According to [Alex] it is easy to make your own rolls of 3D printing filament, even though existing off-the-shelf solutions don’t work very well. His explanation for this is economics. He built a filament extruder using a high torque induction motor and gearbox that was locally sourced. He argues that shipping heavy gear around would make a similar extruder commercially unattractive. He sunk about $600 into the device but estimates that a company would need to charge at least $1,500 or more for the same thing. That may seem steep but as [Alex] points out, a 1 kg roll of filament really only has about 750 grams for filament and plastic pellets cost $2 to $3 per kilogram.

There are other costs, of course, like the electricity required to heat and move the plastic. Still, the system appears to use about $1 of electricity for every 10 kg of filament. You can see the process in the video below.

If you think about it, the mechanism isn’t too different from a 3D printer. You heat plastic, force it through a nozzle, and it cools off. The big differences are you are not moving around and have to manage the pellets using a screw feed. It turns out the screw and associated components make up a large part of the machine’s cost.

The other key component is a 1 HP motor. A typical motor will run at 1800 RPM, so you also need a gearbox to slow things down. You’ll also need drive electronics, heaters, and temperature control. If you pay retail for everything, you are going to have trouble matching the $600 price tag. However, the motors and quite a bit of it can be found used or salvaged. A lot of the details are in the second post. The details of the part of the machine that winds the new filament are in yet another post.

If you don’t want to spend quite as much, you can also make a smaller version that can produce about 2 kg per hour as opposed to the 5 kg per hour that the big machine makes. The little sister uses an eBike motor and the whole thing should come in for well under $500. There are several other posts linked from the original ones, including notes on the water bath required, measuring filament thickness, and even selling filament for profit.

We’ve seen a lot of takes on making filament. One even claims to cost about $100.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/17/make-your-own-filament/

If you’re building a CNC machine from scratch, the number of decisions you have to make is nearly boundless. Metal or wood construction? Welded or bolted? Timing belts or lead screws? And even once the mechanical bits are sorted, you still face a universe of choices in terms of control electronics. That’s where something like this modular CNC controller could really prove to be a game-changer.

The idea behind [Barton Dring]’s latest creation started with his port of GRBL to the ESP32. In fact, the current controller bears a strong family resemblance to his version 1.0 dev board, with a few conspicuous and intriguing additions. First, everything is modular — the main PCB is basically a motherboard with little more than a 5-volt power supply and some housekeeping electronics, plus a lot of headers. There’s support for up to six channels of steppers, either directly on the board with Pololu-style modules or as external drivers using pluggable screw terminal blocks. There’s also room for five IO modules; the current collection of modules includes a four-channel switch input, a relay output, an RS-485 module and a 0-10-V interface for talking to a variable frequency drive (VFD) spindle controllers, and buffered 5-V output module. The best part is that the IO module spec is completely open, so designing custom modules should be a snap.

The video below gives a quick tour of the controller. We’re really impressed with the thought that went into this, and we’ll venture a guess that having something like this available is going to kickstart a lot of stalled CNC machine projects. We can think of one shop that finally lost its last excuse for making the move.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/17/the-motherboard-of-all-cnc-controllers/

Most Hackaday readers are likely to be familiar with character LCDs driven by the extremely common Hitachi HD44780 controller chip. If you’re looking for a cheap and easy way for your microcontroller project to display some data, they’re pretty much the go-to solution. But as popular as these displays are, there’s no denying that they’re starting to look a bit dated in 2020. Which is why the tweaks [Joseph Rautenbach] is working on are so interesting.

With one of these displays, the controller puts a single character on each 5×8 block of pixels. There’s also support for creating custom characters, which can be used for rudimentary icons. You’re pretty limited by the per-block resolution, but with a little imagination, you can usually get the point across. With a bit of dead space between each block of the display there’s little point in trying to make icons that “bridge” multiple blocks, as they’ll always be segmented.

But as [Joseph] realized, that’s less of a problem for scrolling text. So he wrote some code that takes an ASCII string and breaks it down into partial letters and numbers which can be displayed as custom characters. The controller only has space for 8 of these characters though, so the code needs to continually step through the string and generate the appropriate offset characters as the position of the text changes.

While the effect looks pretty good in the video after the break, [Joseph] has found that real-world utilization is a bit finicky. He tried the same code on one of the displays that uses white text on a blue background, and the scrolling text ended up ghosting together so it looked like gibberish. So while he’s released the source code for others to experiment with this trick, your mileage may vary.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody make clever use of custom characters on the HD44780. We’ve seen it used for an exceptionally tiny game of Tetris, a rendition of Conway’s Game of Life, and even a horizontal space-shooter.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/smoother-text-scrolling-on-hd44780-lcds/

Most Hackaday readers are likely to be familiar with character LCDs driven by the extremely common Hitachi HD44780 controller chip. If you’re looking for a cheap and easy way for your microcontroller project to display some data, they’re pretty much the go-to solution. But as popular as these displays are, there’s no denying that they’re starting to look a bit dated in 2020. Which is why the tweaks [Joseph Rautenbach] is working on are so interesting.

