Hair Enthusiasts Rejoice! Synthetic Follicles Are Now 3D-Printable

If you’ve been performing painstaking hair-plug procedures on your 3D-printed troll dolls, then prepare to have your world rocked! [Chris Harrison, Gierad Laput, and Xiang “Anthony” Chen] at Carnegie Mellon University have just released a paper outlining a technique they’ve developed for 3D printing fur and hair. Will the figurine section of Thingiverse ever be the same?

The technique takes advantage of a 3D printing effect that most hobbyists actively try to avoid: stringing. Stringing is what happens when the hot end of a 3D printer moves from one point to another quickly while leaking a small amount of molten filament. This results in a thin strand of plastic between the two points, and is generally perceived as a bad thing, because it negatively affects the surface quality of the print.

To avoid this particular phenomenon, 3D printing slicers generally have options like retraction and wiping. But, instead of trying to stop the stringing, [Chris Harrison, Gierad Laput, and Xiang “Anthony” Chen] decided to embrace it. Through extensive experimentation, they figured out how to introduce stringing in a controlled manner. Instead of random strings here and there, they’re able to create strings exactly where they want them, and at specific lengths and thicknesses.

Examples of what this can be used for are shown in their video below, and include adding hair to figurines or bristles to brushes. Of course, once this technique becomes readily available to the masses, the 3D printing community is bound to find unexpected uses for it. 

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks

SEC moves to allow crowdfunding investments

On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-1 to allow small investors to buy stock in startup companies via online crowdfunding, reports Reuters and AP.

Before the new rules, private companies could seek money only from "accredited investors." That's defined as individuals who own more than $1 million in assets, excluding their primary residence, or have maintained an income of more than $200,000 for at least two years.

Under the new rules, those with more modest wealth will be able to invest in startups, with limits.

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Hackaday Links: November 1, 2015

It seems almost compulsory that we start off with a dose of Star Wars. Here’s an epic AT-ST build that motorizes the iconic walker.

That two-legger isn’t going to be lonely. It bigger-slower brother, the AT-AT got a bit of motorized love as well.

What? You were expecting a BB8 build? We have one of those too. [DrYerzinia] has begun a design that hides a quadcopter inside of the BB8. The four 17″ DJI propellers fold up when not in use, extending through hatches in the outer shell when it’s time to take flight. This retains the rolling design you’ve already come to love in the BB8 and we’re going to keep our eyes on it!

Do you have a Teensy and some extra WS2812 strips hanging out on your bench? [etix] put his to use with an ambilight clone. This works really well: simple hardware which connects via USB to communicate with VLC. We applaud [etix’s] choice of Kung Fury as a demo video… a truly bizarre and entertaining short movie. +1000 for its use of VHS tape artifacts.

We just missed Halloween, but this set of wings is far too great of a build to be reserved for that one day. Alas, there is only the demo video but seeing the huge feathered structures fold and unfold is really impressive!

[Truebass] added an artistic accent to one of the walls in his home. He had several cellphone chargers from old phones in his junk bin. These were used to regulate power for some white LEDs. The finished sconces are made from chip-board covered in cherry veneer, all leftover from previous projects.

Want to drink your beer out of beer-byproducts? How about your coffee out of coffee-byproducts. It sounds strange, but 3DOM is marketing it that way, encouraging you to print your beer stein with this beer-byproduct-based 3D printer filament. They also offer coffee filament and have plans for future oddball building materials. Printer inception?

We ran a post about the secret computer of the New York subway system. There wasn’t a ton of information there, but that could change. The New York Historical Society is running a Kickstarter to expand their Computing History made in NY.

Filed under: Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links

Windows Hello facial logins on the new Surfaces is rather impressive

Video produced by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Microsoft's new Surface Book hybrid laptop and Surface Pro 4 productivity-oriented tablet both include hardware for biometric authentication using facial recognition. Yet when I reviewed them, I couldn't test out the feature because we didn't have a complete final driver stack.

Since then, we've been given final software loadouts and Windows Hello has sprung into life. Whether using facial, fingerprint, or iris recognition, the Hello process is broadly the same: first PIN login must be enabled, then you register your biometric data. In common with other biometric systems, such as Apple's TouchID, the biometrics data never leaves the machine and is securely stored in such a way that it shouldn't be possible for malicious applications to capture or exfiltrate the data. Registration for the facial recognition is easy peasy: the camera looks at you for a few seconds, and you're done.

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The Flying Man

No, that’s not a typo for Burning Man. What do you get when you take a hundred feet of plastic sheet, weld up a big ramp, modify a car into your own personal high speed winch, and put it all near a lake? You get some serious air time.

A group of French water sports enthusiasts decided to build this fantastically ill-advised super slip and slide. They built a giant ramp alongside an old farm house heading towards the lake. At the bottom is a large ramp they welded together out of steel. Now you can just slide down this slip and slide.

But they weren’t content with just that.

They jacked up an old car and replaced one of the wheels with a bare steel rim to use as a winch. Using some high strength cable they strung it across the lake, wrapping it around another steel rim on an axel to use as a massive pulley. Bring the cable back across the lake, hook it up to an inner tube and get ready for the flight of your life!

Safety? Really, what could possibly go wrong here?

Nice.

Don’t have a lake at your disposal? A leak proof water blob is kinda fun too.

[via reddit]

Filed under: misc hacks

How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service

Ars covers the Doe Bay Internet Users Association. (video link)

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that's exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, 'what can we do?'” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

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Who Said FORTRAN is Dead?

NASA has an urgent need for a FORTRAN developer to support the Voyager spacecraft. Popular Mechanics interviewed Voyager program manager [Suzanne Dodd] who is looking to fill [Larry Zottarell’s] shoes when he retires.

We had a lot of people comment on my recent Hackaday article, “This Is Not Your Father’s FORTRAN”, who studied the language at some point. Maybe one of you would like to apply? You need to do so soon! NASA is hoping to give the new hire six to twelve months with [Zottarell] for on-the-job training. You’ll need to brush up on your vintage assembly language too.

The two Voyagers were some of the first NASA spacecraft to use computers. The resources are limited in the three 40 year-old computers found on each probe. They handle the spacecraft’s science and flight software. The software is a little more recent having been updated only 25 years ago in 1990.

A big problem is a lot of the engineering design materials are no longer in existence. People’s memories of the events and reasons for decisions made that long ago are bit hazy. But NASA does have an emergency list of those former engineers when questions arise. That means this could be more than just a job where you program for ancient hardware, you could find a lot of reasons to interact with the people who pioneered this field!

This will be an awesome hack. Anyone up to doing remote computing at a distance of 12 billion miles?

A video on the history of the two voyagers is found after the break.

Filed under: computer hacks, news, repair hacks