eMAKER Huxley

Posted on October 5, 2011 by e8johan

The Huxley from eMAKER is an improved RepRap design sold as a kit. The company behind the kit, eMAKER, are based in the United Kingdom, and have already got orders for 300 machines after a spectacular launch on the indiegogo site.

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Dishwasher Monitoring Magic

Posted on October 3, 2011 by e8johan

The dish-o-tron 6000 is a thing of beauty by the hacker Blondihacks. It is an automatic dishwasher monitor built to detect if a dishwasher contains clean or dirty dishes. The beauty lays in the fact that it does that by simply hanging on the outside of the machine. No warranty voiding on expensive kitchen equipment involved.

When reading about it, make sure to catch the rev B part as well. Some subtle improvements such as removing the battery dependency as well as general stability fixes are applied.

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Sketches Over the Net

Posted on September 30, 2011 by e8johan

The people over at WickedDevice has been working on a new bootloader for the Nanode. The code can download and FLASH the device with new software over TFTP. This opens the possibilities for remote updates – meaning that you can place your Nanodes in remote locations without being worried about having to reach them again (you still need to be able to reset it – but you can always cut the power).

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Ultimaker

Posted on September 28, 2011 by e8johan

The Ultimaker is a 3D printer kit sold from the Netherlands. It main points are printing speed and the size of the build envelope.

The build envelope measures 210x210x220mm, which is impressive given that the entire machine only is about 340x355x390mm. Compared to other reprap-derived 3D printers, it also uses an extruder head where the majority of the mass has been removed from the parts in motion. This makes it possible to print at higher speeds.

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Raspberry Pi

Posted on September 26, 2011 by e8johan

The Raspberry Pi computer projects (started by David Braben of Elite fame) wants to bring back the joys of computers in the past, but to today’s audience.

By providing an ultra-cheap computer to educational institutions, and all others interested, the idea is to have kids get started using computers early.

The idea is to provide the computer cheaply enough (around 25 USD). This would allow kids to get full access to a computer and play with it – learning how it works and how to develop programs for it. Much like the classic BBC Micros and Commodore C64s of the ’80s, where development tools (for BASIC) was included and the computers did not have to be used for mom and dad to be able work and interact.

There is a clip on the device on BBC.

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Power to the Breadboards

Posted on September 23, 2011 by e8johan

Blondihacks has designed a small power supply for breadboards – Juice Bridge. It provides regulated 5V, easy access to ground and the ability to measure the power used by the entire breadboard. All this on a single-sided PCB with a handful of components.

Elegant, simple and useful!

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MakerBot

Posted on September 21, 2011 by e8johan

The MakerBot, from MakerBot Industries, is one of the oldest kit-sold reprap-related 3D printers. The original CupCake sold over 2500 units, and soon the first thousand Thing-o-Matics will have left the factory.

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PIC32 in Arduino Format

Posted on September 19, 2011 by kalle.lindbeck

Digilent and Microchip have recently released two new boards targeting the Arduino community, the chipkit 32 UNO and MAX. The neat thing about these board is that they both are based on the microchip PIC32 delivering up to 4 times the performance of existing solutions.

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Lindbeck Joins Digital Fanatics

Posted on September 18, 2011 by e8johan

CC-BY http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenorton/2229437427/I’d just like to make the happy announcement that Kalle Lindbeck has joined Digital Fanatics as a writer. He is has been working with electronics since early stone age, is an active model aircraft pilot, electronics constructor and generalist tinkerer. He will be monitoring trends and hardware components here and his first entry is due tomorrow!

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MakerBot Automated Build Platform Hack

Posted on September 16, 2011 by e8johan

Ever since I got a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, the build platform has been an issue. The belt was uneven. This weekend, I took it apart and reassembled it with a new belt – and resolved the issue at the cost of two nuts.

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