After getting a 3D printer up and running, it’s not uncommon for an enterprising hacker to dabble in 3D printing to make a little money on the side. Offering local pickup of orders is a common startup choice since it’s simple and avoids shipping entirely. It’s virtually tailor-made to make a great bootstrapping experiment, but anyone who tries it sooner or later bumps up against a critical but simple-seeming problem: how to get finished prints into a customer’s hands in a sustainable way that is not a hassle for either the provider, or the customer?

It’s very easy to accept a 3D file and get paid online, but the part about actually getting the print into the customer’s hands does not have a one-size-fits-all solution. This is what I call The Pickup Problem, and left unsolved, it can become unsustainable. Let’s look at why local pickup doesn’t always measure up, then examine possible solutions.

The Problems with Local Pickup

Local pickup for delivery of print jobs is great because there is no mucking about with shipping supplies or carriers. Also, many 3D prints when starting out will be relatively low-value jobs that no one is interested in stacking shipping fees onto, anyway.

“Your order is complete. Come to this address to pick up your order.” It is straightforward and hits all the bases, so what’s the problem?

For a business with a staffed physical location, there’s no problem! But if you are an enterprising hacker trying it as a side gig, it is lacking in several important ways.

Schedules Need To Match Up

You need to be home for local pickup to work. Customers will understandably expect to be able to pick up their order at their own convenience, but your schedules will need to match up for it to happen. Any time you are not home and available to answer the door, local pickup won’t work and that brings us to the next issue.

Scaling and Sustainability

Time and focus are your most precious resources, but committing to making yourself available for local pickups can have an impact on your life and routine in ways you may not anticipate. You may find yourself rushing home, or avoiding going out in order to be home to accommodate pickups.

While home, you may also find yourself avoiding activities, such as putting off tasks or not starting a project because it would interfere with your ability to drop what you’re doing if the doorbell rings. These can be accepted as occasional growing pains, but if they become the new normal these hidden costs will rapidly outweigh any benefits.

Location May Not Be Suitable

Not everyone’s home or workshop location is good for having people drop by to pick up an order. Ideally, a pickup location is easy to get to and has good lighting, security, and accessibility. This isn’t true for every location. An apartment or condo that lacks visitor parking and is not in a convenient location (or seems unsafe or unwelcoming to strangers) is not a good candidate for local pickups. You may get customers, but you won’t keep them.

What it boils down to is that local pickup isn’t as “free” as it may seem at first glance; there are hidden costs involved and they will be borne by you. Fortunately, there are ways around most of the usual problems.

Potential Solutions

Everyone’s needs are different when it comes to working environment, location, timetable, or security. There may not be a one-size-fits-all easy solution, but there are options that can be mixed and matched by an enterprising hacker to meet specific needs.

Have Pickup Only During Fixed Days and Times

Instead of trying to be as available as possible, offer pickups on a fixed schedule and commit to being available during those times. One might choose to offer local pickups Tuesdays and Thursdays between 5:00 pm and 9:30 pm, for example. This provides structure and boundaries while also being easier to plan around for everyone involved. The rest of the time, you can perform your usual work and activities free from interruption or stress.

Offer Reasonable Shipping

This increases costs and will limit the kinds of jobs you can accept. In addition, you will need to obtain and manage some basic shipping supplies such as boxes, packing tape, and packing material. But the payoff is the benefit of having someone else handle the delivery entirely, and you’ll be able to serve a wider area than with local pickup alone.

Seek out online shipping partners that offer postal services at discounted parcel rates; these are in common use among online sellers. You’ll be able to purchase shipping labels online and drop the box off at your nearest postal outlet, or in some cases request a pickup. Just remember that when it comes to shipping, in general smaller and lighter equals cheaper. Shipping proficiency is a bit like baking bread; the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

Offer Some Form of Self-Serve Pickup

With the global COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, self-serve and contactless pickups are a much more common and accepted ways to do things. Highly dependent on location and security, it can nevertheless be a useful option.

A good example of self-serve pickup is a home-based business from whom I recently made a purchase of specialty vinyl sheets. They had a very simple system: open their mailbox and retrieve whichever envelope had your name on it. No locks or access controls to speak of, but they apparently weren’t needed. It was extremely convenient.

This is a situation where perfect can be the enemy of good. It is entirely reasonable to mix and match solutions, or move from one to another as needs change. Since 3D printed objects are relatively low in value (compared to, say, laptops or bricks of gold) it’s easier to accept some risk and experiment in finding a good compromise.

