After many hours of butt-numbing car rides and New York traffic, four intrepid HaHa hackers have taken on the wilds of Brooklyn to journey into the mouth of the caffeine-addled beast, also known as Redbull Creation. Dave, Paul, Jeff and Miles have arrived to bring the hack, Baltimore-style, to the soon-to-be-unwashed masses of McCarren Park. Our dedicated compatriot, Jason, will do his best to record all of our rants and photos here at HaHa central for all to see. Yes, that photo is Paul in a sombrero; they are expecting it to be quite hot. Warning: After over 72 sleepless hours, it could get ugly. This should be fun…
Well, we finally got around to opening the INTJ-22 TGIMBOEJ and took out some selected bits. But, boy, did we fill it back up! We packed it with all manner of miscellanea including motors, mysterious circuit boards, high-power LED’s, and other electronic bric-a-brac. Now, it needs a new home. Are there any Hackerspaces or Makerspaces out there who want to get in on a sweet box of junk? Please keep it within the U.S. as heavy international shipments of questionable gizmos is frowned upon by Uncle Sam and his cronies after the toner cartridge fiasco.
Brooklyn, NY Here we come! Paul, Jeff, Miles, David (from left to right) will be headed to New York in July to compete against 15 other teams in the Red Bull Creation challenge. You can read the official e-mail below.
Your team has made it to the final round of Red Bull Creation, and you are invited to come to New York to take part in the ultimate 72 hour build-a-thon!
Go ahead and jump up and down, run around, call everyone you know (most importantly your teammates) and do what you need to do to celebrate, cause you’re invited to take the final challenge! Yes it’s true. You Won.
When I build personal projects, I like things to be modular. You never know when the LCD you just wired up could be grabbed and used in another project… and wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to desolder/cut wires just to re-position something tightly stuffed inside of your project enclosure? This probably explains why I end up making so many wiring harnesses and consequently crimping wires.
In the past, I used a pair of pliers and a soldering iron to connect these crimps to whatever wire I happened to be using at the time. This worked, but it was tedious and the outcome could have looked better. Why wouldn’t I use a pair of crimp pliers might you ask? Well, when I searched for crimp tools in the past, such as the ones recommended for JST XH crimps, they were priced close to $500! Absurd!
I think some of the folks at the hacker space still think I am a crazy for raving about these things as much as I have, but I just can’t get over how having the right tool for the job simplifies things. They let me crimp things easier (no more cursing as the crimp flies across the room), make stronger crimps (I hadn’t realized how critical it was to crimp the wire jacket until using these), and crimp way faster than before.
In particular, they are a HUGE help when you have to crimp lots of things at once. In my case, I needed them to assemble cables I include in SX2 Mini mill tachometer kits I put together. I was rather concerned about the time it would take me to crimp all of those connectors, but with the right tool it turned out to be a breeze.
Thanks to Bill from I Heart Engineering, we now have a pair of these crimp pliers for the space too! If you ever need to use them, swing on by!
SX2/CN2 tachometer kit in action
I picked up a SX2 Mini mill recently via Little Machine Shop (They call it the HiTorque Mini Mill 3900). When I received it, I noticed there was a port for a digital tachometer readout on the side of it. I though this might be useful, but felt 125$+ for it was a little excessive for what it was. Atop of this, they were out of stock.
I ended up reverse engineering the protocol, building some less expensive kits, and documented how exactly I figured out the protocol. Along the way, I also discovered how to make the mill run in reverse!
If you wondered how a reverse-engineering problem like this is approached or what tools are used, this could be an interesting read:
