Hackaday Links: March 1, 2015

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The somewhat regular Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic was a few days ago in San Francisco. Here’s the video to prove it. Highlights include [James Whong] from Moooshimeter, the two-input multimeter, [Mark Garrison] from Saleae, and a half-dozen other people giving talks on how to develop hardware.

[Taylor] made a portable NES with a retron, a new-ish NES clone that somehow fits entirely in a glop top IC. The controllers sucked, but [Taylor] made a new one with touch sensors. All that was required was eight transistors. The enclosure is an Altoid tin, and everything works great.

Here’s a YouTube channel you should subscribe to: Ham College. The latest episode covers the history of radio receivers and a crystal radio demonstration. They’re also going through some of the Technical class question pool, providing the answers and justification for those answers.

[Prusa] just relaunched prusaprinters and he’s churning out new content for it. Up now is an interview with [Rick Nidata] and his awesome printed container ship.

The tip line is overflowing with ESP8266 breakout boards. Here’s the simplest one of them all. It’s a breadboard adapter with stickers on the pin headers. Turn that into a right-angle breadboard adapter, and you’ll really have something.

Here’s something that’s a bit old, but still great. [Dillon Markey], one of the stop-motion animators for Robot Chicken modified a Nintendo Power Glove for animation duties. It seems to work great, despite being so bad. Thanks [Nicholas] for the link.

[David] the Swede – a consummate remote control professional we’ve seen a few times before – just flew his tricopter in a mall so dead it has its own Wikipedia page. Awesome tricopter, awesome location, awesome video, although we have to wonder how a few really, really bright LEDs would make this video look.

Here’s an item from the tip line. [Mark] wrote in with an email, “Why do you put names in [square brackets] in the blog entries? Just curious.” The official, [Caleb]-era answer to that question is that sometimes people have bizarre names that just don’t work in text. Imagine the sentence, “[12VDC] connected the wires to the terminal” without brackets. The semi-official answer I give is, “because.”

12 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: March 1, 2015

  1. If I remember right, it had a lot to do with the lack of capitalization in the beginning as well. It helped the [named] person to stand out in the article. The writers thought it would also helped boost someones moral a bit to see their name highlighted out like that.

    1. I like it, especially the way they also bracket names like [Thomas Edison], [James Watt] and [James Maxwell]. Reminds me that people like this made stunning leaps of intuition and reasoning to build the foundations of modern science and technology, usually from a messy basement or home workshop similar to something most Hackaday readers would probably work in.

  2. Haven’t seen the all the links yet, but damn every hackaday-links day i see dat picture!
    Can we get a copy of that in 1080p(or higher) and preferably without the LINKS text?
    I would really like that as a desktop wallpaper…

    1. I hate the Hackaday links post, it arrives when I’m at work on monday morning and then I get in trouble for reading it instead of working (not really, I just wait until the boss is out of the room :)

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