Engineer In Wonderland

Cornell University has demonstrated a way to move an insect-like robot using mini-explosions. It has four hollow disc-like feet with elastomer membranes across the open end, like shallow inverted drums. Methane and oxygen are plumbed into the feet from remote reservoirs, and these gasses are ignited with electrical sparks, causing the membranes to deform – more or less depending on ...

The recent compulsory update to RS’ DesignSpark Mechanical version 6, does not look like version 5 and some features have been moved or deleted. Don’t get me wrong here: I a satisfied user of DSM. It is a great tool, whose existing function seems to have been somewhat compromised while adding some powerful new features. Bearing in mind I don’t ...

apr24 Finally tried out the modified 1610Pro cnc, and it works delightfully mar24 Hard won fact about linear rails and V-slot aluminium extrusions mar24 Progress on the 1610Pro CNC upgrade (right) ???23 An isolated PWM-to-voltage converter for grbl-on-Arduino and 0-5V spindle motors aug23 My first CNC’ed object – it was a successful weekend aug23 That long-awaited Raspbrerry Pi Pico CNC ...

Finally, after a lot of false turns, I have both designed and CNC-ed an object. It is a 18x1mm counter-bored 16mm hole for a flanged bearing, in a pleasantly-shaped piece of 4mm acrylic. After seven minutes of cutting, including the shaped perimeter, it came out just right, with the bearing a firm push fit (until I played with it too ...

Hyundai uses 800V batteries in some of its electric vehicles, but not all road-side chargers have an 800V option, so some sort of 400V to 800V inverter is required in the vehicle. And for fast charging, that has to handle a heck of a lot of current – maybe 200A. Rather than have a separate box, and noting that vehicle ...

After much pondering this weekend, I discovered something abouth 3d printing that I have not seen written about before – cylindrical bores tapering subtly at the lower end. I had heard of ‘elephant’s foot’ – 3d prints squashing out at the bottom for various reasons, including the heatbed being set too high – but this tends to be associated with ...

Last weekend, I spent many hours banging my head against software, trying to get Universal G-code sender to run with Mint Linux. It now works, so if you are having similar issues, what follows might help. BTW, UGS comes from here – thank you to all the people who have contributed to this amazing project. For running it, scroll down. ...

PicoCNC, the Raspbrerry Pi Pico based CNC control board, has finally emerged from development by Phil Barrett of Brookwood Design, which has a web store on Tindie. First mooted by publicly by him in April 2021, all went quiet in the grblHAL GitHub discussion that August, until now, two years later. And the result looks very nice (and they seem ...

I was looking at the electronics behind the little Petoi dog robot (right), and noticed a chip I was not aware of before, NXP’s PCA9685. On a deeper delve, I noticed Adafruit also uses it for creating the classic 1.0 – 2.0ms pulses that tell hobby servos where to position. It has an I2C input, and can create up to ...

That LK-99 room-temperature superconductor from Korea University sounds interesting. But I type that wearily as, although I want ti to be true, there have been too many false starts to get too excited. Fingers crossed that the researchers have found one at last. UPDATE: It wasn’t true – it isn’t a room-temperature superconductor (link to Nature article – which is an ...