It doesn’t take much imagination at all to see what a horrible effect this censorship could have on sites like Hackaday. Please do your part to stop internet censorship.

Imagine how many companies would rather us not share with you how our brilliant readers have hacked their hardware to do bigger and better things than they were sold to do. Sites like Hackaday would not survive this censorship.

Since most DSLR cameras now have an IR communication port, [Julius] thought it would be a good idea to build an  IR shutter release remote. He has released the plans for two versions; a single sided hand etched one, and a double sided one to have made professionally. He notes that it should have a range of at least 10 meters thanks to the 100mAh Li-Po battery and a reasonably high power IR LED.  You can download the source code as well as the etching mask and eagle files from the wiki page.  He does note that you may have to change the pattern sent to match your camera.

Most of you probably have a webcam sitting around somewhere, and after all the high voltage projects you’ve done using disposable cameras, we bet you have some camera lenses too. You could always do what [Butch] did and combine the lens from the camera with the webcam to do some up close inspection.

This seems like something we’ve seen several times, but we can’t find it in our archive. Such a simple and quick hack looks surprisingly effective in his shots. If you want to see the details, like where he tied into the webcam’s board to power an external LED, you’ll have to download the PDF.

The folks over at Adafruit had this idea to make “merit badges” for different achievements. One of the major achievements they mentioned was having your project posted to Hackaday. They asked our approval and got it. The badges have finally come in, so we are happy to announce them. You can purchase them directly from Adafruit, along with a plethora of other badges to adorn your projects.

[Phil Torrone] had a great idea though. To celebrate this, they are going to give away 10 badges to the projects that you, our readers, choose to be the top 10. Go on, dig back through the ranks and post links in the comments. We’ll dig through them and try to compile a list. We will then try to contact those people to send them a free badge.

Boeng and the US military found some systems on new P-8 Posiedons to be defective. The culprit: counterfeit electronics. These are scrap parts from 80s-90s electronics that have been re-branded and sold to the government as new.  Many of the parts have been linked to dealers in China, but the Chinese government feels no need to pursue this(according to the article).

There is an amendment to a defense operation bill in the works that requires all parts from china to undergo rigorous inspection and testing before installation.  Regardless of your stance on military action or military spending or whatever political aspect you want to connect this with, we can all agree that dangerous things designed to destroy stuff and kill people should not have defective electrics, right?

[via Adafruit]

There was a recent announcement that G+ opened the doors to businesses and organizations for g+ pages. This means we can have an official G+ page with google’s blessing. We’ve opened one up here. We plan on having “hangouts” from time to time so people can show off what they’ve done. Don’t worry if you’re not into the g+ thing. All stories will still be published here on the site. Maybe we can take a page from Adafruit’s book and record some online “show and tell” sessions to share with you guys.

Of course, sometimes it can be more fun to follow the writers individually, since we are more prone to post opinions and things that aren’t official hackaday info, you can find me,( Caleb Kraft ), pretty easily. For the others, you’ll have to search for their names. None of them are online right now so I can ask permission to link to them.

[Alex], aka [Grovenstien] turned 30 this weekend. After a conversation with his sister, where she asked: “what was that website with the skull that you always look at?”, he thought maybe he’d get a sticker or a shirt. She surprised him with this totally awesome birthday cake! There really aren’t any build details, but you can pretty much see that it has LEDs for eyes as well as some crazy sparkler effects going on as well. What we’re particularly impressed with is the fact that everything was hand cut, even that crisp text at the bottom. Happy Birthday [Grovenstien] and awesome job big sister!

check out the rest of the pictures after the break.

This little beast is named Mechatron. Built by a father/daughter team called Beatty Robotics, the goal was to build something “retro-futuristic, tough, and industrial”. We think they definitely pulled off some of their goals here. Weighing in at nearly 50 pounds, Mechatron is still very agile, as you can see in the video below. He can fire his gun, which uses brass or plastic bullets, at a rate of nearly 1,000 rounds per minute while traveling in any direction thanks to the use of the mechanum wheels. 8 range finding sonar sensors, a laser and a turret that rotates 360 degrees will make sure you don’t elude Mechatron’s watchful eye… and shooting. While we were initially debating how they could make the Mechatron look more reto-futuristic, we all agreed that the lights in the video helped a lot. Maybe a curvy body piece could help too, depending on what era they were hoping to achieve.

