Author: Navarre Bartz

239 Articles

A black and white robot arm is held in a human hand against a grey background. Next to it, in white lettering, is the Arduino logo and the text, "Mini Robotic Arm."

Mini Robotic Arm Lets You Start Your Own Mini Assembly Line

October 24, 2024 by 25 Comments

Automating tasks with a robot sounds appealing, but not everyone has the budget for an Aismo or Kuka. [FABRI Creator] has a great tutorial on how to build your own mini robotic arm for small, repeatable tasks.

Walking us through the entire build, step-by-step, [FABRI Creator] shows us how to populate the custom-designed PCB and where to put every servo motor and potentiometer to bring the creation to life. This seems like a great project to start with if you haven’t branched out into motion systems before since it’s a useful build without anything too complicated to trip up the beginner.

Beyond the usual ability to use the arm to perform tasks, this particular device uses an Arduino Nano to allow you to record a set of positions as you move the arm and to replay it over and over. The video shows the arm putting rings on a stand, but we can think of all kinds of small tasks that it could accomplish for us, letting us get back to writing or hacking.

If controlling a robot arm with potentiometers sounds familiar, maybe you remember this robot arm with an arm-shaped controller.

Continue reading “Mini Robotic Arm Lets You Start Your Own Mini Assembly Line” →

“Click To Cancel” Coming Soon

October 22, 2024 by 31 Comments

If you’ve ever had to suffer through a call tree and a 9,000 hour wait on hold to cancel a subscription, we have good news for you if you live in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just finalized a rule that will “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up.”

The announcement of the proposed rule came in March 2023 and was followed up by 16,000 comments from the public. Complaints to the agency about negative option and recurring subscription services have been rising from 42 per day in 2021 to 70 per day in 2024.

Commission Chair Lina M. Khan says, “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

The rule will take effect 180 days after entering the Federal Register. If you’re curious about other ways we can hold tech companies accountable, Cory Doctorow has some ideas.

A large silver cone attached to a black hemisphere floats over a piece of sheet metal held in a metal frame. The metal has what appears to be machine grease on it to aid in the forming process.

CNC Metal Forming

October 18, 2024 by 30 Comments

Forming complex shapes in metal sheets is still a laborious process, especially if you aren’t needing more than a couple parts so stamping doesn’t make sense. That may change with Digital Sheet Forming.

While this video is basically an ad for one vendor’s approach, it gives a good set of examples of what the technique can achieve. The high pressure mechanism of the machine presses the metal layer by layer down against a silicone backing to form what you’ve designed, in this case, the nose cone for a Tucker Carioca.

Some people will decry it killing the metal forming industry, but as [Rob Ida] says in the video, it will allow metal formers to become more efficient at the work they do by taking out the tedium and letting them focus on the parts of the process requiring the most skill. Anyone who’s done any work with a 3D printer or CNC mill will know that sending a file to a machine is only one small part of the process.

We’re anxious to see this technology make its way to the makerspace and home shop. If you want to do some sheet metal forming now, why not try hydroforming?

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A vaguely boat-shaped vehicle with three wheels and a mast. It sits in a barren-looking plain with short mountains in the distance

Sailing The High Steppes

October 10, 2024 by 29 Comments

Sails typically bring to mind the high seas, but wind power has been used to move craft on land as well. Honoring this rich tradition, [Falcon Riley] and [Amber Word] decided to sail across Mongolia in “Moby the Land Sailing vessel.”

Built in a mere three days from $200 in materials they were able to scrounge up the week before, the cart served as their home for the 300 km (~186 mi) journey across the Mongolian countryside. Unsurprisingly, bodging together a sailing vessel in three days to traverse uneven terrain led to a failed weld to the front tire, but a friendly local lent a hand to get them back on the road.

Built mostly out of plywood, the fully-laden cart tipped the scales at 225 kg (500 lbs) and could still be towed by hand. Under sail, however, they managed 70 km in one particularly windy day. They covered the distance in 46 days, which isn’t the fastest way to travel by any means, but not bad given the quick build time for this house on wheels. We suspect that a more lightweight and aerodynamic build could yield some impressive results. Maybe it’s time for a new class at Bonneville?

If you want to learn to sail in your own landlocked region, maybe learn a bit first? Instead you might want to build an autonomous sailing cart or take a gander at sailing out of this world?

