This is a great project that reuses an LED display found on buses in the 1990s. Translated from the original:
I recently recovered a display bus brand DATA Display (1992, at the sight of datecode components). The display consists of two parts:
Part of a top, consisting of two green segments 12 of dies (7 × 5 each), or a large array of (2 * (12 * 5)) * 7 pixels.
The bottom part, a bit the same, but with red pixels
The bottom part is interesting because it seems to contain a RAM, with external connection (and a NiMH battery to retain RAM) can be upload messages to display. By cons, manufacturers do not have the transmission protocol. It will be a bit boring to reverse-engeenirer.
The top part, it is almost identical. Except that it contains a ROM containing the characters ASCII (at least, their representation in matrix 5 × 7) to display the text. It also has a special connection (RS232, but not too much). It’s going to be boring to do. But I decided to disassemble the upper display and watch how it worked.
How cool would it be take a vintage 1940′s or 1950′s wooden radio and rebuild it as a modern Internet Radio? That’s the premise I had in mind when I started out on my first Raspberry Pi project.
Google is expanding its Google Offers service, which reminds users via a mobile app or email whenever there’s a limited-time deal at a nearby business, so that users can now see, save and share promotions from within their Google+ stream.
Only a select number of brands and companies will be able to share Google Offers through their respective Google+ accounts to begin with. NOOK, Hello Kitty, Art.com and Adafruit Industries have already started sharing exclusive deals through the service, although there could be more waiting in the wings.
The Adafruit forums are a great place to get help with your projects– and we just added a wearables board! Folks are building so many FLORA projects that we decided customers needed a special place to post (and ask questions about) wearables projects and techniques! Post your queries about any of the tutorials in our FLORA section on the Adafruit Learning System, and build the wearable electronics project of your dreams! Then post pictures of it. See you in the forums!
Recon Jet is an activity specific heads-up display with a truly open platform that delivers information instantly, effortlessly and unobtrusively direct to the user’s eye via a microcomputer and high-resolution widescreen display. Jet has a dual core processor, dedicated graphics, Wi-Fi, ANT+, Bluetooth, GPS, HD camera, and a comprehensive suite of sensors. All of this is mounted on a precision-engineered, fashionable pair of sunglasses on par with the best in the world.
In honor of the launch of Star Trek Into Darkness, PCMag 3D printed a copy of the U.S.S. Enterprise on The Cube … like you do!
To boldly go where no 3D printer has gone before. Yes, that’s the pun that came to mind when we decided to make a 3D print of the U.S.S. Enterprise in honor of the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness. Much like with John Harrison, the villain in the movie, we weren’t sure what we were getting ourselves into….
Printing out the U.S.S. Enterprise proved to be an interesting challenge. Because the surface upon which objects are printed on the Cube is relatively small, we had to print out the ship in pieces that would have to be glued together at the end, rather than a single piece. And it was a little difficult to glue pieces together with the super-glue that we had bought. But in the end, we managed to make it happen.
But, really, you have to see it to believe it. Check out our time-lapse photography video of the Cube as it prints the U.S.S. Enterprise. And have a gander at our other time-lapse video where we print out a Weighted Companion Cube from Portal.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
We’re proud to announce that some 3D-printed pieces from the MakerBot Design Team have been chosen for a special collection at the MoMA Design Store called Destination: NYC — Made in the USA. For those who don’t know, MoMA is the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. The organization has been shining a light on local designers in cities around the world in its Destination: Design series.
Sometimes pieces in the series become top selling items at MoMA Design Stores. At MakerBot, we hope the innovative artists and designers who see our items will be inspired to use 3D printing in their own work. Here’s the set of items all together, including a customized MakerBot Mix Tape and MakerBot Watch designed just for MoMA, along with a bunch of pieces reflecting iconic places and objects in NYC.
Get your hands on these now! The whole Destination: NYC series, including pieces from other amazing local designers, is available from now through August only at MoMA Store locations in New York and Tokyo, as well as online at MoMAstore.org, MoMAonlinestore.co.kr, and MoMAstore.jp.
