XYZ Printing Unveils Inkjet-Based Filament Printer

XYZ Printing, makers of the popular da Vinci line of 3D printers, have just released one of the holy grails of desktop 3D printing. The da Vinci Color is a full-color, filament based printer. How does this work? A special filament (Color PLA, although this filament is white in color) is extruded through a nozzle like any other 3D printer. Color is then added layer by layer by a system of inkjets in the head of the printer. Yes, it’s a full-color 3D printer, and yes, people have been suggesting this type of setup for years. This is the first time it’s been made real.

The specs for this printer are about what you would expect from any other filament-based printer in 2017. The build volume is 200 x 200 x 150mmm, the print bed has auto-leveling (although strangely doesn’t have a heated bed), and the user interface is a 5-inch color LCD. The da Vinci Color is available for preorder right now for $2,999.

You can check out a few pics of samples printed on the da Vinci Color below:

In terms of brand recognition and XYZ Printing, their DaVinci is a somewhat surprising footnote in the history of desktop 3D printing. XYZ Printing’s da Vinci was one of the first cheap 3D printers with closed firmware, chipped filament, and a slightly terrible user interface. Nevertheless, the da Vinci was cheap and it could be hacked, turning it into a somewhat respectable printer.

As with any advancement in the state of desktop 3D printing, it must be mentioned that this is not. Color printing has been done before by members of the Open Source community. The exact same thing was done years ago with Sharpies, and I know RichRap experimented with markers and dye earlier than this, but I can’t find a reference. Full-color inkjets have been used in the past to create 3D prints, although these are powder-based printers, not filament printers. That doesn’t mean color printers can’t use filament; [Prusa]’s multicolor extruder is shipping soon, the Mosaic Palette splices filament to create multicolor prints (another RichRap invention circa 2011), and [Daren Schwenke]’s Arcus 3D has a mixing hot end that can create any color from CMYKW filament. There are many other solutions to full-color 3D printing that have been invented over the years, let us know your favorites in the comments below.

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, news

Celebs’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses exposed in active Instagram hack

Google is losing allies across the political spectrum

Lenovo’s second Alexa-powered speaker connects to its Tab 4 devices

Dealmaster: Get an FHD UltraSharp monitor for $180 and more with Labor Day steals

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have a new batch of deals to share ahead of Labor Day weekend. Dell's Labor Day sale is happening now, with steals on monitors, laptops, and more. Now you can get an FHD UltraSharp IPS monitor for just $179, an Inspiron 14 7000 notebook with Core i5 CPU and 128GB SSD for $629, and a bunch of other items for low prices.

Check out the rest of the deals below as well.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This three-wheel EV is still the most fun thing we’ve driven all year

Jonathan Gitlin

Without a doubt, the most fun thing I've driven all year is also the cheapest. It's the Arcimoto SRK: a three-wheeled electric vehicle that remains the one thing I liked about CES 2016. Since then the Oregonian startup has been beavering away, refining the design of the $12,000 EV as it readies for production next year. The SRK made its way to DC recently, and that meant another chance to drive it—this time on some familiar city streets. Yet again, the experience blew me away.

It's a tandem trike, with each front wheel powered by its own 25kW (34hp) electric motor. But don't let the handlebars fool you; with seats, seatbelts, and a roof, even the bike-phobic like me are quite at home here. In fact, earlier versions of Arcimoto's platform actually used a steering wheel and pedals before evolving into the SRK, and it corners with almost no body roll. There's a 12kWh lithium-ion battery pack, good for about 70 miles (112km) of range, although a 20kWh pack will also be available. Depending on the state, you don't need a motorcyle license to drive it, but for those where that doesn't apply, you can take the test in the SRK.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Hackaday Prize Entry: ESPMetric, a Simple and Easy Matrix

Review: Aneng LT-001 USB Soldering Iron

Stunning Fake Polaroid Camera Performs Magic

It’s high time us Muggles got our hands on the hardware used to take Magical Photographs as seen in The Daily Prophet. The first pioneering step in that direction has been taken by [Abhishek] who built this moving picture taking polaroid-ish camera, which he’s calling the “Instagif NextStep”. It’s a camera that records a short, three second video, converts it to GIF and ejects a little cartridge which displays the animated photo.

