The Ackermann car kit is a popular, inexpensive robotic car platform that’s available online from many retailers. It includes the platform, wheels and motors — but the rest is up to you. If you want to get up and running with it, you need to either develop a solution yourself, or you can pick up this Ackermann Component Set that includes everything you need to get a robot car up and running in a short amount of time.
This kit comes with an STM32F411-based board as well as power management boards, battery holders, and much more. All components are designed to plug into each other with wire harnesses, meaning no soldering is needed up-front. It’s also designed to be an open platform, with no limit on how you can customize or modify the system as you learn. Easily add more sensors, wireless modules, lights, or anything else you need for your application!
The platform comes pre-flashed with MicroPython firmware, making it easy to add code with simple drag-and-drop programming. Currently, there is an issue with the links for the documentation and example code, but check back soon and it should be resolved. This will allow users to try out a demo and help get up and running quickly!
If you have ever enjoyed a fresh chicken egg, you’ve tasted just how worthwhile having your own chickens can be. Some folks raise chickens for their sustainability impact, others as a source of income, and some simply for companionship. Whatever the reason, raising chickens is a full-time commitment, and you need quite a bit of infrastructure for their care. One important daily task is making sure the chickens all make their way in each night and are released from the coop each morning, and the Automatic Chicken Coop Door is an incredibly simple device to help you with that job.
The mechanism is powered by a rechargeable 18650 Li-Ion battery, which isn’t included but is readily found online and in physical stores. The solar panel on the device recharges the battery and also measures the ambient light to determine when the door should be opened and closed at dawn and dusk. By using the potentiometers inside the device, you can fine-tune the delay when opening and closing the door in the mornings and evenings. You can even test your configurations without having to wait for the right time of day thanks to the flexibility and feedback integrated into the design of the mechanism.
This product comes from Putkovar, the Poultry Protector from Slovenia. Be sure to visit the product page to appreciate all the thought they’ve put into this design, and keep an eye out for future projects from them on their storefront!
If you’re considering automating your hydroponics garden, this board from GrowTek might be the perfect match! Featuring 8 MOSFET outputs as well as 4 differential load cell inputs, you can easily control lighting, pumps and any other actuators you have in your garden. For example, the system could automatically monitor nutrient levels in the water, and when the nutrient level drops, it’ll automatically weigh and dispense the exact amount of nutrient needed to bring the system back into equilibrium.
The ESP32 is used as the main microcontroller, so it’s possible to have live data from your hydroponics setup fed to a web page or other tracking system such as MQTT. This way, trends over time can be examined and any long-term negative trends can be corrected before they become problematic. Alarms could be set in case certain parameters go too high or too low, and therefore require human intervention! This system could be used in many other applications as well, not just hydroponics; the integrated load-cell inputs mean any project where weight needs to be measured and outputs changed based on them would be a great solution. Also, because the load-cell inputs go into an HX711 ADC, any differential input could be connected!
An external programmer is required, but these are readily available (including from Tindie!) and there are many tools available for ESP32 development, including Arduino, NodeMCU (Lua), and of course C/C++ using the ESP32 development libraries. If you have no experience with the ESP32, check out Hackaday.io and you’ll find some great tutorials and example projects.
If you sell PCBs on Tindie, you’ve perhaps designed a board to be hand built, then eventually set it up as a PCBA for assembly elsewhere when the volume and maturity justifies it. I went through this process myself with one of my products. Admittedly, there was a part where I was applying solder paste for assembly which could have been done in a neater and less wasteful manner.
One solution is to use a solder stencil, which in my experience comes with its own set of challenges – including the need to actually design and make. The second solution is to use a dispensing setup that can help you more accurately dispense globs of solder paste than with a manual syringe. Such a device comes with its own set of challenges, often including the need for compressed air. The e.Dispenser from Dan M does things a little differently by precisely displacing solder paste with a servo-driven linear actuator.
I got my hands on one of these units to try out and I’ve been pretty impressed, but read on to see my thoughts on how the device works!
e.Dispenser Initial Impressions
The system sells for a list price of $149.00 USD, including enough accessories (sans actual solder paste) to get you going. There are also a number of additional options available, including a foot-pedal and on-dispenser device trigger.
The device is made in, and ships from, Mexico. As an American buyer, my first hesitation was that there might be some import duties and/or hassle, however, I’m happy to report that in my case getting it was no trouble whatsoever. It simply showed up at my house in Florida via UPS, 11 days after placing the order. The item was very well packaged in custom-cut foam, which could double as storage apparatus if you’re careful when opening it up.
The device itself was well-made, with a laser-cut housing, and an LCD character display that will be familiar to anyone who has browsed an Arduino projects site for even a few minutes. The reversible USB-C power input was a nice feature, and there’s a 3.5mm jack for accessory connection. Finally, the driving stepper motor is keyed in such a way that it can’t be reversed when plugging it into the controller.
Dispensing Solder Paste
The unit is easy enough to plug in and turn on, and features a menu system driven by two encoders. The left encoder selects the menu option, while the right actually modifies it. When you press the trigger button, settings are saved to the profile you’re working with. When either is pushed in (at any time) the left pushes the piston forward, while the right pulls it back.
To insert solder paste, a coupler is included that lets you push it out of your old tube into the new tube quite elegantly. From there, the machine’s piston can push it out blob-by-blob. This is where things got a little hairy, due to:
I had no idea of the scale needed to push out a component’s worth of paste
My roughly year-old paste, stored in a hot garage wasn’t doing me any favors.
Quite a bit of excess initially dripped out after dispensing, and didn’t get the right amount on my pads to begin with. I contacted Dan M. about my predicament.
Long story short: I was dispensing way too much paste, and, according to Dan, depending on the type of paste you’re using, tiny air bubbles can cause a sort of internal spring effect. He gave me a few suggestions on things to try, and after a bit of tinkering, it worked much better. Also, it might seem obvious to many readers, but pressing down on the board before triggering the paste seems to work better than triggering it mid-air and attempting to dip paste onto the pads.
Dan’s support was prompt and excellent, offering me input and settings to try. That being said, I should have perused the documentation on his website more carefully, especially the page about dot dispensing to get a better sense of scale. I eventually made several prototype boards using the dispenser, which turned out much better than my syringe-only attempts.
After a bit of adjustment, oozing improved significantly
In my testing, I still get some paste extrusion after finishing a job using the dot dispensing mode. If/when I continue to tweak things (and/or buy new solder paste) I suspect this will improve. This adjustability is an excellent feature of this device, and up to 5 setups can be saved to allow you to work with different paste setups and/or scenarios.
External Trigger
As mentioned earlier, there’s a 3.5mm jack into which you can plug a foot pedal, or a trigger that slips over the dispenser tube. Both worked as designed, and I primarily tested the pedal. It’s also easy enough to start the device via the button on the main controller, though using the foot pedal felt natural and helpful once I started using it.
Vacuum Pickup
In addition to outputting solder paste, this device is also capable of picking up components and small ICs using vacuum. As there’s no air compressor involved, the way it does this is by pushing the piston into position, then pulling back to create a vacuum when triggered. I tested this with a few addressable LEDs, and even the Ooberlights circuit board seen above, and it works well.
The fact that it doesn’t need an air compressor is probably the #1 feature that will draw people to this device. The tradeoff here is that the driving stepper motor is on top of the dispensing syringe, which means that the center of mass is well offset from its geometric center. This wasn’t a problem for the limited assembly work that I’ve done with it so far, and I am thrilled to have this as a part of my workbench for prototyping. At the same time, this would likely be problematic if put into constant use over a full production shift.
A fascinating possibility for this device is that it seems to be just begging for people to use it in an automated manner per its external trigger capability. Dan has a guide to setting it up on a 3D printer here, but who knows what other people will (and have) come up with? Notably, the device can dispense other types of paste, opening up possibilities further.
The Verdict
This dispenser is well built and well supported, and it fills the niche between “what am I doing with this squeezy syringe thing” and full offshore production. There’s also the exciting possibility of repurposing a 3D-printer or other robotics assembly to work with this device. If you fall in the category of avid SMD prototyper, then in my humble opinion, it’s absolutely worthy of consideration!
Disclosure
Dan M provided the product at a discounted rate to me for this review. I’ve tried to be fair, open and honest in my appraisal of it, but if you’d like a second opinion (or forty-second opinions), you can check out the device’s customer reviews.
If you are selling electronics kits and are hand picking and bagging components you’ll know it can be a time consuming affair. Add to that the fact that each of your kit needs some wires cut to length and it can all get quite frustrating! This automatic wire cutter takes the pain out of adding custom length wires to your product.
Accommodating wires between 1mm and 2.5mm (around 14-30 AWG) this unit can throughput wire at up to 9.2 metres per minute. Using a simple encoder with integral button and an LCD screen you can select between working in imperial or metric measurements. To create a job you simply set the desired length of wire and set the number of cut pieces you require.
When not in use the unit is smartly contained in a robust industrial case easy to store under the workbench until next called into duty. It’s quite hypnotic to watch the unit when performing the cuts, check out the video below to see it in action!
The GUI looks very well-designed and easy to navigate. The HASP has been designed to work with Home-Assistant.io or openHAB, but because it uses MQTT it can easily work with just about any existing home automation solution. With the help of websites like IFTTT, it could be leveraged to control devices that are part of your Google Home ecosystem, for example.
The designers are quick to point out that this is not a drop-in solution; you will have to do some legwork and setup to integrate it into existing systems. This is the controller for the hacker, not the consumer. Despite this, it has the polished look of a consumer product, which is a great selling point.
I’m very impressed with their excellent documentation. It covers basic set-up and integration with Home-Assistant, as well as pointers for how to integrate with other systems. I’m pretty confident that any hacker who has worked with MQTT before will have no problem. As an open-source project, you can also dig into the source code to modify it however you wish. I’m sure that many end users will want to make changes to the GUI to include new features, or change the colour scheme, etc. The code is written as an Arduino sketch for the ESP8266, and it is well-commented and easy to read.
Overall, this looks like an excellent solution, and one I am strongly considering using one in my own apartment! Kudos to Derusha Digital Designs for such a slick and clean design.
If you need an MQTT debugging tool, I’d like to give a shoutout to MQTTCute, an excellent tool designed by my friend and Hackaday contributor Maya Posch. I’ve used it many times for MQTT projects and it’s a great tool for quickly subscribing and publishing to MQTT topics.
A developer by the name of Brian Kane has made millions of people feel slightly unsettled by hooking up Amazon’s Alexa into an animatronic singing fish called Billy The Bass. No details as to how this was actually done are provided with the video but you can see some kind of development board in the lower left part of the frame indicating this is probably a legit hack as opposed to just syncing Alexa’s voice to the fish movements manually. The question is, does this simply process audio in real time for lip syncing, or is it precalculated?
Precalculated methods have been used in the past in the form of text-to-speech readers. But this is using the voice of Alexa and it’s more difficult to figure out how a precalculating method would work. Modern microcontrollers are powerful enough to analyze audio on the fly, and that may be what’s going on here. You just need some type of WiFi dev board and an Amazon Dot for input, using it the microcontroller to flap the jaw as necessary.
A more refined version might make the Billy Bass its own Alexa device and for that you have to go through the Alexa Skill Set. It is a set of APIs providing access to a whole host of things ranging from playing music to setting an alarm. You can also write your own ‘skill’ which is how the interface with a microcontroller is built. Communication with Alexa is done over HTTP requests so you could probably use any development board with a WiFi chip on it for this type of project.
Amazon Echo
One of the main attractions of the Amazon Echo is the seven microphones it has mounted on its rim. This lets it pick up sound from any direction even if there is music playing. There have been some attempts at a voice based home automation service for the Raspberry Pi, Jasper is one example. Whatever microphone you hook up to a Pi still probably won’t be nearly as good as the Echo. Picking up normal speaking level voice from across the room is tricky and the Echo seems to have cracked it. For clarification, the Echo is the physical device containing the microphones and speakers. The echo streams your speech to a server where the web service ‘Alexa’ analyzes it and can respond and perform tasks etc.
While the Echo and Alexa are still in the early stages of the whole IoT and home automation scene and the whole thing is riddled with Amazon specific terminology like ‘skills’ and ‘lambda functions’, it is a step in the right direction. By making it easier to hook up a microcontroller to these types of services, it will hopefully be fertile grounds for new types of projects we’ve not seen before.
Hopefully you all are going to be taking some time off during this winter season for a little rest and fun time. I like to spend the holidays tinkering around with new gadgets and ideas. Here are some products I’m really excited about this holiday season.
The Whistled is easy to set up and attach to an LED light strip. Set up some lighting around your room, your festive tree, holiday decor table, or anywhere else you want a splash of light, and control them by whistling! Make clapping a thing of informercials past.
Sparki is the adorable (and affordable!) robot that comes ready to plug in and use with a variety of prewritten projects as well as the ability to code your own. Make Sparki into a mini robot waiter to deliver your egg nog, friendly ribbon holding assistant, or general Arduino growth project.
Maybe you are a little more like me, and spend a lot of your free time gaming (I have over 25 consoles. I might be an addict.) Grab one of these adapter kits to make classic controllers into USB devices to use with emulators. Console gaming versus PC gaming? Why not both? Play on both teams to save Princess Zelda in “Link to the Past”, race in some classic “Mario Kart 64”, or try to get past the first two levels of “Lion King” all from the comfort of your desktop.
Whatever you decide to do this month and leading into the new year, be safe and have fun. The holiday season is stressful in a number of ways, so be sure to take a breather and do something you love. Hobbies help hecticness!
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