[via buildlounge]

Earlier today, [Jack] posted his latest video. He then promptly ran off to the secret Hackaday headquarters to begin work on the next one. Unfortunately there was a weird problem with Youtube which left the video un-viewable. We’ve fixed it now and wanted to let everyone know.

We’ve also been getting lots of questions about the videos, mainly about what future content we’ll cover.  Obviously, we’ve only done some very simple and goofy things so far.  We wanted to start simple to get the hang of everything. [Jack] has let us know that the upcoming videos are going to be a little bit more serious and deal with some different aspects of pcb design. We can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

The robot dog you see above is a mystery. [Daneil Dennet], a professor of philosophy at Tufts University found this in an antique shop in Paris.  Apparently it has no identification and no one has been able to tell him anything about it. It was made in the 50s, and that seems to be all he knows. He’s offering a reward to whomever can reveal its secrets. There’s a full gallery of pictures to browse through that reveal some of the construction, but not a whole lot of the function.

We are just blown away by the construction here. Look at all those switches! Can you imagine how easy to reverse engineer things would have been back then? Surely in the right hands, someone could get this thing working again. Then again [Daniel] might like it kept completely original. If you know something about this robot, you can find [Daniel]‘s contact information here.

Oh, and yes, we realize it looks just like k-9.

We’ve been working hard on this one and finally made a tiny bit of progress.

You will find that comments are now nested.  We can see there are some slight visual issues, but we’re working on it. Please be patient with us.
Another edition you will find is the “report” button. If you find comments offensive, click that button to let us know.

Again, we’re still working through this and have a decent list of quirks that need worked out but it seems to be mostly functional.

Sit down for a moment commenters, we need to talk.
Yes, you all knew this post was coming one day. We’ve talked about this topic at length internally, and we have decided that we’re going to clean up our act. For some time, Hack a Day has been growing a reputation as the prime source of extremely negative, vulgar, rude, sexist, and inflammatory comments in the hacking community. We’ve had complaints from readers (yes there are readers that aren’t commenters, thousands of them) and fellow members of the hacking community about this problem for a long time. [Eliot] even mentioned it back in 2009 when a job applicant expressed concern. We’ve nicely tried to steer things to the positive in a variety of ways, from suggesting commenters to be more supportive, jokingly making a troll detector, and simply stating that the comments need to stay “on topic and nice”.

When we see things like these  tweets by [Jeri Ellsworth], we hang our heads in shame.

She’s not the only one. We actually get this quite regularly. As our readership grows, we see it more and more often. We get emails explaining that people have done a hack but don’t really want to post it because the commenters will just tear it apart in an unnecessarily aggressive and negative way. We have actually had people ask us to remove their projects and comments due to uncivil behavior. Constructive criticism is good, but insulting and angry deconstruction isn’t helpful to anyone.

We’re better than that aren’t we? We are fast, agile and fairly unrestricted in our content. We should be at the center of this community, not on the outer edges, reviled by many for the behavior of a few. Hackaday should be the teacher at the front of the classroom, not the kid in the back throwing wadded up paper at the kids in the front.

What we’re doing:
First off, as far as we can foresee, we will never close the comments section of our web site down. Hackaday should be a home for the entire hacking community and as such, you will always be able to settle in and have a reasonable discussion. We do not want to implement any sort of G+ integration or similar, nor do we want to require registration to leave a comment. We will if we absolutely have to, but lets try to avoid that.

Comment sections and forums have often been a place where negative comments can get out of hand. There are many theories for why this happens, but the result is usually the same: rules and moderation. Many sites have already laid down the law and are adhering to their goals of keeping things civil. We realize that we are to blame if our image is this poor, so we are doing something about it.

From this point moving forward, Hackaday comments will be civil. If you are posting an empty in-joke (“where’s the Arduino?”), a declaration of “not a hack”, a racist, sexist, completely off topic, platform-hating, or personally insulting comment, your post will be deleted. This will be at the discretion of whichever Hackaday staff member happens to see your comment first.

Can you criticize Hackaday?
You can’t walk into a business and start screaming about how much they suck without being escorted out immediately.  Same thing applies here.