This amazing piece of hardware has been painstakingly built, and the finished product looks great. The nice thing about building such projects, in [Abhishek]’s own words, is that “it involves a bunch of different skill sets and disciplines – hardware, software, 3D modeling, 3D printing, circuit design, mechanical/electrical engineering, design, fabrication etc that need to be integrated for it to work seamlessly.”

His delightful photo album has lots of pictures detailing the build from start to finish. The enclosure and all of the internal mechanical parts are 3D printed but require access to a SLA printer. The electronics BoM is a pretty long list. The main camera, called CamPi, has a Raspberry Pi 3 with its companion camera module, a 2.8” TFT screen, a 10000 mAh power bank, a servo and a bunch of assorted parts. The GIF cartridge, called SnapPi, has its own Raspberry Pi Zero W, another 2.8” TFT screen, a 400 mAh LiPo and a boost charger. Several of the modules had to be trimmed in size and many unnecessary parts removed to make it all fit together.

The two Pi’s form an ad-hoc network with each other for communication and data transfer. Most of the work is done by Python and Node scripts communicating over RPC. When the shutter button is pressed, a three second video is recorded on the CamPi. It is converted and compressed before being sent over the network to the SnapPi. A slow fade in is the hallmark of Polaroid photos, and the SnapPi emulates this by implementing one of two different methods (selected in code) to achieve the fade in effect. Essentially, he is generating a GIF with gradually increasing opacity. This in itself is an awesome hack.

He has documented all of the problems that he faced and describes how he solved each of them, making the task of replicating this camera easier. Plus, there’s a few handy guides in there for those new to hacking such as how to make your own printed circuit boards and how to setup a Raspberry Pi from scratch. If looking at this has you itching to build one, worry not. [Abhishek] has not only published the photographs with descriptions, but provided a detailed BoM with links and everything else required to build this is available from his GitHub repository.

If you’d like to see more of [Abhishek]’s projects, check out Peeqo, the Animatronic Head Responds with Animated GIFs.

Thanks for tipping us off on this, [Hobson].

I made a camera that prints a GIF instantly

Sauce in the gallery

Filed under: digital cameras hacks, Raspberry Pi

Way to Go, Einstein; His Time Spent Being Wrong

Can You Visualise a Sega Cart from 2017?

The Sega Genesis, or Mega Drive if you’re not from North America, isn’t exactly this summer’s hottest new console, but it still has a huge following 29 years after launch. Fans range from retro Sonic enthusiasts to hardcore chiptune composers, and this year, Catskull Electronics is releasing a Genesis compilation album on a cartridge with a rather special feature.

The cartridge sports an 8×8 LED matrix, which acts as a visualiser for the audio coming out of the console. They’re controlled with a combination of data and address lines with some buffers and 74-series glue logic to make it all work together. Special attention was paid to make sure the LED matrix doesn’t just respond to all activity on the bus, though it would perhaps be cool to see some blinkenlights on a 90s console one day.

Each row of LEDs is attached to an address line, and each column to a data line. It’s a fairly basic multiplexing setup which sees each LED only actually lit for a fraction of a second, but sweeping the display at speed creates a lasting display. The image data is stored as an 8×8 sprite in the system RAM, and updated with the sound level of each channel from the Genesis’s audio subsystem.

The team are looking to release the ROM code in future to inspire copycat designs, which has the potential to spawn even more Genesis cart releases in future. We look forward to seeing what else the community comes up with. And if you’re a die-hard Genesis fan, there are other ways to listen to those classic tunes too.

Filed under: musical hacks

Repurposing Moving Coil Meters to Monitor Server Performance

Snazzy analog meters can lend a retro flair to almost any project, but these days they often seem to be retasked as indicators for completely different purposes than originally intended. That’s true for these Vu meters repurposed as gauges for a Raspberry Pi server, and we think the build log is as informative as the finished product is good-looking.

As [MrWunderbar] admits, the dancing needles of moving-coil meters lend hipster cred to a project, but getting his Vu meters to cooperate and display network utilization and disk I/O on his Raspberry Pi NAS server was no mean feat. His build log is full of nice details on how to measure the internal resistance of the meter and determine a proper series resistor. He also has a lengthy discussion of the relative merits of driving the meters using a PWM signal or using a DAC; in the end, [MrWunderbar] chose to go the DAC route, and the video below shows the desired rapid but smooth swings as disk and network usage change. He also goes into great depth on pulling usage parameters from psutil and parsing the results for display on the meters.

