Technology

This 3D Printer Extrudes Molten Glass to Form Parts

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Lios Design, a team formed by MIT students, is well on its way to perfecting molten glass 3D printing.

The vast majority of 3D-printed objects are plastic. Most FFF (Fused-Filament Fabrication) 3D printers use thermoplastic filament and LCD/SLA (Stereolithography) 3D printers use photopolymer resin. Other materials, like ceramic, concrete, and metal, are somewhat common. We’ve even seen organic tissue and various foods being 3D-printed on occasion. But glass is difficult to print, because of the temperatures required and the physical properties of molten glass. That’s why it is impressive that Lios Design, a team formed by MIT students, is well on its way to perfecting molten glass 3D printing.

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3DPrinterOS Announces Sponsorship of OctoPrint to Ease 3D Printer Integration

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Software developer 3D Control Systems, the parent company of 3DPrinterOS, has become a corporate sponsor of open source interface OctoPrint to help ease 3D printer integration processes.

Through its 3DPrinterOS platform, the company will help users and companies integrate Octoprint into their 3D printing workflows by means of its new 3D Printer Software Development Kit. By offering integration as a software service, the partners are hoping to save customers time and money on developing their own software to fully integrate OctoPrint with their systems.

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Should you buy a GaN Power Adapter? Or is it a scam? || Testing GaN FETs!

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In this video we will be having a closer look at GaN FETs in order to find out whether they will improve power electronics products in the future. For that I got myself a commercial GaN power adapter which I will compare with a more traditional power adapter concerning their efficiency. Afterwards I will measure the resistance and switching speed of a proper GaN FET and finally use it in a buck converter circuit to demonstrate the difference to a normal MOSFET. Let’s get started!

How to work with a Real Time Operating System and is it any good? (FreeRTOS, ESP32)

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Using a real operating system to simplify programming with the Arduino IDE. Is this possible and how? Let’s have a closer look!
Operating systems were invented to simplify our lives. But, because they need a lot of resources, they only run on reasonable computers like the Raspberry Pi or a PC. Right? Wrong. Nowadays, we also get operating systems running on our small MCUs. Particularly interesting in this respect is the ESP32 because it has enough power and memory to accommodate such an additional burden. And the best: It already runs a version of FreeRTOS with all our Arduino sketches, and it is easier than you think. Is this useful?

Dynamic Build Platforms for 3D Printers Remove Supports and Save Material

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We’re all too familiar with the 3D printing post-processing step of removing supports, and lamenting the waste of plastic on yet another dwindling reel of filament. When the material is expensive NinjaFlex or exotic bio-printers, printing support is downright painful. A group at USC has come up with a novel way of significantly reducing the amount of material that’s 3D printed by raising portions of the bed over time, and it makes us wonder why a simpler version isn’t done regularly.

In the USC version, the bed has a bunch of square flat metal pieces, with a metal tube underneath each. The length of the tube determines the eventual height of that square. Before the print is made, the bed is prepared by inserting the appropriate length tubes in the correct squares. Then, during the print, a single motor pushes a platform up, and based on the height of the pin, that portion of the bed raises appropriately, then stops at the right height.

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Mictic’s Wearable IMUs Turn Your Movements, Gestures Into Music via Smartphone App or MIDI

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Prototyped on mbientLab Bluetooth IMU technology, the Mictic wristbands look to turn making music into simply moving your arms.

Zurich-based Mictic is looking to change the way people create and interact with music, using a wearable wristband-like instrument dubbed the Mictic and designed to translate gestures and movements into sound in real-time.

“Mictic is the Swiss-made XR [cross reality] wearable that turns your movements into sound,” Mershad Javan says of his company’s product. “It doesn’t matter if you already have a Grammy or have never picked up a musical instrument, with Mictic you’ll be expressing yourself the minute you put the wristbands on and connect via Bluetooth.”

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How to Configure an ESP Mesh Network using Arduino IDE – Communicate among and between ESP32, ESP8266, and NodeMCU

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Internet of Things (IoT) has seen exponential growth over the past couple of years. A new study from International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that there will be almost 42 billion connected devices within the year 2025, generating over 80 zettabytes (ZB) of data. As the number of IoT devices grows; the amount of data grows, along with that, grows the need for superior network instruments; which can support this load.

However, if we consider a common host (like a generic router), it can connect to a limited number of nodes, less than 32 to be exact. And with an increasing number of IoT devices that could be in our home or industry, this is not sufficient. Currently, there are two solutions to this problem: The first one is to use a Mesh Router that can handle a lot more connections compared to a generic one, or we can use a network protocol known as Mesh Network.

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Detecting Pokemon on an Arduino using TinyML and TensorFlow

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Using colors to predict whether this is Pikachu or Bulbasaur…

The deployment environments of a machine learning (ML) model are changing. In recent years, we went from locally training models and running them on standalone scripts to deploying them in massive and specialized setups. However, the industry hasn’t been focusing only on large-scaled-productionized ML, but also its small, portable, and accessible counterpart—for machine learning has found a place in embedded systems.

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