What Worked for Me

After trying a few different things, I settled on a self-serve pickup method combined with fixed hours for pickup.

I purchased a lockable outdoor plastic storage bin and attached a sign to the front, and a cable lock to the back. Each morning, I put the bin on the front deck (a well-lit spot that was not entirely visible from the sidewalk) and secured it with the cable lock. At night I brought it indoors.

For access control, the latch was secured with a word lock. Turning the dials to form the right word would open it.

When an order was complete I would email the customer with the pickup instructions and the code for the word lock. They would come at their convenience, retrieve their order, and be on their way. If there was any issue or problem, my cell phone number was provided.

I eventually decided I had gone overboard with security and removed the word lock. It was a hassle for customers and I could always lock things down more if I ran into problems, but I was fortunate enough that none ever came up. The box even occasionally doubled as a drop-off point for other jobs and materials.

I was quite happy with the solution, and it worked well until I stopped accepting online print orders to focus instead on my own jobs, and no longer needed it. If I were to do anything differently, I would raise the bin up to waist-height for better comfort, but that’s about it.

Have You Encountered the Pickup Problem?

Have you ever run into the pickup problem as a seller or a customer, whether for 3D printing or something else? What did you do about it? If you have any insights or experiences to share, please put them in the comments because we’d love to hear them.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/08/3d-printering-selling-prints-and-solving-the-pickup-problem/

The wood-burning heater [g3gg0] has at home works perfectly, except for one flaw: the pellet reservoir needs to be manually refilled every few days. Humans being notoriously unreliable creatures, this critical task is sometimes overlooked, which naturally leads to literally chilling results.

With automatic fill systems expensive and difficult to install, [g3gg0] wanted to find some kind of way for the heater to notify its caretakers about any potential fault conditions. Not just the fact that it was out of fuel (though that would naturally be the most common alert), but any other issue which would potentially keep the heater from doing it’s job. In short, the heater was going to get a one-way ticket to the Internet of Things.

As it turns out, this task was not quite as difficult as you might expect. The Windhager heater already had upgrade bays where the user could insert additional modules and sensors, as well as a rudimentary data bus over RS-485. All [g3gg0] had to do was tap into this bus, decode what the packets contained, and use the information to generate alerts over the network. The ESP32 was more than up to the task, it just needed a custom PCB and 3D printed enclosure that would allow it to slot into the heater like an official expansion module.

When an interesting message flashes across the bus, the ESP32 captures it and relays the appropriate message to an MQTT broker. From there, the automation possibilities are nearly endless. In this case, the heater’s status information is being visualized with tools like Grafana, and important alerts are sent out to mobile devices with PushingBox. With a setup like this, the Windhager will never go hungry again.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/08/heater-joins-the-internet-of-things-with-esp32-board/

While the Hackaday reader likely knows all about Nikola Tesla and his incredible body of work, the same can’t necessarily be said for the average passerby. Even a child can be counted on to know the names of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, but as [Daniel Springwald] laments, the name Tesla is more often associated with the line of sleek electric cars than the brilliant Serbian inventor they were named for.

Hoping to level the playing field a bit, [Daniel] has come up with a way for the great man to plead his case. This custom designed robotic facsimile of the alternating current aficionado is able to speak about Tesla’s life and accomplishments in an interactive, if rather creepy, format.

There isn’t a lot of technical detail on this one yet, but what we can glean from the image gallery and video below is that there are an incredible number of OpenSCAD-designed 3D printed parts knocking around inside Mr. Tesla’s head. Add into the mix a healthy dose of springs, linkages, and servos, and you’re just a mustache short of a museum exhibit.

Most of the animatronic projects we’ve covered in the past have been based on animals, so it’s certainly interesting to see what goes into approximating human mannerisms mechanically. We’re not sure if this talking Tesla head will help educate the masses, but it’s certainly an impressive technical achievement.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/08/animatronic-nikola-tesla-sets-the-record-straight/

If you have ever studied the early history  of the GNU/Linux operating system in its many forms, you’ll have read that [Linus Torvalds] developed his first kernel for his Intel 386-based computer. Though the 386 architecture is now ancient, the current Linux kernel can still be compiled for it and many distributions still maintain an i386 branch to provide broad compatibility for later machines able to run i386 code. But what if you were to take a current Linux kernel and stick it on a floppy in a machine from the early 1990s, with meagre RAM? [Fozztex] did just that, with not a 386 but a 486, sporting what would have been an impressive for the time 36MB of RAM. You can watch it in action in the video below the break.

A recent Linux kernel is rarely if ever compiled for something as small as a floppy disk, so getting one to boot from such ancient media appeared to be a challenge. It was possible though with the tinyconfig make option, and after finding a small enough root filesystem courtesy of Aboriginal Linux, a bootable floppy was created. It’s not entirely useful and its sole purpose was to see whether Linux could see a large hard drive on the 486, but it’s still a version 5.6 Linux kernel booting from floppy on an ancient computer. Never complain that your Raspberry Pi Zero is slow again, we’ve come a long way!

Header image — Afrank99 / CC BY-SA 2.0

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/08/the-latest-linux-on-a-floppy-in-a-486/

Every day, it seems to get harder and harder to relax and unwind. A person can only take so many lava-hot showers before they start cutting into work time. Listening to music is a wonderful option, but it can be difficult to find something to listen to that’s soothing without being disruptive. So what else can we try? Oh yes, blinkenlights. Frosted, glowing blinkenlights that bathe the room in color. Ahhhh.

There’s something about those enclosures that completes these so well. [ChrisParkerTech] used Alder wood sprayed with clear coat, which gives them a delightfully clean mid-century look. We also dig the lack of ceiling and unfinished top edge, because it gives the leaking light a bit of infinity pool mystique.

Of course, these wouldn’t be much of a relaxation tool if you have to get up up from your couch, chair, or bean bag every time you want to adjust them. Each strip is connected to a Wemos D1 mini, so [Chris] can control them with his phone via WLED, or make Alexa do it. Check out the build video after the break.

If you really love LEDs, don’t leave home without them. Show the world how you feel with a stylish LED hat.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/color-your-workspace-calm-your-mind/

Every day, it seems to get harder and harder to relax and unwind. A person can only take so many lava-hot showers before they start cutting into work time. Listening to music is a wonderful option, but it can be difficult to find something to listen to that’s soothing without being disruptive. So what else can we try? Oh yes, blinkenlights. Frosted, glowing blinkenlights that bathe the room in color. Ahhhh.

There’s something about those enclosures that completes these so well. [ChrisParkerTech] used Alder wood sprayed with clear coat, which gives them a delightfully clean mid-century look. We also dig the lack of ceiling and unfinished top edge, because it gives the leaking light a bit of infinity pool mystique.

Of course, these wouldn’t be much of a relaxation tool if you have to get up up from your couch, chair, or bean bag every time you want to adjust them. Each strip is connected to a Wemos D1 mini, so [Chris] can control them with his phone via WLED, or make Alexa do it. Check out the build video after the break.

If you really love LEDs, don’t leave home without them. Show the world how you feel with a stylish LED hat.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/color-your-workspace-calm-your-mind/

Every day, it seems to get harder and harder to relax and unwind. A person can only take so many lava-hot showers before they start cutting into work time. Listening to music is a wonderful option, but it can be difficult to find something to listen to that’s soothing without being disruptive. So what else can we try? Oh yes, blinkenlights. Frosted, glowing blinkenlights that bathe the room in color. Ahhhh.

There’s something about those enclosures that completes these so well. [ChrisParkerTech] used Alder wood sprayed with clear coat, which gives them a delightfully clean mid-century look. We also dig the lack of ceiling and unfinished top edge, because it gives the leaking light a bit of infinity pool mystique.

Of course, these wouldn’t be much of a relaxation tool if you have to get up up from your couch, chair, or bean bag every time you want to adjust them. Each strip is connected to a Wemos D1 mini, so [Chris] can control them with his phone via WLED, or make Alexa do it. Check out the build video after the break.

If you really love LEDs, don’t leave home without them. Show the world how you feel with a stylish LED hat.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/color-your-workspace-calm-your-mind/

One of the perks of using older hardware is its comparative simplicity and extensive documentation. After years or decades of users programming on a platform, the amount of knowledge available for it can become extensive. This is certainly the case with the 6502 microprocessor, used in old Apple computers and some video game systems from the ’80s. The extensive amount of resources available make it a prime candidate in exploring various programming languages, and their advantages and disadvantage.

