How To Convert Film Slides To Digital Pictures - Easy DIY setup for any camera

Description

Want to convert slides to digital images? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to convert film slides to digital pictures using the gear you already have. This technique also works for transfer old negatives to digital photos.

Resources (Amazon affiliate links):
Clamp light with aluminum reflector
GE 100 watt equivalent LED lights
Clip on macro lenses

Additional information about camera/lens selection and post processing.

How to shoot to the right (aka ETTR)

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How To Convert Film Slides To Digital Pictures

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Starry," "Touching Moments Two," "Riptide" & "Rocket"

Transcript

Our memories are more like photos than videos. We remember moments. Snapshots in time.

Photos allow us to share these moments with others.

Some may have been there with us and photos give us a common anchor point.

Some may not have been, separated by distance, time or both, and photos allow us to share our experience with them.

Imagine what it’d be like if you could move those memorable moments captured with physical images into the digital world.

You could have a historical record that doesn’t degrade over time.

You could instantly share them others around the world.

You could compile them into new and different ways.

Stick around and I’ll show you how to move from imagination to reality.

In this episode, I’m going to show an easy DIY build to help you digitize either slides or negatives.

Its primary materials are some cardboard and an inexpensive light you can get at the home improvement store or online for less than ten dollars.

And you can use any camera. An SLR if you have one. Or your phone. Or anything in between.

Welcome to the House of Hacks.

If we’re just meeting, I’m Harley and I show you how to create stuff in the workshop.

Sometimes it's out of wood or metal. Today it’s going to be out of cardboard and duct tape.

Basically, we’re going to make a light filled box. This does two things for us.

It diffuses the light nicely so we don't have any hot spots in our final image and it gives us a place to mount either a slide or negative.

Whatever's mounted here gets lit up nicely and then we can use any camera to make an image of it.

I'll show some samples from my SLR and my phone later in the video.

Let’s get started.

The tools we’re going to need are:

• a box knife,
• a straight edge,
• a right angle,
• a pen,
• and a measuring tape.

The materials we’re going to use are:

• some scrap cardboard, (both corrugated and non-corrugated.),
• white duct tape, or you can use white paper or paint,
• shop lamp,
• daylight balanced LED light bulb,
• and glue.

I’m going to be using this inexpensive shop light as a light source. They come in various sizes.

This is one of the smaller ones with an 8.5” reflector. You can get them at any home improvement store or online.

They'll take any kind of light bulb, but I'm going to be using an LED. These run cooler and have great color rendition.

I recommend using daylight balanced for the best color in your final images.

And this one happens to be a 100 watt equivalent.

Since the light is going to be bouncing around inside the box quite a bit, I wanted something with a higher wattage in order to be able to keep the ISO in the camera down lower.

I’ll leave Amazon affiliate links to all of this down in the description below.

First, let’s make a box to contain the light and give us a place to mount the slides or negatives.

This needs to be large enough for the light to mount to and also so there’s enough room for the light to disburse nicely.

Too small and you may end up with some shadows or gradients.

I’m going to use an old cardboard box that was used for shipping.

You could also use some foam board from the craft store and cut it to the desired size.

First I mark a circle where I want to put the light.

Now, I’m going to cut a hole in the cardboard above the reflector for the film mounting point.

I have a number of different film sizes I work with, so I’m going to make this a bit larger than the largest negative I’ll want to duplicate.

In my case it’s 120 film and making it a bit larger keeps the thick edges of the cardboard from casting shadows on the film.

This gives me an idea for the size to cut the rest of the box to.

I want the box to be about as deep as the light is round, so, looking from the top, roughly square.

The idea is to have the light shine in one direction, bounce off the back and then into the film mounted on the same plane as the light.

If we put the light on the opposite side of the film so it's shining directly on it, we might get some hot spots or an unevenness of exposure from the middle of the film to the edges.

Bouncing it this way should help eliminate that problem.

So, this box is a bit larger than I need. I’ll use a box knife to cut it down to size.

I don’t want the inside of the box to be this brownish, cardboard color because that would give us a color cast to the light.

I want it to be as close to a neutral white as possible.

I'm going to line the inside of this box with white duct tape.

But you could also use white paint or glue white paper to the inside. We just need it to be white.

And of course, this step could be skipped if white foam board was used.

Now that the box is white inside, I’m going to tape the box closed.

Next, I’ll tape the light to the box.

To do this, I’m going to first put down a layer of tape on the outside of box.

Then I’m going to tape the light to the tape on the box, making sure to fold over the end of the tape to give me a little pull tab.

By taping to the tape on the box instead of the box itself, it’ll be easy to remove the light without tearing up the box.

We're almost ready to use this, but first we need an easy place to put the film.

In addition to 35mm film cameras, I have a number of cameras that take 120 film and expose it in different aspect ratios.

Some give me square images and some give me wider images.

I’m going to use this thin cardboard to make different holders for the various sizes so I can convert images from any of my cameras.

For each type of film, I cut a large base piece that covers the hole in the box. These can all be the same size.

Then each base gets a smaller hole for a particular film format.

Finally I make holders appropriate for each type of film to hold it in place.

For slides, I cut some cardboard and glued in a U shape around the hole.

Then I glued a small piece of cardboard on the corners to help hold the slide in place.

This will allow the slides to be consistently placed in the same location.

For film, I’ll use cardboard folded to the correct size to make a sleeve and line it with fabric to minimize scratches.

I can then run the film through this sleeve.

Like the area around the opening for the light, I put more tape on the box around the hole where the film holders go and also on the film holders themselves.

Then whatever film holder I need for the project at hand can be taped to the box and removed without tearing anything up.

Now that we have the box constructed, let’s put it to use and get it setup.

I've got a nice stable setup here with the box on the table and the camera on a tripod.

When you set this up, you want to make sure your camera is straight on with the image that you're taking a picture of.

If there's any angle involved at all, one side will be smaller then the other and you'll have distortion that you need to fix in post processing.

They way that I've found easiest to set this up is to level the camera and then raise and lower the tripod until the images were centered between what I was taking the picture of and the camera.

And then I could move the box in and out to change the zoom level until the image completely fills the sensor.

In my case, I have a 35mm camera, full-frame, and a true macro lens and 35mm slides that I'm taking pictures of so I can perfectly fill the image of the slide with the camera.

If you have a different camera, different lens or different film, then the aspect ratios may not perfectly line up and you'll end up with black bars on either the sides or top and bottom in order to see the entire image.

If you're using a zoom lens in your setup, you want to set it to something over 100mm ideally.

This'll give you the least amount of distortion.

If your wider than that, then the edges may get distorted because of the lens optics.

Now that we have the physical setup, we need to setup the settings inside the camera.

There's two things we're concerned with: exposure and white balance.

For exposure, we need to make sure the light's on, set the camera to manual mode and look at just the white light coming out of the box.

We want to set this so that our camera's histogram is as far to the right as possible without actually getting clipped off.

I have a video that talks about this in more detail.

This'll give us the most amount of brightness in our images without glowing out any details.

For white balance, you want to use the custom setting.

How this is setup will vary from one camera to the next, so look in your user's manual to find out how to setup yours.

Now that everything is setup, I'm ready to put a slide in the holder and start making images.

This box will work with any camera.

I just showed an SLR but I've got my phone here and I can use it to just kind of position there and take an image.

It'd be better if I had a tripod for my phone if I was doing a lot of these.

But I don't and hand held works fine enough for demonstration purposes.

I also found that digital zoom works but having a clip on macro lens works even better.

These are inexpensive for cheap ones. They're not perfect lenses but they're satisfactory.

As I mentioned, different cameras, different lenses and different films will give you different aspect ratios and may require some post processing.

Slides of course don't require post processing for color correction but you may need to adjust for crop.

Negatives will need some color correction.

Obviously you need to invert the colors and I go into a lot of details about different camera lenses and the effects that they have and also how to post process negatives in this video over here.

I'll see you over there.

Down here is a video that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.

And when making things, remember...

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How to make a portable air hose reel cart

Description

Wondering about how to build a portable air hose reel cart? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows an install method for his new air hose reel that's portable and uses a new-to-him construction material: SteelTek. There are many ways of mounting an air hose reel but sometimes you don't want it in a permanent location. This option will allow you to move the reel around. This is a small test to see the applicability of this product for future SteelTek projects.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to make a portable air hose reel cart

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "The Whip Theme", "Pump", "There It Is", "Guiton Sketch", "Cool Rock"

Transcript

There's got to be a better way.

Hi. If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we use our God-given creative talents in the workshop to make things out of wood, metal, electronics and other things like that.

Today we're going to be working on a storage system for this compressor hose.

As part of the car project, I picked up a new air compressor. And along with that came a number of new things that are related to the air compressor itself. Things like the air hose and other miscellaneous bits and bobs that are used to connect hoses together and things like that. And eventually I expect I'll be getting some more air tools and I need a place to store those. To help keep the garage organized and less cluttered, I need a place to store some of this new stuff.

