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Stories of Open Hardware, Hacking, and 3D Printing
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[Old] But she's a girl... ☛ Building a hand-wired Corne keyboard
With the knowledge that my wiring actually worked, the second half went a bit quicker. I cut and placed the wire for each row and column before soldering in one go, which was more efficient. I was also able to organise the wires from the controller in a more compact way for the second half, learning from the experience with the first. This time, the LED wiring worked perfectly first time.
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CNX Software ☛ TermDriver 2 is a USB-to-serial adapter with a built-in color display (Crowdfunding)
USB-to-serial debug boards are commonly used for board bring-up, checking for issues when a board does not boot, or accessing the serial console in systems without networking or video output. You’d just connect GND, Tx, and Rx wires to the target board, and a USB cable to the host, before running a terminal program like Putty, Minicom, or Bootterm with the correct parameters, and you should be good to go.
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Hackaday ☛ An Open-Concept 3D Printer Using Cantilever Arms
If you’re looking for a more open, unenclosed 3D printer design than a cubic frame can accommodate, but don’t want to use a bed-slinger, you don’t have many options. [Boothy Builds] recently found himself in this situation, so he designed the Hi5, a printer that holds its hotend between two cantilevered arms.The hotend uses bearings to slide along the metal arms, which themselves run along linear rails. The most difficult part of the design was creating the coupling between the guides that slides along the arms. It had to be rigid enough to position the hotend accurately and repeatably, but also flexible enough avoid binding. The current design uses springs to tension the bearings, though [Boothy Builds] eventually intends to find a more elegant solution. Three independent rails support the print bed, which lets the printer make small alterations to the bed’s tilt, automatically tramming it. Earlier iterations used CNC-milled bed supports, but [Boothy Builds] found that 3D printed plastic supports did a better job of damping out vibrations.[Boothy Builds] notes that the current design puts the X and Y belts under considerable load, which sometimes causes them to slip, leading to occasional layer shifts and noise in the print. He acknowledges that the design still has room for improvement, but the design seems quite promising to us.This printer’s use of cantilevered arms to support the print head puts it in good company with another interesting printer we’ve seen. Of course, that design element does also lend itself to the very cheapest of printers.
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Hackaday ☛ 2025 One Hertz Challenge: An Ancient Transistor Counts The Seconds
If you’ve worked with germanium transistors, you’ll know that many of them have a disappointingly low maximum frequency of operation. This has more to do with some of the popular ones dating from the earliest years of the transistor age than it does to germanium being inherently a low frequency semiconductor, but it’s fair to say you won’t be using an OC71 in a high frequency RF application. It’s clear that [Ken Yap]’s project is taking no chances though, because he’s using a vintage germanium transistor at a very low frequency — 1 Hz, to be exact.
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Hackaday ☛ Playing Snake With Digital Microfluidics
Display technology has come a long way since the advent of the CRT in the late 1800s (yes, really!). Since then, we’ve enjoyed the Nixie tubes, flip dots, gas plasma, LCD, LED, ePaper, the list goes on. Now, there’s a new kid on the block — water.
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Hackaday ☛ Die Cut Machine Makes Portable Metal Cuts
[Kevin Cheung] likes to upcycle old soda cans into — well — things. The metal is thin enough to cut by hand, but he’d started using a manual die-cutting machine, and it worked well. The problem? The machine was big and heavy, weighing well over 30 pounds. The solution was to get a lightweight die cutter. It worked better than expected, but [Kevin] really wanted it to be more portable, so he stripped it down and built the mechanism into a new case.