Looking for more analog meter goodness? We saw a similar CPU load meter a few months back, and there was this mash-up of Nixies and old meters for a solar energy CEO’s desk.

[via r/raspberry_pi]

Filed under: classic hacks, hardware

A Very Accurate Current Probe

There’s many different ways of measuring current. If it’s DC, the easiest way is to use a shunt resistor and measure the voltage across it, and for AC you could use a current transformer. But the advent of the Hall-effect sensor has provided us a much better way of measuring currents. Hall sensors offers several advantages over shunts and CT’s – accuracy, linearity, low temperature drift, wider frequency bandwidth, and low insertion loss (burden) being some of them. On the flip side, they usually require a (dual) power supply, an amplification circuit, and the ability to be “zero adjusted” to null output voltage offsets.

[Daniel Mendes] needed to measure some fairly high currents, and borrowed a clip-on style AC-DC current probe to do some initial measurements for his project. Such clip on current probes are usually lower in accuracy and require output DC offset adjustments. To overcome these limitations, he then built himself an invasive hall sensor current probe to obtain better measurement accuracy (Google Translated from Portugese). His device can measure current up to 50 A with a bandwidth stretching from DC to 200 kHz. The heart of his probe is the LAH-50P hall effect current transducer from LEM – which specialises in just such devices. The 25 mV/A signal from the transducer is buffered by an OPA188 op-amp which provides a low output impedance to allow interfacing it with an oscilloscope. The op-amp also adds a x2 gain to provide an output of 50 mV/A. The other critical part of the circuit are the high tolerance shunt resistors connected across the output of the LAH-50P transducer.

The rest of his design is what appears to be a pretty convoluted power supply section. [Daniel] wanted to power his current probe with a 5V input derived from the USB socket on his oscilloscope. This required the use of a 5 V to 24 V boost switching regulator – with two modules being used in parallel to provide the desired output power. A pair of linear regulators then drop down this voltage to +15 / -15 V required for the trasducer and op-amp. His blog post does not have the board layout, but the pictures of the PCB should be enough for someone wanting to build their own version of this current sensor.

Filed under: hardware

Detecting Dire Diseases – with a Selfie?

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. But with a new smartphone app, the eyes may be a diagnostic window into the body that might be used to prevent a horrible disease — pancreatic cancer. A research team at the University of Washington led by [Alex Mariakakis] recently described what they call “BiliScreen,” a smartphone app to detect pancreatic disease by imaging a patient’s eyes.

Pancreatic cancer is particularly deadly because it remains asymptomatic until it’s too late. One early symptom is jaundice, a yellow-green discoloration of the skin and the whites of the eyes as the blood pigment bilirubin accumulates in the body. By the time enough bilirubin accumulates to be visible to the naked eye, things have generally progressed to the inoperable stage. BiliScreen captures images of the eyes and uses image analysis techniques to detect jaundice long before anyone would notice. To control lighting conditions, a 3D-printed mask similar to Google’s Cardboard can be used; there’s also a pair of glasses that look like something from Sir Elton John’s collection that can be used to correct for ambient lighting. Results look promising so far, with BiliScreen correctly identifying elevated bilirubin levels 90% of the time, as compared to later blood tests. Their research paper has all the details (PDF link).

Tools like BiliScreen could really make a difference in the early diagnosis and prevention of diseases. For an even less intrusive way to intervene in disease processes early, we might also be able to use WiFi to passively detect Parkinson’s.

Thanks to [Patty] for the tip.

Filed under: Medical hacks, phone hacks

Feds: Man jailed for not decrypting drives has “chutzpah” to ask to get out

Ultrasonic Array Gets Range Data Fast and Cheap

How’s your parallel parking? It’s a scenario that many drivers dread to the point of avoidance. But this 360° ultrasonic sensor will put even the most skilled driver to shame, at least those who pilot tiny remote-controlled cars.

