Maker Business Profile: Skye and Thomas of MarninSaylor
By Caleb Kraft
Who are you, and where are you located? We are MarninSaylor, the brainchild of Thomas Marnin and Skye Saylor. We are a husband / wife business, love, and life partnership based in Seattle, WA. What do you make? We call our family of products Pastry Pets. The main items are […]
Millennium Falcon Project: A Mad Rush And The Largest 3D Printer In Europe
By Caleb Kraft
I was working in Pinewood Studios, England, when I was informed I had an interesting job. My eyes brows raised a little, but much much higher when I was told I would one of there team bringing to life a Lucus Film Millennium Falcon! It was decided that the Falcon […]
Megabots Pulls the Plug, Puts Eagle Prime on eBay
By Mike Senese
Megabots had an inspiring run, starting as part of a giant robot arm demo’d at Comic-Con, turning into a number of compelling crowdfunding and viral video campaigns, and leading up to a much anticipated but somewhat disappointing bout between their massive, $2.5 million robot and a Japanese counterpart. Now, despite […]
This maker spotlight was brought to us through Maker Faire Rome. You’ll be able to find them and many more creative and exciting makers at Maker Faire Rome: The European Edition on October 18-20. Get your tickets now! Who are you? My name is Loïc De Buck, I was […]
This maker spotlight was brought to us through Maker Faire Rome. You’ll be able to find them and many more creative and exciting makers at Maker Faire Rome: The European Edition on October 18-20. Get your tickets now! where are you located I’m from Portugal, more specifically living near […]
Cool Crowdfunding: Augmented Reality, Modular Build Plates, Vader, and Drones
By Caleb Kraft
We receive so many pitches for crowdfunding projects. They pour into our inbox daily. Since crowdfunding is a bit of a gamble, it is always kind of hard to determine just how to write about these projects, considering that many of them may not ever deliver. Cool Crowdfunding is our […]
[Project] 3D Print a Mini Steering Wheel for Your Xbox One or PS4 Controller
By Tyler Koslow
Want to make your video gaming experience even more realistic? New York-based designer Brent Scott has created a 3D printable mini steering wheel that you can mount onto your Xbox One or PlayStation 4 controller.
As the video game graphics slowly become on par with our own reality, they create an immersive experience that is being enjoyed by people both young and old. However, as realistic as your favorite racing title may be, it’s hard to feel like you’re actually behind the wheel when all you’re doing is tilting your sticks and mashing some buttons.
New York designer Brent Scott– known on Thingiverse as pixel2 – has recently created an incredible 3D printed attachment for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers. This mini rack and pinion steering wheel was made to enhance your experience with racing games, allowing you to steer your virtual vehicle of choice using your controller.
No need to start a console war either… The designer has released a model for both Xbox and PS4 controllers. It’s useful, relatively easy to print, and all you need aside from your 3D printer is a bearing and some glue! So, if you’re planning on doing some gaming this weekend, why not add a 3D printed steering wheel to your controller.
Let’s take a closer look at this project.
3D Printed Mini Steering Wheel: What You Need & How to Build it
Ready to start racing? Here’s what you need to build your own steering wheel.
The STL files for both the Xbox One and PS4 controllers are freely available via Thingiverse. There are multiple parts that make up this steering wheel contraption, so feel free to get creative and mix different filament colors. Aside from your 3D printer, all you need to put this project into overdrive is a bearing from an old fidget spinner or skateboard, along with some superglue.
Once you have the parts printed and your bearing ready, it’s time to move into the assembly process. Taking the 3D printed parts, snap the rack into the pivot, moving it back and forth until the ridges of the print are smoothed out.
Next, mount the bearing onto the frame by gluing the top and bottom edge of the bearing. Make sure that the glue is fully dried before snapping it onto the controller, as the glue can leave some residue on the controller. After snapping the 3D printed rack onto the frame, mount the entire wheel onto the controller.
Slide the pivot down onto the controller’s stick until the ball joint is in the center and the bottom edge of the pivot is parallel with the rack. Finally, center the wheel on the rack and press it into the bearing.
Now you’re finally ready to get behind the wheel and start racing.
Lego House: Right Next to Denmark’s Legoland, But Way Cooler
By Jenny List
If there is one thing that most Hackaday readers will know about Denmark, it is that it’s the home of the Lego brick. The toy first appeared at the end of the 1940s from the factory of Ole Kirk Christiansen‘s Lego company in Billund, central Denmark, and has remained inseparable from both the town and the country ever since.
When spending a week in Denmark for the BornHack hacker camp it made absolute sense to take a day out to drive up to Billund and visit the famous Legoland theme park. All those childhood dreams of seeing the fabled attraction would be satisfied, making the visit a day to remember.
Your first view of the Lego House, in the centre of Billund.
The Danes at Bornhack however had other ideas. By all means go to Legoland they said, but also take in Lego House. As a Brit I’d never heard of it, so was quickly educated. It seems that while Legoland is a kid’s theme park, Lego House is a far more Lego-brick-focused experience, and in the view of the Danish hackers, much better.
In The Company Town, You’re Sitting On The Mother Lode
Billund is a small town surrounded by farmland, that would probably have remained a sleepy backwater were it not the Lego company town. The visitor attractions are dwarfed by the extent of the Lego factories and warehouses, and it boasts the country’s second largest international airport also owned by the company.
You are in no doubt as to Lego’s influence on the place as you drive in, the city limits are marked by car-sized Lego bricks at the side of the road. Lego House is right in the centre of town, a modernist structure designed to resemble a huge pile of Lego bricks. From across the square you can’t miss seeing more of those monster bricks. (I looked close — turns out they’re fibreglass, and I unaccountably want to own one.)
Once inside, the central atrium is dominated by a life-size tree over several stories, made of course from Lego. The furniture and fittings are all beautifully designed but retain a Lego theme, and you are never far from Lego bricks with most seating having a bin full of them for you to idly play with. This is the temple of the brick in every sense, and it is clear that a huge quantity of thought has gone into its creation. It is no budget visitor attraction but the premium statement of thanks by a multinational company to the fans of its product, and as a visitor you are welcome to immerse yourself in it rather than be a spectator.
The Brick Has A Fascinating History
Spent Lego moulds, under the museum floor
The museum in the basement takes the visitor through the formation and early years of the Lego business from its origins in a family carpenter’s shop through its diversification into wooden toys and then its embrace of plastic moulding. First though, you walk above a series of worn-out Lego brick moulds unearthed from the foundations of a Lego factory, fascinatingly we learn that the company used to bury moulds in this way to avoid their falling into the hands of competitors. It’s interesting to see the moulds up-close, and there’s something slightly eerie about the exhibit.
We see the succession of the company’s wooden toys from the 1930s through to the ’50s, which incidentally provide a snapshot of the toy fashions of the day. There was a yo-yo craze in the 1930s, for instance, and later a craze for fake motorcycle engines to attach to bicycles. To eyes that associate the name with plastic bricks it’s very odd indeed to see the word “Lego” on a wooden truck or train. These were high-quality toys, and dare I say it there were a few I’d definitely snap up were I lucky enough to encounter one in a second-hand store.
The company diversified into plastic mouldings in the late 1940s, and there follows a series of exhibitions charting the decline of the wooden toy business and the rise of the plastic. It began with Lego bricks, evolving into the innumerable shapes we know today. The quantity of design work that went into ensuring that the bricks grip each other enough for the models to not fall apart, while remaining easy to dismantle is a fascinating story.
This is the point at which you’ll see the sets you had as a child, for example for me it was the blue railway tracks and large gear sets of the early 1970s that triggered the most nostalgia. It’s notable that the sets from that era were much more “Here are a load of parts, go and build anything you want” rather than “Here is a set to make this spaceship, go and build that”, and I at least am left with the feeling that our kids have lost some creative opportunity along the way.
Plenty Of Lego Activities For All Ages
The museum alone would make for a worthy destination, but this building offers so much more. Upstairs there are a series of zones, from an art gallery of pieces done in the medium of Lego bricks through interactive Lego challenges and games involving making real items in Lego and mating them to virtual worlds, to more traditional Lego activities. If you wish to build a Lego house and have it in a virtual cityscape you can do it here.
The Hackaday shark. It seems the Lego scanning algorithm doesn’t identify grey bricks very well.
You can also see your Lego fish swimming in a virtual sea. My effort was a shark.
A Rare Chance To See The Bricks Being Made
Emerging from the riot of coloured plastic bricks back into the atrium, there is a final treat. The Danish mathematician Søren Eilers and a team computed the maximum number of combinations in which six eight-stud Lego bricks could be combined as 915,103,765, and the Lego company are setting out to have every one of them built. You can scan your RFID pass and receive your personalised combination, but the special treat is that on your way out you receive a pack of six red Lego bricks made by a working Lego production line there in front of you. We’re told it’s the same as the plant used in the Lego factories, but hugely slowed down to the rate at which visitors pass through the attraction.
There is a machine processing raw plastic pellets, feeding the hydraulic injection moulding machine that makes the bricks, and then a series of sorting machinery that extract six bricks and then a packager that bags them up in the exclusive Lego House packaging, before being weighed and dispensed. It’s interesting to note that the weighing process rejects a few bags of bricks, there must be quite a fine tolerance on a finished brick. It’s a rare opportunity to see close-up an industrial production line, and that it’s creating the iconic Lego bricks is a bonus.
There’s Another Attraction In Billund, Too
With bricks in hand, we left Lego House past the Lego shop in which almost anything Lego could be found. A festival of Lego bricks, but of course it’s not the only game in Billund. The Legoland theme park is on the outskirts of town, so on a second day we made the trip there. It’s not worthy of a Hackaday write-up as much as Lego House because we are not a theme park review site, but it’s worth a quick mention as there are a few points of technical interest there.
Most of the rides are Lego-themed versions of traditional park fare, but it’s worth taking the time to try the Ice Pilot ride in which you sit on the end of an industrial robot following a path you can program yourself. Then there are the extensive Lego model cities, which have plenty of automation to marvel at. Otherwise have the usual fun with monorails and trains and water rides, but don’t expect much accessible tech. And a word to the wise: by all means try the Lego brick fries in the burger joint, but order a portion between more than one person. Danes must have HUGE appetites.
So then, Lego House and Legoland. Both as Danish as a smørrebrød, and definitely something you should put on your itineraries should you find yourself in the country. How about making time for BornHack next year so you can follow in our footsteps?
How’s That 2.5D Printer Working For You?
By Al Williams
We’ve noticed a trend lately that advanced 3D printing people are calling their normal print setup as 2.5D, not 3D. The idea is that while the machine has 3 axes, the actual geometry generation is typically only in the X and Y axis. The Z axis simply lifts up to the next layer unless you are working in vase mode. [Teaching Tech] wanted to experiment with real 3D printing where the Z axis actually helps build the shape of the printed object, not just advancing with each step.
As it turns out his first investigation linked back to one of our early posts on the topic. There’s been more recent work though, and he found that too. It took a little surgery to get more Z clearance, but nothing too serious — just a movement of a fan.
The problem is, of course, if you start having the head moving up and down, it needs to have a very low profile so you aren’t bumping into things. This is usually not as big a problem with conventional printing because the head is always a little bit over the printed object.
A special slicer computes the way to move the head around in all three directions. The only thing we’d worry about is that most printers don’t expect much movement in the Z axis. For example, many printers use belts on the X and Y axis but use leadscrews for Z. You might have issues with backlash being worse, for example, or need to lubricate the Z axis more than usual.
One nice thing about not using layers is that layer lines do not appear in the same way they do with conventional printing. You can really see the differences in some of the example prints in the video. It may be that one day having a 3D print sliced into layers will be as quaint as putting data on a floppy diskette seems today. There’s a long way to go, but there’s a lot of work to push in that direction.
We’ve gotten to the point where a $35 Raspberry Pi can be a reasonable alternative to a traditional desktop or laptop, and microcontrollers in the Arduino ecosystem are getting powerful enough to handle some remarkably demanding computational jobs. But there’s still one area where microcontrollers seem to be lagging a bit: machine learning. Sure, there are purpose-built edge-computing SBCs, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to run AI models on versatile and ubiquitous MCUs that you can pick up for a couple of bucks?
We’re moving in that direction, and our friends at Adafruit Industries want to stop by the Hack Chat and tell us all about what they’re working on. In addition to Ladyada and PT, we’ll be joined by Meghna Natraj, Daniel Situnayake, and Pete Warden, all from the Google TensorFlow team. If you’ve got any interest in edge computing on small form-factor computers, you won’t want to miss this chat. Join us, ask your questions about TensorFlow Lite and TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers, and see what’s possible in machine learning way out on the edge.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
Who are you, and where are you located? We are MarninSaylor, the brainchild of Thomas Marnin and Skye Saylor. We are a husband / wife business, love, and life partnership based in Seattle, WA. What do you make? We call our family of products Pastry Pets. The main items are […]
3d print ......errori ed esperienze, 