The Smithsonian has been using 3D printing and 3D scanning for some time now. What can you do to bring some of the Smithsonian’s 137 million objects to life? The Smithsonian decided to use laser arm scanners to preserve its collection.
Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo, two researchers work in the Smithsonian’s 3D Digitization Program Office, lead the project. They work with laser scanners to create high resolution, three-dimensional digital models of these objects.
“The main purpose of 3D scanning an exhibit like this is to have an archive of what an exhibit of this era might have looked,” Metallo says. “This is a documentation for folks in the future to know what a museum experience here was like.”
Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo are working full time to document, in very high three-dimensional detail, these priceless and important collections for future generation. They dream of digitizing all 137 million of the objects in the Smithsonian’s collections. At the moment only 2% of the objects are displayed in its museums. And these 3D digital models could be printed and sent to local museums, or viewed digitally on a computer screen anywhere in the world.
“There’s one specimen that’s on display two stories up in the air,” Metallo says. “Now, instead of a researcher having to get up on a scissor lift to look at it, we can just email him the digital model.”
Watch the video below how the team captured a digital copy of the Philadelphia gunboat, America’s oldest fighting craft.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
A proper JTAG/SWD HW debugger can make debugging more of a pleasure and less of a pain. It allows you to program your devices at the click of a button, read or write memory addresses or registers on a live system, temporarily halt program execution at a given location or condition, and much more. Essentially, it’s a direct window into what’s going on inside your MCU at any given moment, giving you a level of access and control that’s not easy to replicate with other debugging methods.
Of the dozens (and dozens!) of debuggers out there (we have literally drawers full of them!), we chose the J-Link for a number of reasons:
It’s USB based and uses a high-speed MCU internally, not an FTDI convertor like most low cost debugger. More debugging, less waiting!
It support both JTAG (ARM7/9/11) and SWD (ARM Cortex), and has you covered for any core: ARM7/9/11, Cortex-A5/A8/A9, Cortex-M0/M0+/M1/M3/M4, Cortex-R4
It’s toolchain, IDE and vendor neutral, so you only need to buy one tool for all of your ARM needs and be done with it forever:
It includes flash-programming algorithms for most MCUs, and Segger is very pro-active about updating their drivers to support the newest chipsets.
It just works, and keeps on working, and it’ll be there for you in several years time.
The J-Link is fast. Stepping through breakpoints and reading memory addresses is quick, as is programming the flash memory on the chips. It’s real strength, though, is that it’s so vendor and tool neutral. Most chip vendors today provde low cost (or free) tools, but they also lock you into their chips and force you to accept the choice they’ve made for you. Segger’s J-Link is a nice change in that respect, since you can be reasonably certain it will work with any chip, in any major toolchain, and you’re free to change camp (or OS or IDE) without having to buy a new debugger every time.
Why Would I Want This?
You can do a lot of basic debugging with just printf and an LED, and you may not need a HW debugger to get started, but once you start to working on more complicated projects, you hit a debugging wall pretty quickly.
Your chip might be ending up in the HardFault handler, for example, but without a debugger it can be very hard to trace back exactly what is causing the problems. A debugger allows you to set ‘breakpoints’ in your code, where execution will temporarily stop, and you can check the value of memory or peripherals at that point in time, and then ‘single-step’ through your code line by line, executing your program until you find the place that causes your fault. There’s a lot more to debugging than simple breakpoints, but you can often solve in a few minutes with breakpoints what would take much longer with printf and instrusive blocking mechanisms you insert into your code without a debugger.
Whether you’re using GDB Server (GNU Tools) or an IDE and a commercial toolchain, it’s also just a big convenience, since the J-Link can program the flash for you at the click of a button, reset the device, start execution, and then ‘halt’ on main(). You can do all these steps yourself — programming the device via free tools over UART or via a USB bootloader, etc. — but when you need to do that 40-50 times a day, it can get old quick, and 15 seconds saved make a huge difference when debugging. You can program a small MCU and break on main in 2-3 seconds with a J-Link, which makes the tools more or less invisible, which is a good thing when you have other problems to worry about.
What is the J-Link EDU?
The J-Link usually sells for a few hundred dollars up to four figures, but Segger makes a special, low-cost ‘EDU’ version of ther J-Link available. It’s feature complete (including GDB Server support, unlimited flash breakpoints, etc.) and the same debugger you’d buy for professional use, but it has the following limitations (source: http://www.segger.com/j-link-edu.html):
You may use the J-Link EDU for non profit educational purposes only! Non-profit educational purposes means that you may not use the J-Link EDU and its J-Link software
direct or indirect in or for a profit organization or business purposes or other undertaking intended for profit
direct or indirect in any other commercial environment (e.g. office)
to develop, debug, program or manufacturer a commercial product (or parts thereof)
to use it to either earn money or reasonably anticipate the receipt of monetary gain from it.
What does this mean? Basically, if you’re making money (or plan to make money) off your project, you’ll need to order the full commercial version, or find a different debugger that suits your needs and budget better. But if you’re working on personal, non-commercial projects, such as publishing some open source designs you’re not selling yourself, you’re good. You don’t need to be a student, and you can even be a paid engineer during the week, using this on the weekend for personal non-commercial projects. As long are your intentions are non-commercial, the J-Link EDU is an excellent choice!
NEW PRODUCT – Fabric Ribbon 4-Channel Wire – 1 yard – This lightweight, flexible fabric ribbon channel contains four individual wires, perfect for wiring up wearables where flexibility is key. This ribbon has 4 x 28AWG stranded-core wires, easy to solder but also quite flexible. There’s no risk of accidental shorts since each wire is sleeved, and you can also pass a fair bit of current.
This ribbon is ideal for when you’d like to make soldered connections, a rugged sewable data bus or pass higher current than is possible with stainless thread. This ribbon can handle 250mA continuous load & spikes of 1A.
Features:
Ultra-low resistance: ~0.25 Ω / m
4 Conductor connections
Power and data applications
Sewable – we suggest straight-stitching on the edges
Washable and dryable
Foldable onto itself without shorting
100% Nylon: Black color with two red & white pinstripes
Check out this fascinating installation piece (original text in Spanish, so forgive my Google translation here). Say…I recognize that “golden age” desktop 3D printer!
BIOS collaboration Ex Machina with Jesus Gilder, Bautista and Billy Yair Dept. flowers. Mechatronics Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the UNAM and Fernando Lomeli Digital Lab Cultural Center Tlatelolco, UNAM.
The artificial nature of the seed – seed corn corn plastic – therefore, poses a paradox of no easy solution for the design of the artificial and the natural copy. In the seed represent both the natural and the artificial, the original and the derivative, and she staged the tensions inherent in these distinctions. The seed sown our piece is not “really” a corn seed, but has its origin (material) in it.
The corn becomes mythical origin of several villages just at that moment it ceases to be completely natural, moving to also be a cultural entity, a device eminently defining human activities such as agriculture. Somewhere between the natural and the artificial, the domestic maize both the farmer and to the cornfield. But agriculture staging the polymer Milpa is also artificial in a second sense, mechanized agriculture. The piece itself is a mechanism biotechnology.
In its center, a robot tractor spirals, artificial seed sowing. The sterile seeds gradually fill the space spiral, turning the earth into grow-in economic and cultural artifact, but in a grow sterile plant that never result in any. So is staged the complex relationship between the natural and the artificial, the origin and originated.
Seeds that are printed are polylactic acid (PLA) thermoplastic biopolymer made from corn. Due to its biodegradability and biocompatibility barrier properties, it has found numerous applications biopolymer. While proponents argue that it is compostable, actually breaks down in less than 90 days, carbon dioxide and water, but in a controlled environment, as used by large waste processing plants. In a traditional landfill, there is no evidence to disintegrate faster or more completely than PET or any other form of plastic. Much of the corn used to produce PLA is genetically modified.
