23b Shop

23b Shop member Atari makes his first appearance on element14 Presents (formerly The Ben Heck Show) building a homebrew Geiger counter complete with the trademark 23b “Civil Defense” roundel.

The 23b Shop website is being rebuilt.  Please check the following links if you’re looking for something:

Old 23b Shop Blog (Archived projects and events)

Hackerspaces Wiki 

Sparklecon Info (Our yearly hacker con in January)

Cheers,

Arclight

“While your faith in technology is endearing,
it will ultimately be your undoing”

Arclight has an old 2600 tshirt with a friendly robot on the back, uttering this stark phrase.

When was the last time you looked around you at this technological society that has sprouted up around us, within our lifetimes? If you’re under 30 years old, you barely remember a time before the internet; a strange far-off land where payphones and Thomas Guides helped us stay connected and get to where we were…

Now with limit switches!  after years of passive work and weeks of rather intense hair-pulling, the machine is now bootstrapped into a functional state.

Also, gauging interest for a CNC milling class.  CNC class would NOT be for tourists.  plan on spending two days on the Tree mill for foundational work, before.  if you’re interested, hit me up.

Original post: http://blog.shop.23b.org/2014/11/singing-cnc-mill-is-fully-operational.html

This book was written in 1922 by an artillery school, and includes lots of info on hoisting and moving huge, heavy, delicate machinery, like cannons or machine tools or overturned/stuck vehicles. The book covers knots, leverage principles, and some of the basic tools that can be created to help the task.

Mostly you will be using manpower and simple leverage multipliers of all kinds, along with some good thinking about what you’re doing. Thus the ‘mind’ part. Unfortunately they don’t cover pure…

OBJECTIVE
Build a robust, accurate rotary-to-linear motion transfer box within a weekend, without spending any money.

PLAN
Some projects need an element that moves in a straight line, but this is not always as easy as getting rotary motion straight from a motor, pedals, or crank.

To accomplish this, I read online about mechanical linkages and selected a hypocycloid linkage. It has a very elegant and simple design, with a long linear travel for a small size. Rotary input (like a hand crank…

This week we decided to build lasers. Not just any laser, but one that puts out 100KW pulses of Ultraviolet light. Okay, the pulses only last 1-2ns and it’s hard to burn things with it, but it’s still pretty cool. It’s pretty easy to make from junk, and it uses Nitrogen right out of the atmosphere to lase. Check out the video:

Original post: http://blog.shop.23b.org/2010/11/homemade-uv-lasers.html

Modified this otherwise unremarkable found-statue:

Original post: http://blog.shop.23b.org/2010/11/venus-de-cthulhu.html

A while back, a friend of ours asked if we could build one these for him:

Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box

Since I like a challenge, I went for it. I ended up using the EM-406A GPS module from U.S. Globalsat, a standard Arduino 328 board, a backlit 16×2 character display from Futurlec.com, and the Pololu soft power switch from Sparkfun.com. The code will be cleaned up and posted soon.

Here are some pics of the build and completed project:

Initial board:

Original post: http://blog.shop.23b.org/2010/…