This project looks into those differences using a robot game, which has been programmed four different ways in three languages. [Joey] created the game in Python first and then began to port it to the 65C02, a CMOS variant of the 6502. The first iteration is its assembly language, and then a second iteration with optimized assembly code. From there, he ports it to C and then finally to Forth. Each version of the game is available to play in a browser using an emulator to run the 6502 hardware.

Since the games run in the browser, other tools are available to examine the way the game runs in each language. Registers can be viewed in real time, as well as the values stored in the memory. It’s an interesting look at an old piece of hardware and of its inner workings. For an even deeper dive into the 6502, it’s possible to build a working computer on breadboards using one.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/gaming-in-different-languages/

For most people, a broken tool is at the end of its useful life. But rather than toss a heavy-duty drill that had its handle broken off, [Workshop From Scratch] thought it was a perfect opportunity to create something new. In his latest video, he shows how he converted this old hand tool into a magnetic drill press with predictably impressive results.

Despite being assembled largely from pieces of scrap metal cut into shape with an angle grinder, we wouldn’t blame you for believing the end result was a commercial product. From the handles salvaged from chewed up old screwdrivers to the scratch-built rack and pinion assembly, the attention to detail here is really fantastic.

It’s difficult to pick a favorite detail, but the reinvented enclosure for the drill certainly ranks up there. [Workshop From Scratch] could have simply bolted on the tool as-is, but instead he surgically removed the vestigial handle to make it look as though the drill was always meant for this application. After cutting, it was finished off with some body filler, a bit of sanding, and a coat of his signature orange spray paint.

When he built his magnetic vise, [Workshop From Scratch] used magnets pulled from automotive air conditioning systems. They got the job done, but were somewhat annoying to work with given their round shape. This time around, he’s used off-the-shelf magnetic locks intended for steel doors. When energized with a 19 V laptop power supply, he says the three rectangular electromagnets have a combined pull of 540 kilograms.

If you don’t have a broken drill to use as a donor for this type of project, don’t worry. You could always use a salvaged hoverboard motor instead.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/salvaged-drill-gets-a-magnetic-upgrade/

When we think of lawn mowers, our first thought is of heavy, rusty old machines that take the best part of an afternoon to get started. Of course, there’s always another way, as [Mark] ably demonstrates with his own build. 

Beginning from an unconventional starting point, [Mark] chose a remote control car, of the type that can flip and drive in both orientations. Having lost the controller, he started by ripping out the original electronics. In its place, an ESP32 receives signals from a FlySky RC receiver, and runs the drive motors with a Sparkfun Monster Motor Shield. Another channel on the receiver is hooked up directly to a drone speed controller driving a brushless motor, outfitted with a sawblade to cut the grass.

It’s a small platform, and one that ordinarily you might doubt could do the job. However, for [Mark]’s purposes, the rig works just fine, and has been doing good work for the last two years! We’ve seen mowers hacked before too, like this autonomous rig out in the wild. Video after break.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/rc-car-becomes-useful-little-mower/

Although you’d be hard-pressed to tell in some areas, it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, which always seems to bring out the projects that require a swimming pool for adequate testing. The [Brick Experiment Channel]’s latest build, a submersible made almost entirely from Lego, is one such project and has us pining for weather that makes a dip sensible rather than suicidal.

The sub featured in the video below is a significant improvement over the “Sub in a Jug” approach the [Brick Experiment Channel] favored for version 1. Rather than starting with a vessel specifically designed not to hold water, the hull for this vessel is an IKEA food container, with a stout glass body and a flexible lid with silicone seals. And instead of penetrating the hull for driveshafts and attempting to seal them, this time around he built clever magnetic couplings.

The couplings transmit torque from the motors on the inside to gears and props on the outside. And where the first version used a syringe-pump ballast tank to control the depth, this one uses vertical thrusters. The flexible lid proved to be a problem with that scheme, since it tended to collapse as the depth increased, preventing the sub from surfacing. That was solved with some Lego bracing and adjustment of the lead shot ballast used to keep the sub neutrally buoyant.

This looks like a ton of summer fun, and even if you don’t have Legos galore to work with, it could easily be adapted to other materials. There are a ton of other fun [BEC] Lego builds to check out, some of which we’ve covered, including a Lego drone and a playing card shooter.

Thanks for the tip, [Vox]!

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/07/magnetic-couplings-make-this-lego-submarine-watertight/