[Thanks to Amber for stopping by to suggest some corrections!]

A black OLED screen with a happy face displayed upon it is situated at the top of a squarish calculator with a 5x6 grid of white calculator keys. It floats above a graphing calculator, Nintendo Switch, aigo numpad, and an Arduino Mega on a white table. A handful of differently-colored kalih choc switches are in various places around the table.

Mechanical Switch Sci-Calc Is Also A Macropad

October 4, 2024 by 6 Comments

Smartphones have replaced a desktop calculator for most folks these days, but sometimes that tactility is just what you need to get the mathematical juices flowing. Why not spruce up the scientific calculator of yore with the wonders of modern microcontrollers?

While you won’t be able to use Sci-Calc on a standardized test, this classy calculator will let you do some pretty cool things while clacking on its mechanical choc switches. Is it a calculator? Obviously. Is it an Arduboy-compatible device that can play simple games like your TI-84? Yes. Is it also a macropad and ESP32 dev board? Why not? If that isn’t enough, it’s also takes both standard and RPN inputs.

[Shao Duan] has really made this device clean and the menu system that rewrites main.bin based on the program selection is very clever. Escape writes main.bin back into the ROM from the SD card so you can select another application. A few classic games have already been ported, and the process looks fairly straightforward for any of your own favorites.

If you’re hankering for more mathy inputs, checkout the Mathboard or the MCM/70 from 1974.

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Supercon 2023: [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse

October 3, 2024 by 69 Comments

Those of us old enough to remember BBS servers or even rainbow banners often go down the nostalgia hole about how the internet was better “back in the day” than it is now as a handful of middlemen with a stranglehold on the way we interact with information, commerce, and even other people. Where’s the disintermediated future we were promised? More importantly, can we make a “new good web” that puts users first? [Cory Doctorow] has a plan to reverse what he’s come to call enshittification, or the lifecycle of the extractionist tech platform, and he shared it with us as the Supercon 2023 keynote.

As [Doctorow] sees it, there’s a particular arc to every evil platform’s lifecycle. First, the platform will treat its users fairly and provide enough value to accumulate as many as possible. Then, once a certain critical mass is reached, the platform pivots to exploiting those users to sell them out to the business customers of the platform. Once there’s enough buy-in by business customers, the platform squeezes both users and businesses to eke out every cent for their investors before collapsing in on itself.

Doctorow tells us, “Enshittification isn’t inevitable.” There have been tech platforms that rose and fell without it, but he describes a set of three criteria that make the process unavoidable.

  1. Lack of competition in the market via mergers and acquisitions
  2. Companies change things on the back end (“twiddle their knobs”) to improve their fortunes and have a united, consolidated front to prevent any lawmaking that might constrain them
  3. Companies then embrace tech law to prevent new entrants into the market or consumer rights (see: DMCA, etc.)

Continue reading “Supercon 2023: [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse” →

Two hands hold a rounded rectangular case with a small lollipop-shaped cutout. The case is dark grey with a bit of white protruding between the two halves in the middle.

Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way

October 3, 2024 by 8 Comments

While the death of Apple’s Lightning Connector can’t come soon enough, swapping the ports on their products as “category-defining innovations” seems a bit of a stretch. [Ken Pillonel] has designed a set of streamlined, repairable, USB-C adapters for the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max that show Apple what innovation really means.

If you’ve followed [Pillonel]’s work in the past, you’ll know he’s as a big a fan of repairability as we are here, so this isn’t just a cheap knockoff dongle that’ll be in the trash as fast as your counterfeit wireless earbuds. In the video below, he walks us through his quest start-to-finish to design something compact that gives you all the joys of USB-C without the pain of buying a whole new set of headphones.

We like the iteration on the connector, showing that flexible circuits can do some amazing things, but are still subject to failure at extreme angles. Using a combination of 3D printing, a cool robot sandblasting machine, a pick-and-place, and some old fashioned hand soldering, [Pillonel] treats us to a polished final product that’s put together with actual screws and not adhesive. His designs are all open source, so you can DIY, or he sells finished copies in his shop if you want to give one to your less-than-techy relatives.

[Pillonel] may seem familiar as he’s the guy who added USB-C to the iPhone before Apple and redesigned the AirPods Pro case for repairability. Apple is getting better about repair in some of its devices, for sure, but unsurprisingly, hackers do it better.

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