Watch the video below a few times and you’ll see that within the limits of the test system, [Dimitris Platis]’ “SonicDisc” sensor does a pretty good job of nailing the parallel parking problem, a driving skill so rare that car companies have spent millions developing vehicles that do it for you. The essential task is good spatial relations, and that’s where SonicDisc comes in. A circular array of eight HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors hitched to an ATmega328P, the SonicDisc takes advantage of interrupts to make reading the eight sensors as fast as possible. The array can take a complete set of readings every 10 milliseconds, which is fast enough to allow for averaging successive readings to filter out some of the noise that gets returned. Talking to the car’s microcontroller over I2C, the sensor provides a wealth of ranging data that lets the car quickly complete a parallel parking maneuver. And as a bonus, SonicDisc is both open source and cheap to build — about $10 a copy.

Rather use light to get your range data? There are some pretty cheap LIDAR units on the market these days.

[via r/Arduino]

Filed under: robots hacks, transportation hacks

7 Ways to Have Fun at Maker Faire Eindhoven

Maker Faire returns to Eindhoven, this year as a fully featured faire with 200 exhibiting makers. Here's a small sample of what we're looking forward to.

Read more on MAKE

The post 7 Ways to Have Fun at Maker Faire Eindhoven appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

AT&T absurdly claims that most “legitimate” net neutrality comments favor repeal

Kaspersky Lab turns the tables, forces “patent troll” to pay cash to end case

How objectively do you suppose politicians evaluate data?

Toy Dash Turned Gaming Interface

We see a lot of MAME cabinets and other gaming emulator projects here on Hackaday, but it’s not often that we see one the form factor of which so elegantly matches the ROM. [circuitbeard] converted a Tomy Turnin Turbo toy dashboard into a mini arcade machine playing Outrun.

There are many fascinating details in [circuitbeard]’s writeup. His philsophy is to “keep it looking stock” so he went to great lengths to add functionality to various elements of the toy without changing its appearance. The gear shifter was turned into a 3-way momentary switch with high and low speeds at top and bottom, with rubber bands pulling the switch back the center (neutral) when he lets go of it. The original toy’s steering wheel mounts to a slide potentiometer. The dash has a working ignition switch that uses a PowerBlock to manage the safe startup and shutdown of the Pi.  The dash also lights up the way you’d expect, and even displays accurate MPG and rev info.

For more MAME goodness here on Hackaday, see this broken tablet turned into a mini MAME cabinet or the portable MAME system of the future

[Thanks, Adrian!]

Filed under: toy hacks

New study: We’re outpacing the most radical climate event we know of

465k patients need a firmware update to prevent serious pacemaker hacks

FDA approves first gene therapy for certain leukemia patients

Low-tech privacy breach earns Aetna lawsuit for revealing HIV patients

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Source Kiln

F1 2017 reviewed: Weeks of fun for the racing fan

Lu Ban’s Axe and Working with Your Chinese Suppliers

In test of speed, student Hyperloop pods are keeping pace with startups

August SpaceX Hyperloop competition. Credit: Jing Niu (video link)

Students from the University of Munich were winners again last Sunday night. Their team, called WARR, built a demo Hyperloop pod and sent it down a test track just outside of SpaceX's headquarters, reaching more than 200mph using its own homemade propulsion system and braking in time before the track's end.

The speed was leagues better than the speed that WARR clocked during the last SpaceX Hyperloop competition in January (58 mph). At the time, WARR won its first award for having the fastest demo pod. On Sunday, the German team was able to best their official record by nearly 150mph with some clever engineering.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

ISP-funded study finds huge support for keeping current net neutrality rules

Google-funded think tank fires prominent Google critic

Friday Hack Chat: Making in Shenzhen

China is an amazing land of opportunity, and if you want to build anything, you can build it in Shenzhen. This city that was just a small fishing village a few decades ago has grown into a cyberpunk metropolis of eleven million and has become the manufacturing capital of the world. You’re probably reading this on a device made somewhere around Shenzhen.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about manufacturing in Shenzhen. We’re bringing in a very special guest for this one: [Naomi Wu] is a Cantonese DIY maker, professional web dev, transhumanist, electronics reviewer, occasional Hackaday contributor, vlogger, 3D printerer, advocate of women in STEM, SexyCyborg, and a riot on Twitter. [Naomi] also lives and works in Shenzhen, and is tapped into the DIY and maker culture there. She’s created 3D printed pen testing shoes, a Raspberry Pi cosmetics case, and infinity skirts.

