Making an Airgap Flash

[Maurice] and his team just finished the airgap flash they’ve been working on for a year now. This kind of flash is useful for very high speed photography such as photographing shooting bullets. With a duration of about a millionth of a second it is 30 times faster the normal flashes at their fastest settings. In the video embedded after the break, [Maurice] first explains the differences between his flash and a conventional one which normally uses a xenon flash tube, then shows off different photos he made with his build.

Even though this video is a bit commercially oriented, [Maurice] will make another one detailing the insides. In the mean time, you can checkout the schematics in the user manual (PDF) and also have a look at an other write up he made which we covered in the past. We should also mention that trying to make this kind of flash in home is very dangerous as very high voltages are used (in this case, 16kV).

read the rest of article...

BlenderDefender: Automating Pavlovian Conditioning

This isn’t your typical home automation project; who turns a blender on remotely? [Brian Gaut] did, when he rigged his blender and a strobe light to scare his cat off the kitchen counter. To be fair, we’ve linked to this project before on Hackaday—twice actually—but neither the article about relays or the related cat waterwall article actually talk about the BlenderDefender, and that’s a shame, because it’s pretty clever.

[Brian] began by installing a DCS-900 network camera on the wall near his kitchen sink. The camera monitors any motion on the counter, and once it detects something, a networked computer starts recording individual frames. This security camera setup isn’t looking for criminals: [Brian] needed to keep his cat away from a particularly tasty plant. The motion detection signals an X10 Firecracker module to turn on both a nearby blender and a strobe light, provoking some hilarious reactions from the cat, all of which are captured by the camera.

read the rest of article...

A Much More DYI Air Gap Flash Unit

In reaction to the other air gap flash unit we featured a few days ago, [Eirik] sent us a tip about another one he recently made. In his setup, the duration of the flash peak intensity is around 300ns (1/3,333,333 of a second). As a reminder, an air flash unit consists of a circuit charging a high voltage capacitor, a circuit triggering a discharge on demand, a high voltage capacitor and the air flash tube itself.

The flash tube contains two wires which are separated just enough to not spark over at max potential. Isolated from the other two, a third wire is placed in the tube. This wire is connected to a trigger/pulse transformer, which will ionize the gap between the two capacitor leads. This causes the gap to breakdown and a spark to form, thereby creating a flash of light.

[Eirik] constructed his flash tube using an olive jar and a glass test tube. As you can see from the (very nice) picture above, the spark travels along the glass test tube, making the quenching much faster than in an open air spark. [Eirik] built his own high voltage capacitor, using seven rolled capacitors of roughly 2nF each made with duct-tape, tin foil and overhead transparencies. For ‘safety’ they are stored in a PP-pipe. A look at the schematics and overall circuit shown on the website reveals how skilled [Eirik] is, making us think that this is more a nice creation than a hack.

read the rest of article...

Open Source Telescope Control

Telescope mounts connected to computers and stepper motors have been available to the amateur astronomer for a long time, and for good reason, too. With just the press of a button, any telescope can pan over to the outer planets, nebula, or comets. Even if a goto command isn’t your thing, a simple clock drive is a wonderful thing to have. As with any piece of professional equipment, hackers will want to make their own version, and thus the openDrive project was born. It’s a project to make an open source telescope controller.

Right now, the project is modular, with power supply boards, a display board, motor driver, an IO board (for dew heaters and the like), and a hand-held controller. There’s an openDrive forum that’s fairly active covering both hardware and software. If you’re looking for a project to help you peer into the heavens, this is the one for you. If telescope upgrades aren’t enough to quench your astronomical thirst you could go full out with a backyard observatory build.

read the rest of article...

39 Raspberry Pi 3D Scanner

[Richard] just posted an Instructable on his ridiculously cool 39 Pi 3D Scanner! That’s right. 39 individual Raspberry Pies with camera modules. But why? Well, [Richard] loves 3D printing, Arduinos, Raspberry pies, and his kids. He wanted to make some 3D models of his kids (because pictures are so last century), so he started looking into 3D scanners. Unfortunately almost all designs he found require the subject to sit still for a while — something his 2-year old is not a fan of.

So he started pondering a way to take all the pictures in one go, to give him the ability to generate 3D models on the fly — without the wait. He originally looked at buying 39 cheap digital cameras, but didn’t want to have all the images on separate SD cards, as it would be rather tedious to extract all the images. Using the Raspberries on the other hand, he can grab them all off a network. So he set off to build a very awesome (and somewhat expensive) life-size 3D scanning booth. Full details are available on his blog at www.pi3dscan.com
 
Stick around after the break to see it in action at Maker Faire Groningen 2013!

read the rest of article...