I got a ReelWorks hose reel to store the hose on but now I need a place to mount this and I don't want to mount it permanently to the wall anywhere in the garage because I don't really have a good place for it in there and I don't know exactly how I'm going to be using it, where I'm going to be using it, so I wanted a portable solution.

So today I'm going to look at making a cart that this hose reel will mount to and then will also have additional storage that possibly in the future might be expandable to store additional air tools and things like that in that I purchase in the future.

Let's open this up, get some basic dimensions on it because it will be kind of the core around which everything else will be built.

[Unboxing ReelWorks hose reel]

This is what came in the box: the reel, a manual, a strain-relief spring, a connector fitting and the handle.

A little tiny bit of assembly required.

When I ordered the air hose, I also ordered an air filter and a three foot section of hose.

The idea was I will mount the air filter close to the hose reel and that will filter out any contaminants that are in the air line.

I'll get another hose, probably in the 20 foot range, that will go from the air filter to the air compressor.

From my research online, that's a good length to have between the air compressor and the air filter in order to allow time for anything that's suspended in the air flow to condense out and for the air filter to actually be able to be effective.

Then I'll have the longer hose that will wrap onto the hose reel to move around for actual use of the compressed air.

So, let's assemble this, make some drawings and see what we come up with.

[Hose reel assembly]

[Drawing cart elevations]

OK. Here's the concept.

We've got elevation drawings for the front, the top and the side.

The hose reel goes right here and we've got castors on the bottom.

It's 19 inches from the edge of this handle to where this curves up and it's 13 inches tall from the base here where it mounts to the outside edge and it's 11 inches around in this direction.

So the idea is to build a square base that has castors on it depicted by the circles down there so that'll allow it to roll around and have a plate on the bottom that the reel will mount to and then also have two supports that come up and that are joined at the top and it's going to be offset from the center.

It'll be behind the reel.

And that will be what the air filter connects to and then there will be a hose that runs from here down around into the bottom of where it mounts to to connect the incoming air from the air filter into the hose reel.

And I may think about putting some sort of storage media on top here somewhere.

I need to be careful about how big this is though because I don't want it to go above the handle, so it might look like something along these lines where it covers a portion of that space to hold odds and ends and nick-naks.

I don't want it to get all the way to the edge though otherwise it'll make it hard to spin the handle.

So that's the general idea. Let's go see if we can find some parts to build this with.

[Parts shopping]

[Parts cutting]

I was walking through Lowe's the other day in the plumbing department and noticed this really cool material that I hadn't seen in there before.

It's a whole system for making things with. It doesn't really belong in the plumbing aisle as far as I'm concerned other than it has these tubes that kind of looks like plumbing but it's not a plumbing system at all.

It's really a, basically a, Tinkertoys for adults.

They have all kinds of different connectors. These happen to be Ls and I also got some intersection connectors that have one pipe go through on the one direction and has another connector attach something in.

But they have all kinds of different connectors for Ts and multiple intersections coming together in pretty much all the different configurations you can think of of pipes coming together.

They also have adjustable connectors where you can have set screws and put the pipe in and adjust it to different angles depending on the purposes for whatever it is you're building.

It seems like a really cool system.

According to the web site, it comes in 3/8, 3/4 and 1-1/4 inch sizes and in galvanized and in black.

Now my local Lowe's only had it in 3/4 and 1-1/4 sizes and only in galvanized so I haven't seen the smaller size or the black.

For this particular project, the 3/4 is what I got because that was the smallest size they had but it's really overkill.

3/8 probably would have been way more than sufficient.

Each of the connectors have set screws in them that are tightened with an Allen wrench that tighten down onto the pipe and hold it in place.

It seems to be a really solid, robust system and I have a number of projects that I think it'll work really well for but I wanted to use it on this smaller project just for testing things out.

It is not a very cheap system.

These eight connectors and a 10 foot section of pipe ran me about $70 so compared to like copper or PVC that you might use for a similar application from the plumbing aisle where the connectors are in the cents to dollar range, it's much more pricey but it also is much more robust, rigid system.

The pipe comes pre-cut in various lengths from about I think 4 inches was the smallest in I think 2 inch increments up to a certain size and then it started going in foot increments.

The pipe was pretty expensive when purchased in the smaller sections so I ended up getting a 10 foot section which was the longest I could get and the cheapest per foot and then just cut it up to what I needed for this project.

I cut three 20 inch sections for the cross members and four 15 inch sections for the width and the height and now it's just a matter of connecting everything together with the Allen wrench.

Let's put it together.

[Frame assembly]

OK, that's all there is to it. This is a real sturdy system. I'm real impressed. Like I said, this is way overkill for this particular project, but don't have to worry about the hose reel going anywhere.

The next step is to cut some plates to mount things to.

A buddy of mine gave me some of these surplus moving dollies that his company built.

It's basically a piece of heavy duty sheet metal with a bunch of castors on the bottom.

The castors are a little gummed up, a little worn out possibly, possibly just dirty.

So, I'm going to tear these apart, clean them up and cut the metal down to fit in here and use a couple of the castors for the four corners of the hose reel.

[Moving dolly disassembly and cleaning]

OK, that worked really well.

I first started by trying to spray some WD-40 in one of them and realized that was going to take a lot of WD-40 and a lot of fiddling with things so I had the idea to take it upstairs and run them under some water and within seconds of putting them under water they immediately freed up.

That tells me that the thing that was really keeping these things from moving freely was dirt and probably soda.

These things were used to move soda vending machines around and my guess is they just got a lot of soda in there that kind of caked the dirt in there and made everything really gummy because, like I said, within seconds of putting it under the water they were moving freely.

I did use some soap and tried to clean things up pretty well. Had a lot of dirt come out of it as I was running it through the water and now I've kind of soaked them in WD-40 to drive all that moisture out, to lubricate them a little bit and to protect the surfaces from rust.

WD-40 makes a great solvent and water displacer. It does a little bit of surface protection and lubrication but that's not really it's strength.

So, once this WD-40 kind of evaporates out and displaces all the water, I'll get some oil, 3-in-1 oil or something similar to that, and just kind of lubricate this up for long term lubrication and protection.

The next step is to take those metal plates and cut it down to try to make it fit for the frame that I made earlier.

[Metal cutting, filing and drilling]

[Final assembly]

Well, that's a lot more compact and I think it's going to be easier to use. I don't have to unroll the whole hose in order to use things and we've got the filter on it now.

I didn't get it as far done as I would have liked. I would have liked to have painted the wood and gotten the storage system on top but I just have other projects I need to get to and ran out of time.

So, I'm going to call this good for now. Eventually I can do those as future upgrades.

Over here are some videos that YouTube thinks you're going to enjoy and remember when making things, as this demonstrates...

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Compressed Air Vacuum Cleaner - An easy DIY project

Description

Need a small vacuum cleaner for tight spaces? Have an air compressor handy? In this episode of the #HouseOfHacks, Harley shows how to make a DIY compressed air vacuum cleaner out of some junk parts and a couple fittings from the hardware store.

Skip to the project build.

Related videos:
Make your own manometer.
Dishwasher replacement.
Why a new air compressor.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Compressed Air Vacuum Cleaner - An easy DIY project

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Rocket"

Transcript

Do you ever have a small mess in the shop that you need to clean up?

Something that may be in an out of the way place where a big shop vac can't get to?

Or maybe a big shop vac is too much power and you something that doesn't have quite as much suction?

Well today at the House of Hacks we're going to make our own DIY vacuum cleaner.

That uses compressed air as a power source.

[Intro]

Hi. Harley here.

Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to make a DIY vacuum cleaner that runs off compressed air.

Now, compressed air may not necessarily be the most intuitive thing to use to make a vacuum cleaner with.

So, we're going to first talk about the physics of how this operates and then we're going to get into the making of this vacuum cleaner with just some surplus parts that I had lying around and a couple fittings from the hardware store.

If you're not interested in the physics and you want to get right into the build, there's a link in the description below that will take you directly to that part of this video.

Now, let's take a look at the physics.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a family named Bernoulli that had a number of prominent mathematicians and scientists who contributed to our better understanding of the natural world.

One of these people was Daniel Bernoulli who recognized that in a fluid system, as the speed of the fluid increases, it's pressure decreases.

He published this discovery in a book on hydrodynamics in 1738.

This principle is used in many of our modern devices from airplanes to computer disk drives.

Later in the 18th century, along came Giovanni Venturi.

He was a man of many accomplishments and among his achievements, he applied Bernoulli's principle to a device consisting of tubes that demonstrated the effect of pressure differentials.

In 1797, he published a treatise on hydrodynamics wherein he described this effect that was eventually named after him, the Venturi Effect.

This picture illustrates what happens.

When air goes through these tapered tubes, as the cross section of the tube decreases, the speed of the fluid must increase. And as Bernoulli's principle indicates, the pressure must correspondingly decrease.

When a U shaped tube, known as a manometer, is connected between the slower moving fluid and the faster moving fluid, the pressure differential causes the gauge's fluid to rise on the low pressure side and drop on the high pressure side.

This low pressure can be used in many applications, from the gas furnace that heats your home to the hose attachment to drain your waterbed to the vacuum cleaner we're going to make today.

OK, to make this, I have some scrap tubing I scavenged off the old dishwasher that I replaced.

Here's some water line and some drain line, I think. This might be water supply line. I don't remember right now off the top of my head.

I have an old T-shirt that was in the scrap bin.

I've got a blow gun for my new air compressor that has a nozzle on it.

I've got an old 2 liter pop bottle.

And I've got a T fitting and an L fitting.

So let's get making this.

OK, the way this is going to work is we have the blow tube that will connect into the end of a piece of flexible pipe.

The flexible pipe will have the T connector on it.

The bottom of the T connector will have this black pipe that will we'll use as the vacuum hose.

And the other side of the T will be the discharge that everything that is picked up by the vacuum will go through as well as the compressed air as it is escaping.

That will go through a tube that has the L bracket on it and the other side of the L bracket will have the bottle on it with a hole cut out to let the air come out so it doesn't escape and all the debris will collect in the plastic bottle.

That's the theory anyway.

[Time lapse of build]

[Example of use]

If you like workshop related projects, like making vacuum cleaners out of some trash and a couple parts from the hardware store, or other things made out of wood, metal, electronics, photography, things of that nature, hit the subscribe button down below and YouTube will notify you next time I upload something.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How to make a rustic table top

Description

Have some reclaimed wood? Need a rustic table top? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows a simple way to make a DIY rustic table top using reclaimed wood. A nice thing about doing a rustic table top build is you don’t have to be terribly precise, which allows you to move quickly. The reclaimed wood table top made in this video was done in a couple hours. It’s primary purpose is for product photography, so it doesn’t need legs or finish. If you wanted to use this in a living space, you’d want to spend a bit more time on it to finish the edges, put a sealer on it and craft some legs.

Subscribe for more DIY videos.

Watch my most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to make a rustic table top

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

Today at the House of Hacks we're going to make a rustic table top that can be used for a variety of purposes.

[Intro]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers.

Harley here.

A couple months ago, I helped by buddy Rich install a new backdrop wall in the studio that used some reclaimed wood.

You may have seen this in a couple of the videos last month.

Well, he wanted to create a table top to do product shoots with using some of this old reclaimed wood so it kind of matched the wood backdrop.

So today we're going to take some of that left over wood and combine it with some wood I scavanged from a built-in cabinet that was in the studio space before we tore it apart and combine that together to make this new table top.

In our case we want the table top to be portable so we're not going to put any legs or anything on it and just set it on available surfaces when we need to set it up.

But if you want to do something like this, you could use it as a end table or a coffee table or something of that nature.

Let's get started.
I first vacuumed all the loose dirt, sawdust and miscellaneous things off the fence wood.

Then I sorted the boards into an order that looked nice.

Next I glued and nailed each board onto the plywood substrate.

I trimmed the uneven edges off with a circular saw.

And gave it a final vacuuming to get all the sawdust off.

So this is what the table looks like setup in the studio.

And here's a test product shot using it.

If you're going to use this idea in a living space, you'd probably want to finish it off with some sort of Verathane or something just to seal it in.

Keep the splinters out of your hands. That sort of thing.

And you probably also want to put a edge banding around it to just trim it off and finish it.

For the purposes of this project, we don't need to do any of that.

The way it is is plenty sufficient because it'll never be in an image and you won't see it.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How to select a power supply

Description

A contact recently asked "How do I select a power supply for my project?" Once a project moves past the prototyping state using a battery, picking the power supply is a critical element of a personal electronics project. In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley discusses the four items to consider when choosing a surplus power supply.

For a written transcript, go to How to select a power supply

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

What do turkey basters and power supplies have to do with each other? And why am I in the kitchen? We're going to talk about all this today at the House of Hacks.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

I was recently asked about selecting a power supply for a hacked together project. There are four things when selecting a power supply that you need to pay attention to.

The first two are simple. The last two are a little be more complex but not too bad.

First is the input, you need to make sure that your power supply is appropriate for what you're plugging it into. For the most part you're going to be using locally supplied power supplies, probably surplus stuff that you've scavenged, and in that case it's going to work because it's designed for your local environment. In the United States that's going to be 110 to 120 volts AC. Pretty much anywhere else in the world, with a few exceptions, it's 220-240 volts AC. So the first item, while it's there and you need to be aware of it, it's really simple.

The second item has to do with the output. Power supplies can either output volts AC, indicated by VAC or a squiggly line or it can output in volts DC, indicated by VDC or a straight line. And you need to select the type of current that's appropriate for your project. Most, if you're doing low-voltage stuff, most of those are going to be DC, but depending on what you're working on, AC may be appropriate for your case.

The last two items are volts and amps. And these are similar to properties of water systems so we'll look at that here in a minute with the turkey baster and the sink.

But in short, volts have to do with, kind of, the pressure that the electrons are pushing into your circuit. And you need to make sure that this is appropriately ranged for your circuit you're working with. Generally circuits have a minimum and maximum voltage. You need to make sure that the voltage coming from the power supply fits within those parameters.

And finally there's amperage. Amperage is more like capacity. So it has to do with, as long as your power supply meets minimum requirements for your circuit, you're good to go. Your power supply can provide more amps than you need, it just can't provide less. So, make sure you know what your circuit requires and your power supply at least meets that minimum.

For example, a circuit that requires 250 milliamps (ma) would work just fine with a power supply that supplies 250 ma, 500 ma or 100 amps. Any of those would work just fine. However, if the power supply says it's rated for 100 ma, that's going to be too little and your circuit won't work right.

So let's go look at the sink and see how water correlates to volts and amps.

OK. As I mentioned, volts have to do with the amount of pressure and amps have to do with the capacity.

If you think about a water system, there's a whole lot of capacity here. The city has probably thousands of acre-feet of water that are sitting behind these pipes. They can provide pretty much all the capacity that we need for our little simple demonstration here.

It also has a lot of pressure. We control the pressure by the knob here, the lever, and if we put this on here and we give it just a little bit. This would be like not enough volts where we have a really weak stream here and the circuit isn't going to work right because it just doesn't have enough oomph to make it work.

If we increase the pressure to just the right amount, we get a nice flow without overdoing things and we reach a point of equilibrium here where the equivalent of the circuit is going to work just fine because we have the right amount coming in, not too much, not too little and everything's going to work just fine. And this is kind of equivalent to the volts controlled by the lever here.

If we increase the voltage too much though, what we end up with is a lot of leaks. And when you have leakage in electronics, that's a really bad thing. Things tend to blow up, burn up, magic smoke escapes, all that kind of good stuff. So you really don't want to put too much voltage to your circuit. You want to have just the right amount of volts that you get a good flow like that without having too much.

But now in all these cases, regardless of how much voltage I had, how much pressure I had coming out of the circuit, I still had huge, huge, vast amounts of water sitting in reservoirs behind these pipes. And that's equivalent to your amps. Your circuit will only use the amount of amps that it needs, regardless of how much capacity your power supply has.

So in summary, there are four things to look at: the input voltage and current and the output current, volts and amps. Make sure that you have the sufficient volts within the range that the circuit is designed for and that you have at least the minimum number of amps that are required by the circuit and you're good to go.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

How to easily make a vacuum port for the central shop vac system

Description

The previous vacuum port design was less complicated than blast gates but still took a bit of work. Today Harley shows how to make a new and improved design that is much faster to make and easier to use.

How to quiet a shop vac

For a written transcript, go to How to easily make a vacuum port for the shop vac

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Incidental: “Private Eye" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Sound effects: living-room-light-switch by alienxxx at http://freesound.org

Transcript

In my video about “How to quiet a shop vac” I showed how I made hose connection ports modeled after a house central vac system. Today at the House of Hacks, I’m going to show a "new and improved” design that is simpler and faster to make.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

After making the first couple ports for my central vac shop system, I was perusing the plumbing department at the local home improvement store and saw these connectors.

They’re rubber couplers to go between two 2” rigid pipes with hose clamps on both sides. I realized they were the right diameter for the vacuum hose so I picked up a couple of them, along with some 45 degree connectors.

Back in the shop I cut a short piece of pipe and glued it into one side of the 45 degree elbow.

I attached the rubber connector to the other side and tightened the hose clamp down tight.

The other hose clamp I adjusted so the vacuum hose was a snug fit but could still be removed.

I trimmed the corners off a 4x4 and put it in the lathe.

Next I turned it into a tapered plug that fit into the coupler with a snug fit.

Finally I connected a chain to the plug so it wouldn’t wander off too far and get lost.

All told, I spent about 1 hour on this, including the trip to the home store. If you did an assembly line, you could make a bunch of these in pretty short order. This is by far much a much easier port to make than my previous design.

In conclusion, I’d love to hear in the comments about a time a designed of yours evolved over time.

If this is your first time here at House of Hacks: Welcome, I’m glad you’re here. We’d love to have you subscribe. I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark and through this channel I hope to inspire, educate and encourage makers in their creative endeavors. Usually this involves various physical media like wood, metal, electronics, photography and shop projects like this one. If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I’ll see you again in the next video.

Thanks for joining me on our creative journey. Now, go make something. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just have fun!

How to make artificial wind

Description
For Arduino Day 2014, I show how I solved the problem of enjoying wind chimes when there's no wind. Using an Arduino of course.

For a written transcript, go to How to make artificial wind.

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Incidental: "Feelin Good" and "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

Today at the House of Hacks, I'm going to try to make some artificial wind.

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

Over the years we've been give a couple wind chimes that are really nice. They're tuned to specific chords to be really full and resonating. They've got some beautiful wood on them and they're just too good to put outside in the weather and get all beat up. So we have them hanging here in the corner of the living room. During the summer they work really well. We open the house up and the breeze comes through, particularly the evening breeze, they fill the house with nice chimes. During the winter we close everything up and we just don't get to enjoy them. We've tried using an oscillating fan and haven't really been able to get this to succeed very well. The fan itself is very loud and makes a lot of noise. And we haven't been able to get it adjusted so that it has the right amount of turbulence to ring the chimes in a way that sounds pleasant, it's either not enough or too much.

I've had an idea floating around in the back of my mind for awhile to do this electronically. I thought this was a good time to try to do this. March 29th is Arduino Day. It's hard to believe that Arduino's been around for 10 years, but this is its 10 year anniversary--10 year birthday. I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a project that featured an Arduino and also solved a problem that I have. So let's go down to the workshop and see what we can dream up.

The idea I've had floating around in the back of my mind now for awhile is to take an Arduino, connect it to a servo motor and on the servo motor attach a pulley. To the pulley attach some monofilament thread and connect the other end of that to the wind chimes. So, when the pulley turns, it pulls back the wind chimes and then it releases them and they can swing. The Arduino gives us the ability to add some randomness in there to pull it back different amounts, to release it at different speeds, things of that nature, to give us some randomness and hopefully give us a nice pleasing sound that we have some control over.

I think what I want to do is have a total of 12 inches that it pulls on the monofilament thread. And I want to do that in a quarter turn of the pulley. That means the pulley circumference needs to be 48 inches. To get the radius to make the pulley we have the 48 equals 2 pi R. We need the radius so we divide 48 by the 2 pi. Well pi is pretty close to 3 for round numbers and that gives us 48 divided by 6 which gives us a radius of 8 inches.

So let's go build this.

A thin strip of scrap wood fills the need perfectly for an ad hoc 8 inch compass.

I mark the boundaries of the center based on the outside dimensions of the cardboard.

The center of the circle needs to be inside these bounds.

And now just draw the circle.

I cut the cardboard freehand around the marks. I needed 3 disks in total.

Since this is just a prototype, proof-of-concept, scrap cardboard and some hot glue make fast and cheap building materials.

Mark the direction of the corrugations so when the disks are glued together they can be rotated 90 degrees to each other. This will give them some strength.

Three circles, one slightly smaller than the others will make a rough pulley.

I've found hot glue is a great tool for fast construction.

Now I need to find the center. If I'd been thinking I could have placed the other side up and had the hole from the compass already marking the center for me.

A dab of glue attaches a small servo.

The servo is mounted in a hole cut to its size.

A couple weights holds the cardboard tight to the motor mounts while some glue is applied.

A spare piece of Romex wire will work as a mounting bracket for the Arduino.

The wire just slides into the corrugations of the cardboard.

And holds the Arduino in place.

The circuit is simple. The servo connects to the breadboard. To connect the servo to the Arduino, the yellow data wire goes to pin 9, the brown ground wire goes to ground and the red power wire goes to 5 volts.

And it's ready to test.

Load the example servo to sweep a 180 degree arc and upload it to the Arduino.

Fail!! It worked a couple times and then stopped. Something broke. I had to help it get unstuck on one side.

So I needed to swap motors. The first one I tried had a 1.6 kg/cm torque rating and plastic gears. The replacement is rated for 3 kg/cm and has metal gears. It's also quite a bit more expensive.

So I used screws to mount it instead of glue.

I still used glue for the pulley though.

And this works much better. No manual intervention required.

A dollop of hot glue holds the monofilament string in place.

Another piece of bent Romex wire acts as a guide for the string.

Load a slightly modified version of the sweep example.

And a real test…

Yay!! It works!!

For a hacked together prototype, I'm pretty pleased with the way this turned out.

If you're interested in seeing this prototype turned into a finished project, let me know down in the comments below what it is you find fascinating about this project, what you'd like to see in a follow-up video, that type of thing.

Until next time, go make something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun!


And finally "Thank you" if you've already subscribed. You can configure YouTube to notify you when new episodes are available. If you aren't subscribed and you want to get those notifications, be sure to subscribe. It's free and contains zero calories. Finally, if you're interested in this series, go ahead and hit the "like" button, that'll let me know there's interest in this.

Thanks for watching and until next time, go make something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun.

How to make an air lottery ball machine

Description
Need an air lottery ball machine? In this episode I show how I approached the task of making a homemade lottery machine including what I did and why.

Other homemade lottery machines on YouTube:

• The first one I found. So-so performance.
• A more complicated but better operating one.

Video this lottery machine was built for: Super-Minilypse Utah, USA (iStock drawing)

Playlist of other project overviews.

Music under Creative Commons License.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Incidental: "Awesome Call" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

Today at the House of Hacks we're going to look at making a lottery machine.

[music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-It-Yourselfers. Harley here.

One Thursday a while ago, my buddy Rich gave me a call. He asked if I could build him a lottery machine. I told him, "yeah, I thought we probably could do something." Then he asked if he could have it by Monday. It turns out he was responsible for organizing an event that had a limited number of slots. Of course they had more people interested in attending than they had slots available and he needed to some sort of drawing. He thought a corny, 70s style video would kind of spice it up. Make it a bit more interesting than just pulling names out of a hat and reading them. So I asked for a budget and told him I'd get back to him.

I first went online to search for places where I could rent something like this. That would have been the easiest, most straight-forward thing to do, particularly given the time constraints. But I didn't find anything so the next thing I looked for was something where somebody had done something similar. I did find one YouTube video and that's all I found. It was a pretty simple build and didn't really work too well. Since then I've actually found another one that worked very, very well. It was a little complex probably, particularly for the time frame I had; it looked like it was microprocessor controlled. Links to both of those are in the description below.

So this is what I came up with. I found a couple punch bowls the right size at Walmart; they're just plastic bowls in the party section.

For the output side where the balls come out, I found that the shielding tube that you get for fluorescent tubes that's designed to keep the glass from showering down on top of you if you shatter the glass, those tubes are the perfect diameter for ping pong balls. And so I just cut a hole in the top and hot glued this in.

For causing all the air to blow around inside I decided to use the blower side of my shop vac. Because the shop vac is so loud, we decided we probably didn't want it on set right next to this while we were filming so we got twenty foot piece of dryer duct; the exhaust vent stuff. And that stretches out and like I said I think it's twenty foot long if I recall correctly.

I cut a piece of wood and drilled a hole in it with a piece of screen over it that would fit in the bottom of the punch bowl where we also drilled a hole. And then I attached -- this is a union that's designed to connect two of these together. I just cut slits on one side and folded those tabs down and hot glued it to the wood.

Then on the other side where the vacuum blower connector has to go in I went to the plumbing aisle and found a rubber drain piece. I don't know exactly what it's used for but the inside diameter was perfect for the vacuum hose and the outside diameter perfectly fit inside a three inch PVC coupler. So I got a reducer that's the three inch to four inch reducer thing and hot glued the rubber part inside here. And then this fit perfectly in the four inch dryer duct.

I hooked everything together and all the balls bounced around very nicely. We were really pleased with the way it turned out in the end. We did have to drill some holes in here and also in here to relieve some of the pressure. We found it was over pressurizing this and it tended to want to blow the assembly apart. But once we put enough holes in here it reduced the pressure enough that the balls bounced around perfectly and came out without any problem but we didn't have problems with it wanting to burst apart.

So, I'll put everything together and we'll take a look at how it works.

[music]

Thanks for watching. Please "Like" if you enjoyed this episode and here's a playlist of other project overviews like this one. Here at the House of Hacks we cover a wide variety of maker related topics. Subscribe if this interests you. Leave a comment or question below; I'd love to hear from you.

So, until next time, go make something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun!