Category Archives: controller

Drop-in Controller for eBay K40 Laser Engraver Gets Results

Posted on June 10, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

[Paul de Groot] wrote in to let us know about a drop-in controller replacement he designed for those economical K40 laser engravers that are everywhere on eBay. With the replacement controller, greatly improved engraving results are possible along with a simplified toolchain. Trade in the proprietary software and that clunky security dongle for Inkscape and a couple of plugins! [Paul] felt that the work he accomplished was too good to keep to himself, and is considering a small production run.

Laser engravers are in many ways not particularly complex devices; a motion controller moves the head in x and y, …read more

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Posted in cnc hacks, co2 laser, controller, ebay, grbl, inkscape, K40, laser controller, laser cutter, laser engraver, laser hacks, open source | Leave a comment

A Command-Line Stepper Library with All the Frills

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

When you already know exactly where and how you’d like your motor to behave, a code-compile-flash-run-debug cycle can work just fine. But if you want to play around with a stepper motor, there’s nothing like a live interface. [BrendaEM]’s RDL is a generic stepper motor driver environment that you can flash into an Arduino. RDL talks to your computer or cell phone over serial, and can command a stepper-driver IC to move the motor in three modes: rotary, divisions of a circle, and linear. (Hence the acronumical name.) Best of all, the entire system is interactive. Have a peek at …read more

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Posted in arduino, controller, driver, interactive, misc hacks, stepper motor | Leave a comment

Making VR A Little More Usable With A Pinch Gesture Ring

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Fernando Gomes

[Florian] wants to browse the web like an internet cowboy from a cyberpunk novel. Unfortunately, VR controllers are great for games but really incapacitate a hand for typing. A new input method was needed, one that would free his fingers for typing, but still give his hands detailed input into the virtual world.

Since VR goggles have… hopefully… already reached peak ridiculousness, his first idea was to glue a Leap Motion controller to the front of it. It couldn’t look any sillier after all.  The Leap controller was designed to track hands, and when combined with the IMU built into  …read more

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Posted in button, controller, input, Leap motion, pinch, Virtual Reality, vr | Leave a comment