Monday, January 29
Spiral Laser Cut Buttons Make A Super-Slim USB MIDI Board
We see a huge variety of human-computer interface devices here at Hackaday, and among them are some exceptionally elegant designs. Of those that use key switches though, the vast majority employ off the shelf components made for commercial keyboards or similar. It makes sense to do this, there are some extremely high quality ones to be had.
Sometimes though we are shown designs that go all the way in creating their key switches from the ground up. Such an example comes from [Brandon Rice], and it a particularly clever button design because of its use of laser cutting to achieve a super-slim result. He’s made a sandwich of plywood with the key mechanisms formed in a spiral cut on the top layer. He’s a little sketchy on the exact details of the next layer, but underneath appears to be a plywood spacer surrounding a silicone membrane with conductive rubber taken from a commercial keyboard. Beneath that is copper tape on the bottom layer cut to an interweaving finger design for the contacts. An Adafruit Trinket Pro provides the brains and a USB interface, and the whole device makes for an attractive and professional looking peripheral.
You can see the results in action as he’s posted a video, which we’ve included below the break.
We’ve shown you spiral structures for flexibility in the past, with flexible materials made via 3D printing.
Three Teens Combined Their Passion for Tech with Their Love for Fashion
These girls combined their passions for tech and fashion to create three projects: a light-up dress, interactive jewelry, and a LED umbrella.
The post Three Teens Combined Their Passion for Tech with Their Love for Fashion appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Maker Pro News: Football Maker Pros, Nintendo Explores Papercraft, and More
This week, read up on how maker pros are affecting the American football industry, Nintendo is exploring papercraft projects, and more.
The post Maker Pro News: Football Maker Pros, Nintendo Explores Papercraft, and More appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Chasing the Electron Beam at 380,000 FPS
Analog TV is dead, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome. [Gavin and Dan], aka The Slow Mo Guys recently posted a video about television screens. Since they have some incredible high-speed cameras at their disposal, we get to see the screens being drawn, both on CRT and more modern LCD televisions.
Now we all know that CRTs draw one pixel at a time, drawing from left to right, top to bottom. You can capture this with a regular still camera at a high shutter speed. The light from a TV screen comes from a phosphor coating pained on the inside of the glass screen. Phosphor glows for some time after it is excited, but how long exactly? [Gavin and Dan’s] high framerate camera let them observe the phosphor staying illuminated for only about 6 lines before it started to fade away. You can see this effect at a relatively mundane 2500 FPS.
Cranking things up to 380,117 FPS, the highest speed ever recorded by the duo, we see even more amazing results. Even at this speed, quite a few “pixels” are drawn each frame. [Gavin] illustrates that by showing how Super Mario’s mustache is drawn in less than one frame of slow-mo footage. You would have to go several times faster to actually freeze the electron beam. We think it’s amazing that such high-speed analog electronics were invented and perfected decades ago.
Switching from CRT to LCD, the guys show us how the entire screen stays lit, while refresh runs top to bottom. Experimenting on an iPhone 7+ showed that the screen refresh is always from the top of the screen down, toward the home button. If you change the phone to landscape orientation, it will appear to be refreshing from left to right. All pretty interesting stuff, so check out the video. If you’d like to know more about TV technology, read up on the Sony Trinitron story, or learn about the signals used in displaying video.
Thanks for the tip [Quirin]!