Apparently #Arduino ATMega328 #AVR #microcontrollers can sample at 38ksps if you set the ADC clock divider to 32 (16MHz ÷ 32 = 500kHz, and then you need 14 clocks per sample), and still have an ENOB of about 9.5. Not exactly high #precision #electronics but often adequate. And if you’re willing to accept more noise you can do 76ksps with an ENOB of about 8.7. Higher sample rates produce audible clicks when used for audio.
on 02026-09-09prediction from 02014 that #Hamas will acquire #precision #weaponry #drones to strike #Israel’s military and mine its ports instead of killing civilians indiscriminately. #politics
on 02026-04-22#video on making #precision #actuators from cheap stepper #motors instead of US$1 hobby servos to position an array of mirrors to paint light on a wall. Actually he just bought 40¢ stepper-based linear actuators off AliExpress, apparently leftover parts from obsolete cellphones, which turned out to move about 3.2μm per step; he reflow-soldered their flat-flex cables onto custom breakout boards with solder paste and a heat gun. Lacking closed-loop control, he homes the actuators by overdriving them in one direction plus about 200 steps, which stalls the motor but not for long enough to damage it. #hardware #electronics
on 02026-01-13#video on “can I make a #precision component from scrap metal?” by #not-an-engineer. #hoarding #toread
on 02026-01-13#Veritasium #video about #ASML #EUV #photolithography machines, which apparently cost US$400 million each. Explains #optics a bit, including defining NA (as the sine of half the cone included angle) and the Rayleigh equation. Traces the #history through Kinoshita and Andrew Hawryluk, with an #interview with the latter, and extensive interviews with people at ASML. #precision
on 02025-12-31#video on magnetic encoder #precision compared to a stepper motor microstepping; the stepper has about 4° of error.
on 02025-12-17#optics #precision #manufacturing #video on making things flat. Like, optically flat: 50nm peak to valley, 1nm RMS. With a “planetary polisher” or “continuous pitch polisher”, which rotates a huge pitch lap underneath a “bruiser plate,” ideally made of something like Zerodur, carrying the blank or blanks. Helpfully explains that the grooves in the pitch lap prevent aquaplaning, just like the grooves in a car tire #tread. In order to avoid having to run his machine continuously, using a many-pole #brushless motor obtained from #hoarding a washing machine, he uses a very high-viscosity pitch (100× more than normal) in a very thin layer, which he initially flattens with a granite plate for 15–20'. His pitch lap is supported on five rollerblade wheels, and he controls motor speed with a VFD. Matching the angular velocity of the lap and the blank results in constant grinding across the surface.
on 02025-12-17#PDF of a #flexure pivot #precision #mechanism #patent from 01996 for detecting gravity gradients to parts-per-trillion precision for Earth surveying. #toread
on 02025-12-11#video explaining that dipped ceramic disc caps with a black paint hat on the tip are NP0/C0G #precision caps. #electronics #hardware
on 02025-12-09#video listing books on #machining, mostly high #precision stuff, including Precision Hole Location from the Moore Tool Company, as well as their other books; ASME’s Handbook of Industrial Metrology (#metrology); Frank D. Graham’s Audels Machinists and Tool Makers Handy Book [sic sic sic!] from 01941; Franklin D. Jones’s “Old-Fashioned Toolmaking”; Henry Ford Trade School’s Shop Theory from 01934; The Starrett Book for Student Machinists; Goodrich and Stanley’s 01923 Tool and Gage Work; Miller and Russel’s Toolmakers Handy Book; Calvin & Stanley’s Gear Cutting Practice, reprinted by Lindsay Publications; Henriksen’s Jig and Fixture Design Manual; Moore, Davis, & Coplan’s Building Scientific Apparatus; Shigley’s Mechanical Engineering Design (by Budynas and Nisbett); US Steel’s The Making, Shaping, and Treating of Steel; Frank Curtis’s High Frequency Induction Heating; the ASM’s Metallurgy for the Non-Metallurgist, edited by Reardon; Dossett and Boyer’s Practical Heat Treating; the ASM’s Heat Treater’s Guide; and Edward F. Connelly’s Machine Tool Reconditioning.