This Friday (or Saturday, depending on which side of the date line you’re on), [Naomi] is going to be talking about manufacturing, making, DIY, and Shenzhen culture. Of particular interest will be electronics purchasing and manufacturing in Shenzhen, designing wearable projects with an emphasis on power and thermal design, documenting projects, and Shenzhen culture. This is basically an AMA, so if you have any questions you’d like to ask, throw them up in this spreadsheet.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Hack Chats are usually at noon, Pacific time on Friday. This week we’re doing the Hack Chat a little later, because timezones. This week’s Hack Chat will be at 6 pm PDT Friday / 9 am CST Saturday. Confused? Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Filed under: Hackaday Columns

CDC investigating rare Salmonella outbreak across 13 states—linked to turtles

Tired of waiting for Half-Life 3? Make it yourself

Cortana and Alexa are coming together in surprising Microsoft/Amazon partnership

Portable SNES Chiptune Player

Asus Zenbook Flip laptops get quad-core Intel CPUs and discrete graphics

Mark Walton

If you like your laptops thin and light then boy has Asus got the laptops for you. Asus has dubbed its new ZenBook Flip 14 the "world's thinnest 2-in-1 with high-performance discrete graphics," which is an impressive qualifier if there ever was one. Still, at just 13.9mm thick, weighing 1.4kg, and with a 14-inch 1080p screen in the footprint of a typical 13-inch laptop, the ZenBook Flip 14 is certainly portable enough.

Inside is an 8th generation Intel Core i7 quad-core processor (otherwise known as Kaby Lake Refresh), along with 16GB of memory, and an Nvidia Geforce MX150 graphics card. The MX150 certainly won't win any speeds awards, but it should handle e-sports games without issue, as well as help speed up rendering tasks in compatible applications. There's also a 512GB PCIe SSD inside, a fingerprint sensor, and a battery rated for up to 13 hours of use. Prices start from €799.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Blizzard vows tougher policies to punish Overwatch trolls

Asus’ Windows Mixed Reality headset is priced on the steep side

Asus has joined the likes of Dell and HP with the launch of its own mixed reality headset. Priced on the steep side at €449 (US and UK prices TBC), the Asus Windows Mixed Reality headset takes Microsoft's reference design and wraps it up in a "3D Polygon" shell, complete with PlayStation VR-like headband design that distributes its 400g weight across the forehead.

Internally, it sports the same specs as other mixed reality headsets. Those include 1440x1440 panels for each eye, a 90Hz refresh rate, and two cameras for inside-out tracking. Asus is also making use of "quick drying antibacterial materials" to avoid any sweat-related germs passing between users. It comes complete with Microsoft's VR controllers, which look similar to those bundled with the HTC Vive.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

It looks like yet another satellite is breaking apart at GEO

ExoAnalytic Solutions

On August 26, the Indonesia based, state-owned satellite operator PT Telkom disclosed an "anomaly" in the pointing of its satellite in geostationary orbit. Company officials said that although they and contractor Lockheed Martin expected to restore service to the satellite, it was moving customers to another satellite as a precautionary measure.

However, new evidence gathered by a US-based firm that tracks objects in geostationary orbit, ExoAnalytic Solutions, suggests the satellite may be falling apart. The company uses algorithms to review data collected by its global network of 165 optical telescopes for anomalies, and one of its instruments in Eastern Australia spotted the satellite apparently breaking apart.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Acer Predator Orion 9000 is an 18-core, quad-GPU desktop for l33t gamers

How To Do PCB Art In Eagle

Mini teases a 2019 electric car at the Frankfurt International Motor Show

It's almost time for this year's Frankfurt International Motorshow, but there must be something in the air, because car makers seem to be jumping over each other to reveal their new products days or even weeks before doors open to the press. Last week, Ferrari jumped the gun with its new entry-level Portofino. Yesterday, Bentley did the same for its new Continental. Today, it was Mini's turn. It's bringing what we think is a thinly veiled concept to the show, called (imaginatively) the Mini Electric Concept. We say thinly veiled, because there's a production Mini electric vehicle due in 2019.

"With its characteristic go-kart feeling and powerful electric motor, the MINI Electric Concept is great fun to drive while also being completely suitable for everyday use—and producing zero emissions to boot. That’s how we at MINI envisage electric mobility in tomorrow’s world," said Peter Schwarzenbauer, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, which is responsible for MINI, Rolls-Royce, and BMW Motorrad.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments