Electronics-Lab.com Blog

Christopher Hawkins made this cool DIY 3d printed stepper motor: [via]

This is a programmable stepper motor and driver that I made out of some nails, magnet wire, neodymium magnets, a digispark microcontroller, and a 3D printed piece that I designed around these things. My goal was to make something about the size of a business card that moved. You can’t exactly fit it in your wallet but it does indeed move. It just a first draft- there’s lots of room for improvement. It has a step angle of 15 degrees (although the way I’m driving it, it is 7.5 degrees.)

3D Printed Stepper Motor - [Link]

Christian Aurich developed a script to import Eagle boards into FreeCAD. This way he is able to design custom enclosures.

The common solution until now is to export your board with eagleUp and assemble it with a case in Sketchup. This also gives you some drawbacks. The most important to me was that the Sketchup files are mesh based like the data used for 3D printing usually, but for further use in CAD systems this is not really usable. You also will not be able to get a STEP model that you can give to your costumers out of this data.

Script lets you import Eagle boards for use in FreeCAD - [Link]

Brian Bailey writes :

Flash memory has very quickly risen from being an obscure memory type to perhaps becoming the dominant memory type for many devices, including music players, cell phones, tablets and now increasingly servers and mainstream PCs. But flash memory does not scale quite as well as the more traditional DRAM that it is replacing. It is thought that DRAM can scale down to 1nm whereas we are already hitting some problems with the scaling of the floating gate in NAND flash. It is not thought that planar NAND can go below 10nm which is only a couple of processes steps away from where we are today.

3D NAND flash is coming - [Link]

3D Gerber Viewer

With this free viewer, you can upload your Gerber files and have a 360 degree view of your PCB design.  Launch the viewer to load your own design or view one of the example boards.  So simple yet so effective! Worth a donate.

3D Gerber Viewer in your browser - [Link]

Tinkercad is the easy way to turn your idea into a professional 3D CAD model in just a few minutes.

Tinkercad is an easy-to-use 3D CAD tool - [Link]

Researchers at TU Vienna have developed a special ‘photografting’ technique that allows molecules to be positioned in a 3D substrate to produce more versatile and accurate sensors for ‘lab on a chip’ devices. The researchers had previously explored new kinds of 3D printers, but 3D printing is not suitable for the envisaged applications because putting together materials from tiny components with different chemical properties is very complicated. Instead, they took the approach of starting with a three dimensional scaffold and attaching the desired molecules at exactly the right positions.

The process begins with a hydrogel with large pores through which molecules or even cells can migrate. Specifically selected molecules are introduced into the hydrogel mesh, and then certain points are blasted with a laser beam. This causes photochemical bonds to be broken where the focused laser beam is most intense, creating highly reactive intermediates that bond to the hydrogel in their vicinity very quickly. The precision depends on the laser’s lens system; the researchers were able to obtain a resolution of 4 µm.

Various molecules can be used, depending on the application. 3D photografting is useful not only for bio-engineering, but also for other fields, such as photovoltaics or sensor technology. It allows precise positioning, in very small spaces, of molecules that bond to specific chemical substances and allow them to be detected in a ‘lab on a chip’. [via]

Photografting: 3D Printing with Molecules - [Link]

Easy to learn, Powerful to use, 3D printing ready - [via]

Cubify Invent – $49 CAD tool… - [Link]

This is a small tutorial on how to make ‘3D Warehouse‘-like previews for your SketchUp 3D Models. It involves installing and using the SketchUp Web Exporter plugin – [via]

This tool will create in the given directory a collection of JPEG pictures and an HTML file containing the JavaScript code to animate the panorama, as well as a ZIP file containing the above files for convenient deployment on a website.

SketchUp tip: How to make 3D previews - [Link]

ZofzPCB is a gerber viewer geared to make verification quick and easy. It shows the board and layers in 3D so it’s easier to spot errors. It can also make each trace a different color so the location is clearer. [via]

• ZofzPCB 3D Gerber Viewer can display 3D PCB model, using your design CAM files.
• Gerber and Excellon files are assigned to layers in auto or manual mode. – Stackup dimensions are fully editable.
  3D approach allows more direct visual examination of your design.
• ZofzPCB 3D Gerber Viewer aided by DirectX and modern graphic hardware, brings impressive real-time images to your desk.
• ZofzPCB recreates netlist and can mark each net with different color.
• ZofzPCB allows you to take mechanical measurements, also between layers.

ZofzPCB 3D gerber viewer - [Link]

Mayhew Labs writes:

Whether you’re a first-time circuit board designer or you’ve been doing it for years, you know how difficult it can be to visualize layout, spacing, and relative size in PCB layout software.  You might have also experienced that uneasy “I hope everything is right” feeling when you submit your design files for manufacturing.  You’re not alone!  I’ve ordered boards with silkscreen text way too small to read, components on the wrong side of the board, and even had my silkscreen and soldermask layers reversed by mistake!  Each of these times, the real problem was not having a good view of the design.

I came up with a solution to these problems and designed (with the help of a web developer) an online 3D Gerber viewer that anyone can use.  If you’re not familiar with Gerber files, they are the files that layout software (like Eagle, Altium, etc) export for manufacturing.  They describe everything pertinent about your board that will be required to actually create your PCB.

View Your PCB Design in 3D Online for Free - [Link]