Electronics | William Hare's Portfolio

Nov

K40-SmoothieLaser Breakout Board

I have a cheap Ebay China 40W CO2 laser. Commonly known as the K40. The software it comes with is, “OK”. But I want to do more with it. I read online that there are some RAMPS 1.4 upgrades with Marlin firmware. But I HATE compiling and flashing the Mega 2560. It is a real PIA! Then I came upon SmoothieBoard. Its a 32Bit control board for lasers, 3D printers and CNC. And it you need to make a change to the settings, you just enter edit a config file on an SD card and reboot…. NO RECOMPILE AND RE-FLASHING!!

I need to connect the SmoothieBoard to my laser, replacing the OEM control board. But the laser has a 12pin flat ribbon cable (FFC). So I made a breakout board! The board accepts the machine FFC and make its usable pins for the SmoothieBoard.

I went with the MKS Sbase Smoothie compatible board. It was a lot less money then the original Smoothieboard.

There is another board out there called the Middle Man Board. It does the same thing. I removed some of the outputs that were not needed, and made it much simpler.

Here are the Eagle Cad files for the board.

SmoothieLaser_breakout.rar

BOM:

1 PCB
1 FFC 12pin Female (PN A100331-ND Digikey.com)
1 4pin Terminal Bock (PN 277-1806-ND Dgikey.com
2 2Pin jumper header

Might want to pick up some JST connectors if you are going to use a knockoff Smoothieboard.

I will be selling board in my store if anyone needs one.

Nov

OpenFeeder – Open source SMD part feeder for OpenPNP

I owned some great Pick and Place equipment about 15+ years ago. My contract ran out for SMD manufacturing, so I sold all my machine. Now I have need for SMD PNP again. So I looked toward some opensource alternatives to the commercial machines. I can across OpsnPNP.org. The software so far seems great. But it is still in the BETA stages.

I gathered up a part list of thing I will need. Like motors, drivers, wire, t-slot…etc. I did some more research and started coming up with a design for my machine. But it seemed like there was not a great SMD tape feeder. Thus the OpenFeeder was born!

I wanted a feeder that could do lots of things, expandable and adaptable.

Here are some features:

-Simply made form .250″ acrylic sheet on a laser cutter (3d printable too).

-Easily accessed and cheap components for the drive system.

-Easily changed over to different size tapes, 8mm 10mm 12mm etc.

-Adjustable tape height, from paper resistor tape to tape with electrolytic caps.

-Designed to work with 20mm T-slot.

-“Almost” infinite feeding distance. Able to feed tape form .05mm at a time to 5mm at a time.

-Very smooth feeding, even at a very high speed.

-Most likely over engineered! 🙂

It is still in the testing stages, I will be releasing the files soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

May

DIY Hot Knife Gun

I needed a hot knife to cut some polypro webbing. Looked on Ebay, couldn’t find anything for a good price. The target was VERY LOW!!

SO, yep … I made my own!

I went to Harbor Freight and grabbed a 200W soldering gun, for about $13.

I had some 1/8″ brass rod laying around. Where the soldering tip would go, I used a 1/8″ drill to drill out the contacts. So the brass rod would fit inside them. The OEM tip was much smaller then 1/8″.

Bent the brass rod into a basic U shape, to get the width I wanted for the cut.

Then bent the legs back to match the opening of the soldering gun.

Here was the tricky part! I smashed it flat on a vise with a hammer. But it didn’t work. The brass fell apart. So I made a new one. This time I put the cutter in the gun, pulled the trigger, heated up the brass. Then smashed it flat. IT WORKED!

This thing works GREAT!! I cut on a piece of glass to keep from melting the table.

Mar

Modded Chinese 50″ LED Light Bar

A very good friend of mine came to me with an idea. He wanted a 50″ LED light bar for his Jeep, but he wanted it 100% UNIQUE!!!

Challenge accepted!

He was used to running diesel trucks with 3 amber marker lights above the cab. And that’s what he wanted this light bar to do.

I took apart the Chinese 50″ light bar, and came up with a design for a “add-on piggy-back” board. This board would have the new amber LEDs and the drivers for them. The design was such that I needed to remove a few of the OEM LEDs to make room for my new board. It was also designed so that the new amber LEDs would line up with the OEM lens. Here is the gang board from a board house I use. There are 8 boards on this one PCB.

Bench test of the board design with the light bar optics. I used 5050 amber LEDs.

This is one of the 3 boards installed into the light bar. The little yellow things are the OEM LEDs. I took 2 of them out in this section. I just still 12VDC from the + rail.

This is all three add-on boards installed.

Another view.

This is how it looks installed on the jeep, all sealed up (MUCH better then the OEM Chinese had done)

He LOVED IT!!

Jan

Birth of a 3D printer – Part2

This is the CPU mounted on the bottom of the printer.

The hot bed is installed. The hot bed keeps the parts inplace while printing.

Mocking up the towers before making the wooden frame.

ALMOST DONE!!

First running of the firmware for the CPU.

I had to modify the switches to work with my printed parts.

Its all coming along nicely!!

Dec

3D Printed Case For Quadcopter Flight Board

On www.thingiverse.com I found a protective case for the flight board I used for my quadcopter. It’s the MultiWii PRO board from HobbyKing. So I printed off a copy … and away we go!

The GPS tower was not part of the case, it was a different “thing”. But they work well together. I had to mod the files a little to use some aluminum rod to hold up the GPS pod.

Nov

Birth of a 3D printer – Part 1

I have been looking into DIY 3d printing for some time now. I have even went as far as to gather a few parts here and there over the past year. But now I have a real need for one, so I have decided to pull the trigger and get it done!

Originally I was looking into making a ORD BOT style of printer. The cost of the wheel bearings and the MakerSlide t-slot materials was going to cost to much. That’s why I have been putting off the project for this long.

In mid 2012 the Rostock Delta Printer was developed. http://reprap.org/wiki/Rostock The printer featured high speed printing and a very low part count for building it, lower then ORD BOT. Thus I decided to make the Rostock instead.

To save on the overall cost, I sourced all the parts over the internet, rather then buying a complete kit. The only downside to this is that all the part will show up over a 2 week period, and not all at once. I will show case the build in parts, starting with the parts I have on hand.

I ordered the main parts kit on EBay.
I have already installed the metric screws and one of the motors.

I went with the 8MM sliding bearings, but instead of using precision rod, I used 5/16″ cold rolled rod.
The kit came with a printed Nylon bearing. But it seemed to bind up when it was sliding.

The yoke ends need a rod to connect the 2 together. Some people use wooden dowels, or fiberglass rods from the RC store. I used some 1/4″ aluminum rod I had laying around. It was to big to fit in the yoke, so I had to turn down each end of the rod to fit it on to the yokes.

After gluing the rods to the yokes, I needed a way to keep ALL the lengths the same while it was drying. I layed out some nails on a board, to keep them inline.

Since I am useing printed parts, the holes are a little off form the true size. I dont have metric drill bits, so i can up with a quick fix. Take the metric screw i am going to use, chuck it up in my drill. Put a washer on it, and drill it into the hole. Let the threads do the cutting. It worked great!

After looking at the rods, having the plane aluminum look, and pure board-um, I thought it wold be cool to buff them to make them shine. This should also help reduce wind resistance. LOL

I should have done this BEFORE gluing the yoke ends on -__-

The Rostock is belt driven. I needed a idler pulley for the take up of the belt. I made one from a bearing and a fender washer. I chucked it up in my lathe, and turned down the face of the washer to create the step for the bearing to move.

Here is the step in the washer.

The electronics kit I ordered did not come with ANY instructions, not even on their site :/
So in an effort to figure it out myself, I toasted the 5v regulator on the Arduino 2560 board, you know… the board that controls the entire printer -__-
I had to order a new one form Digikey, but I did learn how to look up the limit switches.

Sep

Bluetooth Module Breakout Board

This is just a simple breakout board for the RN-42 Bluetooth Module. I designed it with Eagle CAD, and made it on my CNC PCB machine.

Jun

DIY LED Light Bar REV.#2

After finishing my original light bar project here. I decided that it would be much brighter, not that its not bright….just can be brighter. One of the main goals of the original light bar was VERY low amp draw. I got that with only 3Amp from the entire bar! So the goal of the next bar will be VERY bright, and to hell with the amps!!

So enter the LED Light Bar REV.#2 🙂

The new LEDs are over 400lm each!!!

The original LEDs from the first one are about 90-100lm.