 32.768kHz crystal. We can think of a few friends and relatives with loud clocks in their house, so we might have to build a few of these to give away.

Take a look at the demo video after the break to see how [Vinnie] stops his grandmother’s clock every night.

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Giant pencil used as an Etch a Sketch stylus

March 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The gang over at Waterloo Labs decided to add a team-building aspect to a plain old Etch a Sketch. Instead of just twisting the two knobs with your own mitts, they’re converting this giant pencil’s movements into Etch a Sketch art.

The challenge here is figuring out a reliable way to track the tip of the pencil as it moves through the air. You may have already guess that they are using a Microsoft Kinect depth camera for this task. The Windows SDK for the device actually has a wrapper that helps it to play nicely with LabView, where the data is converted to position commands for the display.

On the Etch a Sketch side of things they’ve chosen the time-tested technique of adding gears and stepper motors to each of the toy’s knobs. As you can see from the video after the break, the results are mixed. We’d say from the CNC ‘W’ demo that is shown there’s room for improvement when it comes to the motor driver. We can’t really tell if the Kinect data translation is working as intended or not. But we say load it up and bring to a conference. We’re sure it’ll attract a lot of attention just like this giant version did.

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