With one of these displays, the controller puts a single character on each 5×8 block of pixels. There’s also support for creating custom characters, which can be used for rudimentary icons. You’re pretty limited by the per-block resolution, but with a little imagination, you can usually get the point across. With a bit of dead space between each block of the display there’s little point in trying to make icons that “bridge” multiple blocks, as they’ll always be segmented.

But as [Joseph] realized, that’s less of a problem for scrolling text. So he wrote some code that takes an ASCII string and breaks it down into partial letters and numbers which can be displayed as custom characters. The controller only has space for 8 of these characters though, so the code needs to continually step through the string and generate the appropriate offset characters as the position of the text changes.

While the effect looks pretty good in the video after the break, [Joseph] has found that real-world utilization is a bit finicky. He tried the same code on one of the displays that uses white text on a blue background, and the scrolling text ended up ghosting together so it looked like gibberish. So while he’s released the source code for others to experiment with this trick, your mileage may vary.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody make clever use of custom characters on the HD44780. We’ve seen it used for an exceptionally tiny game of Tetris, a rendition of Conway’s Game of Life, and even a horizontal space-shooter.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/smoother-text-scrolling-on-hd44780-lcds/

Most Hackaday readers are likely to be familiar with character LCDs driven by the extremely common Hitachi HD44780 controller chip. If you’re looking for a cheap and easy way for your microcontroller project to display some data, they’re pretty much the go-to solution. But as popular as these displays are, there’s no denying that they’re starting to look a bit dated in 2020. Which is why the tweaks [Joseph Rautenbach] is working on are so interesting.

With one of these displays, the controller puts a single character on each 5×8 block of pixels. There’s also support for creating custom characters, which can be used for rudimentary icons. You’re pretty limited by the per-block resolution, but with a little imagination, you can usually get the point across. With a bit of dead space between each block of the display there’s little point in trying to make icons that “bridge” multiple blocks, as they’ll always be segmented.

But as [Joseph] realized, that’s less of a problem for scrolling text. So he wrote some code that takes an ASCII string and breaks it down into partial letters and numbers which can be displayed as custom characters. The controller only has space for 8 of these characters though, so the code needs to continually step through the string and generate the appropriate offset characters as the position of the text changes.

While the effect looks pretty good in the video after the break, [Joseph] has found that real-world utilization is a bit finicky. He tried the same code on one of the displays that uses white text on a blue background, and the scrolling text ended up ghosting together so it looked like gibberish. So while he’s released the source code for others to experiment with this trick, your mileage may vary.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody make clever use of custom characters on the HD44780. We’ve seen it used for an exceptionally tiny game of Tetris, a rendition of Conway’s Game of Life, and even a horizontal space-shooter.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/smoother-text-scrolling-on-hd44780-lcds/

You used to be able to tell a die-hard ham radio operator on the road by the number and length of antennas protruding porcupine-like from their vehicle. There are still some mobile high frequency operators that have respectable car-mounted antenna farms, but they have nothing on Alfred H. Grebe. In 1919, he fitted a medium wave transmitter in his car that operated around 2 MHz. Since it needed a very large antenna, Grebe rigged a wire antenna that looked like a clothesline between the two bumpers. Obviously, you had to stop, set up your antenna, and then operate — you couldn’t talk and drive. But this may have been the world’s first automotive radio setup for voice communication.

The car had a separate battery for the radio and a dynamotor to generate high voltage for the tubes. Although many radio enthusiasts found ways to add receivers to their cars in the 1920s, it would be 1930 before Motorola made radios especially for cars in production quantities.

That wasn’t what Grebe was most famous for, though. He worked as a ship’s operator After making a few receivers for friends, he decided to open up a business. Grebe radio, though, is hardly a household name today. But he was best known for setting up radio stations, including founding the station that would eventually become WCBS, often called the father of news radio.

We always enjoy learning about radio pioneers including Edwin Armstrong and Reginald Fessenden. This is certainly a far cry even from the old mobile telephones.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/ham-radio-mobile-operations-circa-1919/

We’ve seen plenty of simple reflow ovens, and there’s an excellent chance that some of the people reading these words have even thrown their own together. A minimal example isn’t much more than a old toaster oven, a Solid State Relay (SSR), a thermocouple, and a microcontroller to get them all talking. But if you’re like [Mangy_Dog] and willing to put in a bit more effort, the final result can be a capable piece of equipment that will be the envy of the hackerspace.

This build started as most do, with a search for a used toaster oven. But in the end he actually found a German model cheap enough that he could buy it new without going over budget for the project. Though he soon found out why: when it arrived, the so-called “pizza oven” was far smaller than he’d imagined. Luckily, it ended up being the perfect size for PCBs.

