A couple of months ago I picked up cheap WiFi-controlled LED bulbs (one among dozens of very similar devices), after seeing them at a friend’s place.  This turned out to be an excuse to play with the ESP8266, which has inspired several hacks.

I was overall very happy with these bulbs: decent Android and iOS apps and, compared to fancier solutions (e.g., Philips Hue or Belkin WeMo), they do not require any proprietary base stations, and you can’t beat the price!  However, switching off the lights before falling asleep involved hunting for the phone, opening the app, and waiting for it to scan the network; not an ideal user experience.  I was actually missing our old X10 alarm clock controller (remember those?), so I decided to make one from scratch, because… why not?

Although the X10 Powerhouse controller’s faux-wood styling and 7-segment LED had a certain… charm, I decided to go more modern and use a touchscreen.  I also designed a 3D printed enclosure with simple geometric shapes and used it as a further excuse to play with 3D print finishing techniques.  Here is the final result:

And here it is in action:

If this seems interesting, read on for details.  The source code for everything is available on GitHub. Edit: You can also check the Hackaday.io project page for occasional updates.

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I’m often asked “what is a 3D printer good for, isn’t it just a novelty”?  So here are some examples of household hacks, in no particular order.  I’ve chosen examples that satisfy two criteria.  First, it didn’t take me more than an hour to whip up the CAD model (and, in many cases, it took just 10-15 minutes), so it qualifies as a “quick hack”.  Second, it’s of general household use, so mechanical assemblies, 3D printer parts, etc, were left out.  Some of these are published on Thingiverse (linked from the post headings).

Eyeglass frame fix

This is one of my favorites.  It was one of the quickest to make, but it was used a lot.  My mother has her favorite eyeglasses and is loath to change them.  However, over time, the arm loosened and they would constantly slide down her nose. Tightening the screws didn’t do anything anymore. So, I quickly designed a clip that slides over the frame, and has a tapered nub to apply pressure to the arm (printed in ABS, so it has some flexibility).  Guess you could call it an “eyeglass arm pretensioner attachment”.  She’s been using them for years, and asked for a pack, in case she looses one (printing a set of six takes about 15 minutes; the example in the photo is an early print in black, instead of brown).

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Some time ago I backed the W-Ear kit on Kickstarter.  Even though they also offer the option of a fully assembled, rechargeable version, I opted for the through-hole kit, which went for much less and also shipped much earlier.  I was originally planning to just 3D print an enclosure, instead of using an Altoids tin.  However, on a whim, I decided to take this a bit further, because… why not?

TL;DR: I went from the PCB on the left, to the device on the right, without ever leaving home. Design files are available here (caveat: I’m not an EE, but I sometimes play one on the web! :).

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With the explosive growth of 3D printing, and rapid manufacturing at the consumer level in general, physical objects can be designed and manipulated in a computer. However, like other forms of digital content (e.g., documents, software, music), this is only part of the story: digital representation also enables online sharing and collaboration (as Chris Anderson has pointed out). A prime example of the potential of all these technologies combined with online sharing and collaboration is the initial design of consumer-grade 3D printers themselves which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was what many early adopters of the technology used it for.  Considering that the rest of us is where those early adopters were five or more years ago, the future should be interesting.

Despite hearing about 3D printing daily, very few studies have looked at the digital content of physical things, and the processes that generate it. I collected data some time ago, and started off with this visualization, which I wrote about before. A further initial analysis of the data has some interesting stories to tell.

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Some time last January I decided to back the PortaPi on KickStarter. This is a mini arcade cabinet, that runs several emulators, via the RetroPie project, on a Raspberry Pi. The kit arrived on time, and sometime in May I got around to assembling it.  Here’s how it looks:

The kit is great out of the box but, of course, I had to add some of my own tweaks.   Read the rest of this entry »

Some time ago I bought a few Foscam MJPEG cameras and installed them in our apartment, originally for baby monitoring, and I wanted to set up a proper security surveillance system.  I already have a Netgear ReadyNAS box, so I thought this should be easy.  However, I soon found out that video surveillance solutions from major NAS vendors (e.g., Netgear, QNap, Synology) require per-camera licenses, in the range of $50-60/camera.  That would be over $200 to enable functionality already present in the device!  Although this is already an order of magnitude cheaper than hardware from traditional NVR (network video recorder) vendors, it still felt unreasonably high. Oh, and Foscam cameras still aren’t supported by ReadyNAS Surveillance.  There used to be a KMotion port for ReadyNAS, but it disappeared around the time Netgear’s official solution came out on the market.  Since ReadyNAS is almost Debian (with customizations), I gave installing KMotion from source a shot, but after an afternoon fiddling with custom configurations as well as tweaks for the low-power Atom CPU, I gave up.