The piece seeks to highlight one of the dimensions of the phenomenon biotechnology: its economic dimension, making tangible the intangible aspect of biotechnology. The movement creation / culture is a spiral movement (and, therefore, without beginning, ie without origin) literally dictated by commercial behavior of commercial products of biotechnology – and, in strict sense, by perception market value of these. Instead the farmer driving the tractor, machinery moving it obeys the designs of the market. Without being your engine literally, the commercial aspects of biotechnology guide the tractor, but do not make a direct, but mediated through sound, which makes it tangible, but transitory. Using wireless communication technology, data exchange on the market communicate with the tractor in the field and affect processing and printer engine.
Traditionally, art, nature used to play the role of the original model, which the art piece, epitome of artificial entity, was the copy. Giorgio Vasari art expresses this view as follows: “The Art owes its origin to Nature herself … this beautiful creation, the world, gave us the model, while the divine intelligence was the original master, which created us as beings superior to other animals, more like God himself – if I dare say. “God himself is the first teacher and the first artist, his creature’s primal nature. In the polymer Milpa , by contrast, the nature that serves as a model for the work is not the natural naturans but domesticated nature in a symbiotic relationship with technology. The corn polymer Milpa like corn cornfields of all the country, not the corn “original”, not a corn state of “pure nature”. Is the current corn, field corn technologized, corn biotechnology.
Text: Ex Machina BIOS
Check out this post from Pete Prodoehl’s RasterWeb that explores some of the food safety concerns for 3D printing + food. This is an area that I have been exploring extensively — and will be sharing some great techniques in the Adafruit Learning System in the near future — so I was happy to see other people covering this.
As a secret preview, I’ll let you know now that I am finding that rolling up your sleeves and learning mold making techniques from those who work in design kitchens is the best place to start to eliminate some of the difficult-to-guarrantee questions about using your 3D printer for making food.
You loved Printing Violations, and you tolerated Printing Violations (Part II), so we’re back again with another episode of Printing Violations, this time looking more closely at the health issues surrounding 3D printed cookie cutters.
Licensing issues are one thing, but there is a safety concern with 3D printed cookie cutters. Here’s a look at some of the issues. (All assume you are using a home 3D printer like a MakerBot, RepRap, Printrbot, etc.)
Is ABS or PLA plastic filament food-safe?
The answers range from “probably not” to “maybe” in most cases. If you use natural filament it will be free of coloring agents, which is a step in the right direction, but unless you are specifically buying “food-safe filament” don’t expect it to be food-safe. (Keep in mind that “food-safe” is something that will be determined by local health departments, and will vary depending on where you live.)
Then there’s the printer itself, and the environment it runs in. My printer lives in a basement where I do other crazy things like run a drill press, spray glue and paint, and generally make a mess. Would you want your cookie cutter manufactured in such an environment? What has the filament come into contact with before it goes into the machine, and what else has been introduced into the extruder as far as foreign materials? If you’ve ever read up on what it takes to make food in your home and sell it commercially, you’ll have some idea of the restrictions involved. (Wait, we aren’t selling food, right? We’ll get to that, be patient!)
Can 3D printed items be treated to be safe(er?)
If you’ve ever looked at a 3D printed object, you may notice the ridges. Since it’s built up layer upon layer, there are spaces into which food could get stuck. Of course you can try to clean your 3D printed cookie cutter, but don’t put it in the dishwasher! For PLA prints, the heat will either melt it, or deform it, or do some other nasty thing to it. ABS may be better, but you will still need to heat it enough to sterilize it, and hope you can get the crevices clean. It’s been suggested that acetone vapor finishing might be helpful. Helpful enough? Not sure.
Of course you could use your printer to make a mold and then make a food-safe cutter out of another material, but that’s not really a 3D printed cookie cutter. You could also try to coat your printed piece with a food-safe coating, but that’s a lot more work.
So why does all this matter? Because right now, there are people printing cookie cutters and selling them, and there are also people 3D printing cookie cutters, making cookies with them, and selling the cookies.
Printable catalog (PDF)
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro”? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.
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