Unfortunately, the heating elements weren’t quite where he wanted them. Even after wrapping the heating chamber with ceramic insulation, a feature that was likely left off the original oven to cut costs, he says the temperature would only rise about 1 degree per second. So he added an additional halogen heating element at the top of the oven which pushed that rate up to 6 degrees per second.

Control is provided by an Arduino Pro Mini and a touch screen display with some very slick graphics. There’s the expected thermocouple to detect the current temperature, but while the earlier versions of the electronics used the aforementioned SSR to control the heating elements, [Mangy_Dog] eventually replaced it with a dimmer module rated for 4000 watts. After coming up with a circuit that allowed him to control the dimmer with the Arduino, this module gave for much finer control over the chamber temperature. Plus it apparently kept all the lights in his house from flickering when the elements kicked in at 100%, which was a nice bonus.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody shoehorn an LCD into an off-the-shelf toaster oven, but it’s certainly one of the most polished examples to ever come our way. When even commercially available units need some hacking to reach feature parity with DIY versions, building your own reflow oven still seems like the way to go in 2020.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/touch-screen-reflow-oven-pulls-out-all-the-stops/

We’ve seen plenty of simple reflow ovens, and there’s an excellent chance that some of the people reading these words have even thrown their own together. A minimal example isn’t much more than a old toaster oven, a Solid State Relay (SSR), a thermocouple, and a microcontroller to get them all talking. But if you’re like [Mangy_Dog] and willing to put in a bit more effort, the final result can be a capable piece of equipment that will be the envy of the hackerspace.

This build started as most do, with a search for a used toaster oven. But in the end he actually found a German model cheap enough that he could buy it new without going over budget for the project. Though he soon found out why: when it arrived, the so-called “pizza oven” was far smaller than he’d imagined. Luckily, it ended up being the perfect size for PCBs.

Unfortunately, the heating elements weren’t quite where he wanted them. Even after wrapping the heating chamber with ceramic insulation, a feature that was likely left off the original oven to cut costs, he says the temperature would only rise about 1 degree per second. So he added an additional halogen heating element at the top of the oven which pushed that rate up to 6 degrees per second.

Control is provided by an Arduino Pro Mini and a touch screen display with some very slick graphics. There’s the expected thermocouple to detect the current temperature, but while the earlier versions of the electronics used the aforementioned SSR to control the heating elements, [Mangy_Dog] eventually replaced it with a dimmer module rated for 4000 watts. After coming up with a circuit that allowed him to control the dimmer with the Arduino, this module gave for much finer control over the chamber temperature. Plus it apparently kept all the lights in his house from flickering when the elements kicked in at 100%, which was a nice bonus.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody shoehorn an LCD into an off-the-shelf toaster oven, but it’s certainly one of the most polished examples to ever come our way. When even commercially available units need some hacking to reach feature parity with DIY versions, building your own reflow oven still seems like the way to go in 2020.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/touch-screen-reflow-oven-pulls-out-all-the-stops/

We’ve seen plenty of simple reflow ovens, and there’s an excellent chance that some of the people reading these words have even thrown their own together. A minimal example isn’t much more than a old toaster oven, a Solid State Relay (SSR), a thermocouple, and a microcontroller to get them all talking. But if you’re like [Mangy_Dog] and willing to put in a bit more effort, the final result can be a capable piece of equipment that will be the envy of the hackerspace.

This build started as most do, with a search for a used toaster oven. But in the end he actually found a German model cheap enough that he could buy it new without going over budget for the project. Though he soon found out why: when it arrived, the so-called “pizza oven” was far smaller than he’d imagined. Luckily, it ended up being the perfect size for PCBs.

Unfortunately, the heating elements weren’t quite where he wanted them. Even after wrapping the heating chamber with ceramic insulation, a feature that was likely left off the original oven to cut costs, he says the temperature would only rise about 1 degree per second. So he added an additional halogen heating element at the top of the oven which pushed that rate up to 6 degrees per second.

Control is provided by an Arduino Pro Mini and a touch screen display with some very slick graphics. There’s the expected thermocouple to detect the current temperature, but while the earlier versions of the electronics used the aforementioned SSR to control the heating elements, [Mangy_Dog] eventually replaced it with a dimmer module rated for 4000 watts. After coming up with a circuit that allowed him to control the dimmer with the Arduino, this module gave for much finer control over the chamber temperature. Plus it apparently kept all the lights in his house from flickering when the elements kicked in at 100%, which was a nice bonus.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody shoehorn an LCD into an off-the-shelf toaster oven, but it’s certainly one of the most polished examples to ever come our way. When even commercially available units need some hacking to reach feature parity with DIY versions, building your own reflow oven still seems like the way to go in 2020.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/16/touch-screen-reflow-oven-pulls-out-all-the-stops/