3D printing
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This 3D-Printed Robot Duck Learned to Walk With a Neural Network, and Now It Kicks a Ball Most small walking robots replay hand-tuned servo sequences. XGO-Duck, an open-source biped from Luwu Dynamics, the team behind the XGO robot dogs, walks on a neural network policy instead. The network runs on the Linux side of an Arduino UNO Q, while the board's STM32 microcontroller handles the 15 serial bus servos and the orientation feedback. This weekend the team posted a clip of the duck… |
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This Desk Buoy Copies the Live Motion of a Real Buoy at Sea, Hanging From 8 Stepper Lines A Belgian maritime pilot, whose job is guiding ships in and out of port, has built a desk piece that brings the sea indoors. His 30 cm 3D-printed west cardinal buoy hangs on eight lines, each wound by its own small stepper motor, and it rolls and heaves with live wave data from a real buoy out at sea. Pick a station off Bermuda and it moves to 1.9 m waves every 8 seconds; for some buoys it… |
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A $300 Robot That Plays Fetch: It Finds the Ball, Picks It Up and Brings It Back on Its Own Most hobby robots that "follow a ball" just chase a colour blob. Sector 07 built one that plays a full game of fetch. His 3D-printed robot, called Fetch, uses an Arduino UNO Q and a custom vision model trained in Edge Impulse to find an orange ball, drive to it, grab it with two arms, then look for the owner's hand and bring the ball back, with no remote control. It is his first autonomous… |
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A Robot Moth Pumped Artificial Blood Through Its Wings and Grew a Sensor It Never Had Every robot leaves the lab with its sensors already bolted on, picked from a best guess about where it will end up. Researchers at the University of Tartu in Estonia and the Italian Institute of Technology have built a moth-shaped robot that can add one later. They pumped an "artificial blood" through veins in its 3D-printed wings, shone UV light on a patch for about a minute, and that patch… |
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A 1-Metre 3D-Printed RC Jet Just Hit 273 mph on Its Maiden Flight, and Its Makers Are Now Going After the 465 mph World Record Most 3D-printed RC planes are slow foam-and-PLA cruisers. King Chaser is not. The Mach Initiative, a small team presented on camera by Josh Martin and Dan Sykes, has flown its 1-metre, 3D-printed jet for the first time, and it reached 273 mph (about 440 km/h) on a short private airfield. The team's goal is the Guinness World Record for the fastest jet-powered model aircraft, which currently… |
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This Giant 3D-Printed Wheel Writes Endless Scrolling Text With Black and White Marbles, After 30+ Hours of Testing Marble machines usually stop at clocks, with a fixed number of digits and a fixed amount of space. Ivan Miranda wanted a display that never runs out of room. His new Marble Scroller is a huge 3D-printed wheel that writes text in black and white marbles using a 7x5 pixel font, lets each line roll off the other side and then recycles the same marbles to write the next one. It can do uppercase,… |
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Raspberry Pi 4 Runs a Real Apollo Guidance Computer Inside This 1:1 3D-Printed DSKY Replica The DSKY was the keypad and display Apollo astronauts used to talk to the Apollo Guidance Computer, and Michael Newton has rebuilt one at 1:1 scale from archived NASA and MIT drawings. Inside the 3D-printed case, a Raspberry Pi 4B runs yaAGC, the Virtual AGC project's emulator of the original computer, so the keypad, the green VERB/NOUN/PROG readout and the warning lights all behave as they… |
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Maker Transforms ESP32-S3 Microcontroller Into a Mini Retro TV With Touch Control and Audio Output In an era where microcontroller boards are becoming increasingly powerful, Tech Talkies recently showcased an interesting use for the versatile ESP32-S3 chip by turning it into a fully functional, pocket-sized retro television. Leveraging the display and audio capabilities of modern hobbyist hardware, the project demonstrates how low-cost microcontrollers can easily drive video playback and… |
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Autonomous Lake Mapping Catamaran Steers With Air Propellers and Not a Rudder. Two Years of Iteration An autonomous 3D-printed catamaran built by hobbyist Cy Antony Ash has mapped the depth of a lake in North Wales, the result of a two-year build. The boat carries a Deeper castable fish finder along a programmed route across Llyn Celyn, so the sonar no longer has to be cast from a rod. Instead of underwater propellers, it uses drone motors mounted above the waterline, which keeps the props… |
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Getting Started with the PUI Audio AMP2X15 Audio Amplifier Board and Speakers Adding a speaker to an embedded project is not always as simple as connecting it directly to a microcontroller or single-board computer. Most audio sources provide a relatively low-level signal, while a speaker needs more power to produce useful sound output. This is where an audio amplifier becomes important. The PUI Audio AMP2X15 is designed to bridge this gap,… |
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Built a Compact DIY OLED Keychain Gadget Powered by a Rechargeable XIAO ESP32-S3 Microcontroller DIY electronics enthusiasts are finding creative ways to shrink powerful microcontrollers into portable, daily-carry gadgets, and custom electronic keychains have quickly become a favourite project. Designed around the ultra-compact Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 board, this minimalist build by Tech Talkies combines an interactive 1.3-inch OLED display, a tiny LiPo battery, and a power slide… |
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Using Over 130 3D-Printed Parts, This Six-Digit Calculator Lets Gears and a Hand Crank Handle the Logic A maker has built a calculator out of some 3D-Printed parts that can perform up to six-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that too without any complicated electronics. The machine is made from more than 130 custom designed parts and works entirely through gears, pins, levers, springs, and a hand crank. Its design is inspired by historic mechanical calculators, especially… |