Perhaps the NVR industry is ripe for “disruption”, but I wasn’t willing to wait. Last time I did that (for car stereos) was almost three years ago… and I’m still waiting.  Luckily, an NVR is a much simpler build than a custom car stereo (this was enough for me, thank you :).  There are several low-cost hardware options and ZoneMinder is a great open-source surveillance system that was originally built to scratch an itch (the original author’s power tools were stolen from his garage, and he couldn’t find any reasonably-priced commercial surveillance solutions he liked).  Here is what I got after about a day:

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I recently became a happy owner of a Solidoodle 2 3D printer. This has been the start of a beautiful addiction, but more on the hardware hacking aspects in another post.

If you haven’t heard of it before, 3D printing refers to a family of manufacturing methods, originally developed for rapid prototyping, the first of which appeared almost three decades ago. Much like mainframe computers in the 1960s, professional 3D printers cost up to hundred thousands of dollars. Starting with the RepRap project a few years ago, home 3D printers are now becoming available, in the few hundred to a couple of thousand dollar price range.  For now, these are targeted mostly to tinkerers, much closer to an Altair or, at best, an Apple II, than a MacBook. Despite the hype that currently surrounds 3D printing, empowering average users to turn bits into atoms (and vice versa) will likely have profound effects, similar to those witnessed when content (music, news, books, etc) went digital, as Chris Anderson eloquently argues with his usual, captivating dramatic flair. Personally, I’m similarly excited about this as I was about “big data” (for lack of a better term) around 2006 and mobile around 2008, so I’ll take this as a good sign. :)

One of the key challenges, however, is finding things to print!  This is crucial for 3D printing to really take off. Learning CAD software and successfully designing 3D objects takes substantial, time, effort, and skill. Affordable 3D scanners (like the ones from Matterform, CADscan, and Makerbot) are beginning to appear. However, the most common way to find things is via online sharing of designs. Thingiverse is the most popular online community for “thing” sharing. Thingiverse items are freely available (usually under Creative Commons licenses), but there is also commercial potential: companies like Shapeways offer both manufacturing (using industrial 3D printers and manual post-processing) and marketing services for “thing” designs.

I’ve become a huge fan of Thingiverse.  You can check out my own user profile to find things that I’ve designed myself, or things that I’ve virtually “collected” because I thought they were really cool or useful (or both). Thingiverse is run by MakerBot, which manufactures and sells 3D printers, and needs to help people find things to print. It’s a social networking site centered around “thing” designs. Consequently, the main entities are people (users) and things, and links/relationships revolve around people creating things, people liking things, people downloading and making things, people virtually collecting things, and so on. Other than people-thing relationships, links can also represent people following other people (a-la Twitter or Facebook), and things remixing other things (more on this soon). Each thing also has a number of associated files (polygon meshes for 3D printing, vector paths for lasercutting, original CAD files—anything that’s needed to make the thing).

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[This project is more than a year old, but I never got around to posting anything earlier.]

I generally like to make things (I used to say “build” things, but that was misconstrued by some manager/academic types, who apparently have a very different definition of “to build”), whether it’s software, writing, or “hardware”.  I usually talk about the first, but I occasionally do the last (much to the dismay of my wife, who has nonetheless been very patient! :).  I also like to try new things–I probably care more about the process and experimentation, learning what’s possible and how to do it, that the final product (which is not to say that I don’t care about the final product at all, but it get’s boring pretty quickly for me). So, sometime last year I decided to upgrade my car speakers (I also Dynamat-ted all doors, but I didn’t take photos of that adventure; one tip, though:: make sure you sit down properly, because after crouching down on tiptoe for almost an entire day, I needed physiotherapy for my heel tendon :) —now my Subaru’s doors sound like a Mercedes when you shut them). However, the new tweeters were much larger than the factory-installed ones, so I took the opportunity (excuse?) to learn fiberglassing and make new tweeter pods.

Let me set the mood by starting with my outfit: I started with the one on the left, but after plenty of PVC dust, fiberglass dust, and acetone fumes, I upgraded to the one on the right. A proper respirator helps a lot, especially if you’re working indoors. And don’t skip the safety glasses (even if you’re wearing vision glasses, as I found out).  Always take the proper safety precautions.

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