on 02025-12-09#video on #bootstrapping “#Precision on a Budget” for a US$10 micron-resolution displacement sensor. Specifically he’s using the 8-blade linear-movement flexure Gelbart taught, but made it out of plastic with #3D-printing, with a knife edge in the beam path of an optointerruptor, which he superglued into it once he found the linear region of the optointerruptor. A steel BB on the other end of the linear-motion stage serves as his “stylus” for feeling a shaft or whatever he wants to measure the displacement of. Then he calibrates it with grade-0 (±150nm) gauge blocks from Mitutoyo. He estimates his error at ±5μm over a range of 700μm.
on 02025-12-09#Cylo #video on #precision #flexure #mechanisms, starting with “wobble pins” connected with “pairs of notch hinges”, and cascading two springs of different stiffness, so you apply a large displacement to the weaker spring, which produces a small force in the “colinearly attached” weaker spring, which then moves a four orders of magnitude smaller distance. From Smith and Chetwynd. He proposes the “diving board” flexure, where a force on the end of a cantilevered beam produces a small displacement on the opposite side of its fulcrum, the beam being pinned at its end to form the cantilever support with the fulcrum, the displacement ratio being (16/3)L₂(L₂ + L₁)/L₁², thus asymptotically proportional to the ratio of the squares of the lengths, enabling a large transmission ratio in a small package. His realization uses a cross-leaf flexure for the pin, a bearing ball in a screw for the fulcrum, another bearing ball in a screw to bear on the end, and a wobble bar to a four-bar parallel-movement flexure for the output, which he’s measuring with an LVDT. He even has antibacklash flexures on the threads of his screws.
on 02025-12-09#Cylo #video on books about #machining #precision #mechanisms: Richard Moore’s Holes, Contours, and Surfaces, which is largely about operating jig borers; Douglas Blanding’s Exact Constraint: Machine Design Using Kinematic Principles; CRC Press Basics of Precision Engineering, edited by Leach and Smith; Balasubramaniam, Sarepaka, and Subbiah’s CRC Press Diamond Turn Machining: Theory and Practice; Rowe’s Hydrostatic, Aerostatic, and Hybrid Bearing Design; Kittell’s Precision Mechanics; Evans’s Precision Engineering: An Evolutionary View; Smith and Chetwynd’s Fundamentals of Ultraprecision Mechanism Design; Slocum’s Precision Machine Design; of course Wayne R. Moore’s Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy; and Dave Arneson’s blog post listing “50 tidbits”. Smith and Chetwynd is hard to find.
on 02025-12-09#video #toread about #Alpha-Phoenix’s #precision 2-billion-frame-per-second #cameras
on 02025-10-18#Alpha-Phoenix #video of a laser pointer at 2 billion frames per second. With a single pixel, so he then scans it over the setup with a gimbal-mounted mirror, and repeats the experiment, hundreds of thousands of times (3000 times per second). “Every one of these pixels was recorded separately, as a 1×1 pixel video!” Integrated encoder feedback in the motors was the key. He geared the pitch servo down with a timing belt to get better angular resolution because Katić, Domitran, Horvatek, and Lagator wrote a paper saying timing belt transfer accuracy was fine for angle metrology applications. “After figuring out which LLM code snippets were useful and which LLM code snippets were the reason I’d been frustrated for hours...” His optics train is one lens and one pinhole and, I assume, one photodiode. No, holy fuck, it’s a photomultiplier tube. His data acquisition rig is a benchtop 2Gsps oscilloscope, a Siglent SDS824X HD, 200MHz, 12 bits. He points out that the analog signal path amounts to a 58-frame delay line. To include the synchronization signal on the same line (because the scope can only do 2Gsps on one channel), he used a 500ns coax delay line from the laser. #precision #optics #cameras
on 02025-10-17#Clough42 #video on #precision #manufacturing via #3D-printing, specifically, his filled ABS system (“eSUN ABS+”) shrank by about one part in 300, which ended up being half a millimeter in a 151-mm screw hole spacing part. He measures the hole distance with gauge pins and digital calipers by averaging the outside-of-pins distance with the inside-of-pins distance. “Typical ABS has over 0.8% shrinkage rate. ABS+ is less than 0.4%,” but actually he measured about 0.58% (5800ppm, or about 73ppm/°, assuming the part is at 100° while printing). His proprietary slicer Simplify3D has an option in Tools→Options→Models→Import actions→Scale All to do this automatically.
on 02025-09-29#Marco-Reps #metrology #precision #toread #electronics video on an 0.1-ppb-resolution Guildline Model 9930 direct-current resistance comparator from the 01960s, specifically November 24, 01969, according to the light-beam galvanometer inspection card. At 2'21" there’s a very alarming CERN slide, “The availability of magnetic materials has been declining over the years.
As of 2024 the assembly can be produced, but there is no replacement yet for the obsolete radial shield material (Nanophylm).” #collapse
The key here is that numbers of transformer windings “don’t have temperature coefficients or long-term drifts”, so they’re accurately ratiometric in a way that’s stable until and unless you bend the wire.
Guildline gave him the service manual, SM9930-H-00.
Internally it has an ovenized Weston cell in a test tube, which is used with a second light-beam galvanometer for feedback control of a 50mA current through a critical precision resistor, which is wire wound around a several-kilogram cylinder of brass; the soldered connections to the manganin (?) wires are stuck into a hole deep inside the brass to reduce possible thermal EMFs.
The nanovolt amplifier is a pair of antiparallel photocells powered by a lightbulb whose light is deflected by a third mirror galvanometer, this one 3.6kΩ.
on 02025-09-28#video #toread on ball-joint-based open-source XYZ sub-micron #precision translation #mechanisms using NEMA17 stepper motors and some homebrew magnetic encoders, with 5-arcsecond microstepping in open-loop operation, but using an MT6835 21-bit magnetic angle encoder IC to overcome the hysteresis in the steppers’ laminations and friction. The magnetic encoder uses “magnetic gearing” in the sense that it has 17 permanent magnets with alternating orientations moving past the IC in about a quarter turn, so you get about 68× higher precision (but no absolute readout).
on 02025-09-03“Self-Calibration: Reversal, Redundancy, Error Separation, and “Absolute Testing”” abstract on #precision reversal methods etc. “Over the years many techniques have been developed for accurate measurement of part features without reference to an externally calibrated artefact. This #paper presents a partial survey of such methods for dimensional #metrology, their ranges of application, and their limits. Finally, the paper attempts to distil the common features of the various methods in the hope that this may provide the basis, or inspiration, for development of ‘new’ methods. (...) The methods described in this paper seem to be reasonably well known to the staff at the national measurement institutions and universities but are generally less familiar on the factory floor.”
on 02025-09-02“What’s all this Teflon stuff, anyhow?” Bob #Pease’s war story from 01991 about picoamp bias current testing of #opamps back in the 70s. #electronics #history #precision #metrology
on 02025-09-02#video #toread #metrology #precision “Measuring the flatness of a surface with a laser and a webcam to microns over large surfaces” by removing the lens from the webcam.
on 02025-08-12high #precision inclinometer #electronics that costs €32000
on 02025-08-12#video on #precision #piezoelectric motors
on 02025-03-25#Marco-Reps #video #toread on #precision #metrology power supplies #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-12#Marco-Reps #video on #precision #metrology for evaluating his open-source ADR1000 voltage standards. He ends up #3D-printing #flexures out of ASA for its low creep to preload copper-on-copper rotary-switch contacts to try to keep oxidation down. His stator contacts are bare copper on an aluminum PCB. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-11-12#video #toread about #precision time #metrology with TCXOs, OCXOs, GPSDOs, and a rubidium atomic clock, using #ngscopeclient to visualize the phase shifts, by #azonenberg
on 02024-09-23#video of #Gelbart mostly about spot welding. He recommends 15–25 kVA spot welders at 2½ volts with 5000 amps, for 1–4 cycles for thin ferrous sheet metal, up to 10 gauge, and up to 12 cycles for mounting hardware like screws or, with a conical-hole electrode, balls for kinematic mounts. I’m guessing a “cycle” is 16⅔ms. Talks about how to spot-weld #nitinol into #flexures. Recommends tungsten/copper or chrome/copper alloy tips for your electrodes. #manufacturing #precision
on 02024-09-21#video about scraping the #Gingery lathe bed flat with #precision hand scraping after roughing it in with an angle grinder flap disc
on 02024-09-17#video #toread about #precision lapping three flat cast-iron discs using the Whitworth method.
on 02024-09-17#Breaking-Taps #video about looking at #precision flat surfaces with atomic force #microscopy. His new gauge block has 12 nanometer RMS surface roughness with a total range of almost ±50nm over the 10μm square field of his AFM. A first-surface mirror is 3nm RMS with 36nm range. A λ/20 fused silica mirror blank (λ = 632.8nm) is 2nm RMS, 39nm range. A cheap glass microscope slide is 1.9nm RMS, 62nm range, mostly due to a few big peaks. A silicon wafer is 1.6nm RMS, 17nm range. And a piece of mica (!!!) is 530 picometers RMS, 8nm range.
on 02024-09-17#video #toread on #Cylo’s thrust air-bearing prototype. #precision #mechanisms
on 02024-09-15#video on #Cylo problems in #precision #optics #manufacturing #mechanisms: “Nanoscale air bearing vibrations cause surface finish issues in diamond turned surfaces.” 50 nanometers of vibration gave a “hazy” surface finish, although you’d think it wouldn’t.
on 02024-09-15#video somewhat poorly explained on #3D-printing #kinematic-coupling #mechanisms for #precision #optics. He shows his optical kinematic mount for a long time without showing what he’s going to use it for, instead trying to explain it in words. He has a green diode laser module mounted in a 3-D printed thingy which is pushed apart with screws (with ground and buffed ends rather than ball bearings as you’d expect) running through soldering-iron-staked brass inserts, pushing on flat stainless steel plates, pulled together with tension springs pulling on bits of welding rod, and pivoting on a 7mm stainless steel ball bearing; all the metal parts are inserted into the plastic framework. I think the idea is that you slide this thing around on a surface and the angle of the laser changes to show you the angle of the surface. The laser module is clamped into the thing with an M4 screw tightening a sort of plastic shaft-collar arrangement around it, and a Powell lens (?) turns the laser beam into a line, which I guess lets you determine the surface’s angle in both dimensions at once? He thanks “Zachary from Breaking Taps” for tips. He’s planning to focus the laser through a spatial filter with a microscope lens to clean up the dirty “cat’s-eye” beam. He’s going to put ball bearings in the base of the mount too, to hold it up (bizarrely, four of them instead of three!), and there’s a screw in the middle to hold it down to a screw hole on the optical breadboard. He's planning to replace the plastic with aluminum or stainless steel. In the comments, @bansci recommends using #OpenFlexure designs and captive nuts rather than heat-staked inserts.
on 02024-09-15#video on the Maxwell criterion for #precision #kinematic-coupling explaining how you want potential movement to be nearly perpendicular to the bearing planes
on 02024-09-15#video testing #kinematic-coupling with a laser pointer, except they don’t actually test it. #precision #mechanisms
on 02024-09-10#video #toread on #kinematic-coupling mount for a mirror. #precision #mechanisms
on 02024-09-10#video on #manufacturing #kinematic-coupling for air bearings for #precision #mechanisms. #Cylo ground a three-planed vee out of W-1 tool steel to place a bearing ball in, with slots in the sides for access, then hardened and polished it. I wonder why he didn’t just use three bearing balls? He states (incorrectly, I think) that the small contact surface area between the ball and the planes produces lower static friction.
on 02024-09-10#video on #manufacturing #kinematic-coupling #precision #mechanisms with #3D-printing by #Sonya-Vasquez. Using pairs of round metal dowels and threaded balls.
on 02024-09-10#precision kinematic couplings and related work. “Just using the most ordinary quality kinematic hardware will produce repeatability between the two kinematic platforms in the micrometer (40 micro inch) range. By using super stiff cermet component parts with the geometry and surface texture held to the highest possible quality, repeatability in the nanometer range can be achieved.” The micron range is ordinary bearing-ball tolerances, so I suspect that as long as you’re not swapping out your bearing balls, you can get much better repeatability than a micron. Lots of ideas about #exact-constraint design that I wasn’t familiar with! Not very well written, though; lots of repetition. Practical tips: “A complete ball can be economically installed in a kinematic platform by first machining a pocket that is nearly hemispherical. A female cone can be used, but it is much less effective. This pocket is wetted with a high strength epoxy glue, and the ball is clamped in place with enough force to squeeze out the excess glue. Wipe the excess epoxy glue away with some absorbent material wetted with Isopropyl Alcohol.” Unfortunately this advice is repeated almost verbatim in almost every single entry! Also not very reliable; it claims EDM uses an electrolyte, for example. #manufacturing #mechanisms
on 02024-09-09#video on #optics at #ASML by Huygens Optics, discussing how getting more than one order of diffraction from your shadow mask into your imaging optics can improve the resolution of the resulting image. #precision #manufacturing
on 02024-09-02#Malawey #video on #precision #mechanisms with #3D-printing: “Borrow a Tolerance!” Lots of wisdom about mechanical engineering and which industrial #manufacturing processes have which drawbacks. He shows a 3-D printed collet as one example of a non-borrowed good tolerance. Demonstrates some 3-D printed springs in I guess ABS, but says you can “borrow a [precision] spring rate” from a spring-steel binder clip, which also doesn’t creep at “any temperature a human can survive”. Borrowing smoothness and toughness from HDPE tubing (from water systems) to make hinges; he sharpens it in a pencil sharpener to get it to go through his #print-in-place hinges more easily. His print-in-place approach has support material between parallel horizontal layers which must be broken free with a spatula or hammer.
on 02024-08-27#Steve-Mould #video on what I thought was scanning probe #microscopy but is actually deforming a gel and illuminating its opaque surface with a ring of six lights in front of a camera using the "photometric stereo technique" to measure things to ±4μm #precision.
on 02024-08-26#bootstrapping #machining and #manufacturing with a milling machine made of granite for #precision, the "RIG-CNC"
on 02024-05-21CERN’s 8.5-digit DIY open-source voltmeter, now in the Open Hardware Repository. #electronics #hardware #precision #metrology
on 02024-05-21#Blondihacks did write another article on Hackaday about #machining #precision, this time about rigidity
on 02024-05-20#Blondihacks writing about #machining a test bar on a lathe to test the twist in its ways for #precision
on 02024-05-20the following #Blondihacks column on Hackaday is in /category/hackaday-columns/page/392/ and is from a month later. It explains that “there are parts in all machine tools that (arguably) only lathes can make”, which is why Gingery starts #bootstrapping #machining with one. Well, after metal casting. And it explains that, when turning between centers, the lathe is only imprecise in two dimensions instead of three. That seems like it’s on the right track to why it’s useful for bootstrapping #precision #machining but not a fully adequate explanation. Searching for further columns in /category/hackaday-columns yields no results up to June, which is where I gave up.
on 02024-05-20#Blondihacks explains the #bootstrapping of #manufacturing #precision in #machining: #history (Vaucanson, Maudslay, Andrey Nartov), and promises a series of articles covering the topic comprehensively. But that was six years ago.
on 02024-05-20#video touting “BAXEDM”’s DIY wire #EDM kit for #manufacturing parts with high #precision; getting his “location” fit (ISO H7/h6) for his M-shaped “shaft” requires +0/-16μm tolerance on the “shaft” and +25/-0μm on the hole, so you need about ±8μm precision. He’s using a 300μm nominal kerf width, shooting for ±10μm precision, using 15mm-thick cold-rolled 304 stainless plate. He got the “shaft” almost 10μm under the nominal dimension.
on 02024-05-17#CNC-Kitchen #video about calibrating #3D-printing devices (especially DIY 3-D printers) for #manufacturing #precision, discussing elephant-foot, corner over-extrusion, over- and under-extrusion, and skew (non-perpendicular X and Y axes). He recommends Vector3D’s £5 CaliFlower calibration STL file, which offers inside and outside measurements in X and Y over 50 and 100 mm, and then diagonal measurements of 100mm. With chamfers on the top and bottom to prevent elephant foot.
on 02024-04-03#Putin at #Valdai in #Sochi on #drones in 2014: “Today, many types of high-precision #weaponry are already close to mass-destruction weapons in terms of their capabilities, and in the event of full renunciation of nuclear weapons or radical reduction of nuclear potential, nations that are leaders in creating and producing high-precision systems will have a clear military advantage.” #politics #precision
on 02016-10-11