Lots of great pictures and videos, here’s more than a few links:

Markus:
Pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/112341170605872744137/20120211PourNYerHeartOutValentineSIronPourStills#

Larry:
Pics: http://tinyurl.com/felionpour

Joe:
600fps Slowmo: http://www.youtube.com/user/HighSpeedSlowMotion/videos

Pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/100855345129488501027/IronPourSector67February112012

We’re again excited and ready to support the UW Office of Corporate Relations in another great 100 Hour Challenge.  UW System students are invited to Sector67 for an opportunity to create treasure from state surplus trash with only 100 hours to complete the project and post materials online.  For more information, check out the 100 Hour Challenge website FAQs and peruse past winners for ideas.

During that time, team Splatacrash designed and built a compact LEGO robot complete with motors, sensors, and a microcontroller that they programmed to guide the robot as it journeyed out onto an obstacle-filled 4’ x 8’ field to perform a series of missions. The goal was to accomplish as many of the pre-defined object manipulation missions as possible in two and half minutes. The robots had to maneuver around a field filled with LEGO objects and structures, earning points by collecting and bringing objects back to base, triggering LEGO devices while avoiding obstacles.

Team Splatacrash develops presentation materials at Sector67. The LEGO robotics field is visible in the background.

In addition to the LEGO robotics portion, the team was tasked with a significant research project. This year’s theme “Food Factor” required the team to investigate food safety issues, select a food contamination problem to focus on and then to devise an innovative solution to address the problem. After several scientific experiments, interviews with local experts and a school-wide survey the team determined that the lack of hand washing before the school lunch period was a significant source of food contamination. Their innovative solution? The Germs-B-Gone! The prototype device developed at Sector67 is designed to be wall-mounted at the entrances of school cafeterias, providing a simple and quick way for students to sanitize their hands before eating lunch. Their work on this project earned Splatacrash the Research Award at the Wisconsin State Championship in mid-December.

Germs-B-Gone prototype hand sanitizing station

FIRST LEGO League is an international robotics program designed to encourage interest in science and technology for kids ages 9 to 14. Teams compete in tournaments which include a robot competition, a research project presentation and judging of the team’s technical knowledge, robot design and teamwork skills. The Madison program and regional tournament is run by BadgerB.O.T.S. out of Memorial High School.

For more information, visit www.badgerbots.org or www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll/

Team Splatacrash tests their robot in the “pits” at the WI state FLL Championship.

This offer is LIMITED, – you basically have 6 days ,… no pressure

Event will also feature live DJ and have shirts, stickers, food, and fine beverages available!

My background is 30-odd years in software engineering. From the time I was in high school (and managed to sneak out of the college-prep track long enough to take an electronics class or two with the “shop kids”), I’d struggled to learn electronic design and troubleshooting, mostly to no avail. It always felt like one of those “there’s two kinds of people in this world” issues: my brain seemed wired to “get” software, but not hardware. Oh, I picked up enough to do simple projects and basic Ohms-Law stuff, but just barely.

So when I joined Sector67 a year or so ago, I homed in on Arduino and Electronics 101 classes. You may have seen me present at a monthly meeting on my automatic chicken-door (http://www.sector67.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=85) or my RF remote appliance controller http://www.sector67.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=129.

I decided a couple of months ago to run with the RF remote control project as a test-bed to try to learn how to lay out a custom PCB and have it manufactured. I had tried taking Chris’s class in EagleCAD and had found the interface to be pretty annoying and difficult. Chris had suggested looking at another tool, called Fritzing, but it took me a couple of months and seeing a couple of articles online about it before I finally downloaded the (free) software and tried it out: Bingo!

Fritzing is a very easy to use tool that let’s you capture (or design up-front) a breadboard circuit. With a breadboard, you just stick jumpers in holes to make connections; no soldering needed, easy to make changes until you get it working right. Fritzing lets you just drag wires into place with your mouse, on a graphic display that looks just like your breadboard:

[I actually used two different Arduinos during this project: the Boarduino version is very handy for breadboard work, as it plugs right into a breadboard for quick & easy prototyping. For the actual PCB, I wanted to make an Arduino shield, so in Fritzing I used a standard Arduino Uno. Plus, Fritzing doesn't have a predefined part definition for the Boarduino...]

[I also made a perf-board version of this circuit. I've called perf-boards "needle-point with a soldering iron", and building this one convinced me I just had to learn to make PCBs!]

Fritzing includes predefined parts definitions for hundreds of common parts, including multiple Arduino versions and most of the parts in the the Sparkfun catalog. It also provides a “mystery” chip feature (the black box with the question-mark above) that lets you define the number and names of an arbitrary set of pins.

I was overjoyed to even get this far: just using Fritzing to document a breadboard design is incredibly valuable. I had been struggling to find some easy way to capture and document projects; Fritzing meets that need beautifully, even if you never need the schematic or board-layout features.

But that’s where the magic of Fritzing comes in: once you’ve drawn your breadboard design, a click of a button switches to a schematic view:

Since I tend to not use the schematic view at all (personal preference), this schematic is a default, non-prettified view. You can easily drag the chips around and reposition the wires to “look nice”, if you care to…

The final view in Fritzing is the PCB view, which makes the schematic/breadboard design into actual traces on a circuit board:

This shows my final design, omitting some intermediate steps. Fritzing has an “auto-route” feature that tries to lay out all the traces on the board so that they don’t overlap each other, using a double-sided board design if you need it (as this one did). Most likely it will fail to find a workable route for a few of the connections, but easily allows you to manually shift things around until you get a workable design. It can feel kind of like doing Rubic’s Cube at first, but with a little practice it isn’t too hard, at least for relatively simple circuits. Plus, Fritzing has a “check design rules” feature that validates nothing’s crossed and things are far enough apart to actually build and function properly.

Once you have a PCB laid out, you can export it as “Gerber files”, an industry-standard format for specifying how to build a PCB. There are several companies online that will accept these files, build some finished PCBs, and mail them back to you.

I identified two leading vendors: one in Germany (http://fab.fritzing.org/fritzing-fab) would make me one (1) PCB for 28 Euros. The other in China (http://iteadstudio.com/) would make me ten (10) PCBs for $26. I couldn’t convince myself to spend more money for 10% as many boards, so I emailed my Gerber files off to China on New Years morning. And 22 days later, the mailman had me sign for a small box of PCBs.

I promptly ran over to Sector67 and started soldering parts onto the board. I plugged it on top of my Arduino, downloaded the application code that I had written and tested using the breadboard circuit, and WOW: it worked first try!

Once I recovered from the shock of “worked first try”, I quickly realized that this was a Big Thing: even a software guy can make inexpensive custom PCBs almost painlessly, using a free, user-friendly open-source tool. As soon as Chris saw how excited I was, he told me I needed to write it up for S67. So here it is…

This is a thermal camera project that was designed from www.cheap-thermocam.tk and www.centralnexus.com/thermal/

Thermal cameras normally cost $5,000 or more. They use an array of sensors to make an image. This thermal camera costs a lot less by using one sensor and sweeping it over an area using servo motors. The data is then aggregated by a computer to make the image. The first image produced by this thermal camera is measuring the temperature difference of a soldering iron. The pictures are not aligned in the image because the camera is not yet calibrated.

Firewood Rack

This is a firewood rack that was inspired by AK47 studio. It is a Christmas present for my brother.

It uses a minimal amount of material and utilizes space efficiently to store firewood. It is a dynamic sculpture. As the round rods bend and flex under the load of the stored wood, it gives a sense of continual change. The round rods are gently splayed giving a sense of ever expanding possibilities.

Luckily, he liked how it turned out. Here it is in its final resting place at my brother’s house.

Thanks to all the members of Sector67 whose assistance made these projects possible.

Chris Petit is a member of Sector67 and the owner of the local design firm Regenerative Design, LLC. Website is www.regenerativedesign.com.

• People like drinks cold.
• Ice makes things cold.
• Ice melts.
• People don’t like water in their drinks.
• To prevent melting, you should have the maximum volume (making things cold) with the minimum surface area (melting).
• The shape that does this is called a sphere.
• It’s hard to take water and make spheres that don’t have ugly seams in them.
• Through the magic of thermodynamics, you can use a metal to melt some parts of a block of ice, while freezing the resulting water, and get a beautiful sphere.

At this last bit, the physics student in me is screaming “but that makes no sense!” Admittedly, I didn’t do very well in physics, so it wasn’t screaming very loudly. I really thought that my brother, Quinlan (who’s a liquor snob and has more parties than I) needed this for a party. However, the fact that it costs freaking $1400 put it well out of my range; Quinlan didn’t need it that badly. As I looked at it, though, I realized that it wasn’t a hard concept: just get a big block of aluminum with a spherical hole, heat it, and you’re done. Surely, I could make this. If only I was a member of a hackerspace with milling tools… but wait! I am!

For more, check out Making the Mold at Times and Measures.

I’ve been working for a while on a portable electronic scoreboard, so I had all the materials to make a good LED sign with the name. The day before we were to leave for Kansas, I started the project. The idea was to make a big LED sign that said Kalahari on it. It would be battery powered, and a switch would turn it on when the box was opened so that it wasn’t on the entire time and running out of battery. That was as far as I got in planning before I started building.

I borrowed a rechargeable battery from Sector67 to use as the power supply, then laid out the LEDs on a prototyping perf board covered with sticky black nylon paper. It took a couple tries to get it all to fit on the available board with legible letters and decent spacing. Then I found a switch that would work. The circuit was simple. The switch connected the + voltage to the board and the ground went directly to the board. The LEDs were connected with a resistor and two LEDs in series, and all those strings were in parallel. This meant a huge current drain, but I was limited to a power supply with only 6 volts, so I didn’t have much choice. This also meant a LOT of soldering and a lot of current limiting resistors. There was an odd number of LEDs, so I put an extra one on the back side so that the circuits were all the same.

With all these LEDs packed into a small space, it was very bright, so I struggled with a few different ways to do the presentation. I ended up taping the board behind a piece of paper so that the paper would diffuse the light a little. It ended up working great. The paper covered everything, including the switch. When the box was closed it was off, and when it was opened the switch was triggered, turning on the sign.

The girlfriend was happy, so the project was a success.

The next time I do something like this I’ll use less LEDs and instead of doing a sign of LEDs I think it would be better to have a piece that had letters cut out and was backlit by only a few LEDs. I also would have spent a lot more time on what was surrounding the sign. Using regular paper and crayon to draw was the best I could do with the limited time and resources I had, but it wasn’t enough for me. Construction took far longer than I expected, and I was a little disappointed with the results. I was working late into the night to solder it all together, and I barely had any time to work on the rest of the package. I can do better.

Check out my website for more projects.

Of course, you’re wondering at this point wth this is Sector67 blog worthy, as we avoid posting crap on our blog! Out of the box, there were a couple of bad cameras. One was repaired by reseating the connectors, but another was truly DOA. The good news about these cameras, is they have M12 x 0.5mm standard lens, so you can easily jump on eBay and purchase replacements for the narrow 6mm provided lens, we ended up with the 3.6mm lens for wider field of view. The IR illumination really does go about 20ft, it’s pretty narrow but works well, and the overall image is acceptable for the cost.

Onwards to helping others out there. If you also have a defective camera (and you don’t want to wait a month for an RMA), you should:

• Start by plugging in the camera to different cables (preferably a known working cable) and see if it starts working, if so you may have a bad cable or jack on the DVR/power supply
• Assuming that didn’t fix things, put your finger over the photocell on the front, it’s the striped sensor in the ring of LEDs.  With your finger firmly planted on top of the sensor, the ring of LEDs should light up.  If they are then you’re getting power to the camera and your cables (external and internal to the IR illuminator) are working.
• If you don’t have power, then you probably have a bad jack.  The issue is they have a chrome plated terminal they’re attempting to solder to, which is then injection molded as a strain relief.  The problem is that chrome doesn’t wick solder, but is very good at resisting rust and oxidation when it’s sitting in a Chinese factory waiting to be built into a product. . .
• You can check for a bad connection by pressing hard at the backside of the female DC plug, if things suddenly turn on you’re in good shape for this repair:

You can see in the center of the jack, the red wire has a giant blob of gray solder that’s broken away from the terminal at the center.  At top leftish you can see a few loops of copper I caught with the razor blade on the ground connection.  In this case, I resoldered the center terminal and used hot glue (or epoxy) to repair the torn up plastic.

Black cable here:

The red cable at the left runs to the IR illumination, the set of three at right powers the camera and returns video (yellow).  I ended up having to cut off the wires at the left and solder them onto the camera main board.

The idea behind the project is to turn sound into light and see the sound waves. To accomplish this, a mirror is attached to a speaker. When a laser shines on the mirror, the speaker vibrates it and changes the angle of the mirror slightly, but enough to see. This alone is enough to see the effects of sound waves. The next step in my machine is to shine the reflected beam onto a laser attached at an angle to a motor. As the motor spins, the mirror rotates, and since it is at an angle it makes the reflected beam spin in a circle. This spreads out the wave over a circle, so you can see the waveform as actual waves. See the video for a demonstration.

The picture below is easier to understand. On the right side is a green laser. It shines onto the speaker. The mirror is a front-faced mirror to prevent double images, and it’s attached using hot glue to the center and also to the edge. This allows the mirror to pivot when the speaker vibrates. If the mirror were just attached to the speaker, it would only move forward and back without changing the angle.

After bouncing off the speaker, it is directed at a motor with a mirror attached at an angle. The angle is important because if it were flat it wouldn’t do anything to spin. Having the mirror at an angle makes the laser spin in a circle. When the speaker is making sound and the motor is turning, the laser shows the sound waves using persistence of vision.

The laser shines on a mirror attached to the speaker, then to a rotating mirror. Controls turn on the motor and system, and knobs control frequency and volume.

The tone generated is a simple square wave from an Arduino, which manages the input knobs for the frequency, the switch for the motor, the laser, and has a timer that automatically turns everything off after 30 seconds (to prevent it from continuing to run after the children leave).

For more information check out my website.