We are always hard at work trying to find interesting hacks, makes, repairs, tweaks, videos, etc. that appeal to a wide spectrum of readers. We put this web site together for you, as well as 200,000 other individuals.  Not everything will appeal to everybody. That would be impossible. However, if you don’t like a post or project, just skip it – we’ll have another one ready in short order. We will feature projects that appeal to the seasoned EE as well as the complete beginner. We were all beginners at one time, and it would have been great to have something like Hack a Day around back then to show us hacks ranging from simple to advanced.

From time to time however, Hack a Day can be a less than desirable place to hang out, especially for those who are coming here for the first time. We don’t want to chase off young, creative minds. As a community, we should be helping those that are just starting to venture into hacking electronics.

If you have a problem, email us. You’ll probably actually get a response that way too.  My email is Caleb@ and you’re always welcome to email me personally. Again, please be civil (yep, I’ve had my share of death threats).

Grammar/spelling corrections and dead links:
No need to comment, just email us. A message to team@ will suffice, but you will probably get a quicker response by emailing the author directly. We know we have issues – we’re often so excited about a hack that some little goof slips by. Email us and we’ll fix it. Don’t write a 3 paragraph comment about how important the oxford comma is, or how we’re obviously incapable of functioning because we accidentally flubbed a word. We promise we will never intentionally screw up some grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

What you can will do to help:
Be constructive.

Every project here probably has an area that could be improved, or a part that was done inefficiently. Support your fellow hackers by offering your expertise. Explain why something isn’t working, or how you would improve it. Don’t slam them for their shortcomings. Also keep in mind that different people go about things different ways. Poster X didn’t build something the way you did?  Offer an alternative without being insulting. If someone chooses to use their brand new Core i7 monster system to drive a few LEDs, that’s their prerogative. Inside, we all know that it is not the most efficient use of money or technology, there’s no reason to beat that dead horse in public.

You know what else encourages hackers to do more projects? A pat on the back. I talk to people all the time who say that they just don’t have any constructive criticism for the projects, so they don’t comment. Well, that and they know they’ll bring the ire of the worst commenters if they happen to ask a silly question. Drop in and say what you like about a project. Those positive posts might just be enough to encourage that hacker to take it a step further. How many projects have you seen dropped simply because people thought there wasn’t any interest? Tons. If you like a project, let them know.

To encourage this, the writers are going to be keeping an eye on the comments. Randomly, when we see someone being exceptionally helpful, we’ll contact them and send them a prize. This will most likely be in the form of a hackaday sticker, but we’ll see if we can’t find some other fun things as well.

Help us make Hack a Day great. Please.

[Update: we're working on a comment flagging system currently]

[Update: threading and comment reporting have been added]

Like any other organization out there, we’re always trying to find new ways to reach our audience. Admittedly, we’re not the fastest when it comes to adopting a new social communication site. We’re working on it though, trying to be a bit more interactive … or just plain active.

So, if you’re looking for other ways to get your hacking fix, or see some interesting commentary, find us on facebook, twitter, our own forums, and now G+. We just signed up to G+ and our name is “Hackie Smith”. If you need an invite, email us at theofficialhackaday@gmail.com see below.   Sometimes there’s good discussion in those places that doesn’t end up here on the site.

You can also find several of us spattered across the web in sites like Reddit and Slashdot.

[Update: Our g+ page got shut down. Feel free to find any of the writers on g+. I'll give out invites, look for "Caleb Kraft" or 60mango@gmail]

[Keith] wanted to use his makerbot for some PCB milling, but he ran into a pretty big problem. The platform that his PCB would sit on was mounted with a layer of double sided foam tape and was not perfectly aligned to the head. Not only that, but it would tilt when pressure was applied. This made the result of the milling completely unacceptable. To remedy this, he made a new platform that is not only rigid, but he has made it so that there is the ability to adjust it for perfect alignment via adjustment screws in the 4 corners. At the beginning of each session, he can be absolutely sure that everything is aligned perfectly and his PCBs show a huge improvement. You can see a comparison of the two in the following picture.

[via HackedGadgets]

[Johngineer] found himself in need of an I2C sniffer, but didn’t have one available. Necessity is the mother of invention, so he put together this I2C sniffer sketch for Arduino. The arduino will record what is going on for a set time interval, then dump the data via serial as a .csv. You then have to plot it to see what is going on. [Johngineer] recommends Livegraph, since it is portable and easy. As you can see in the code, the time interval is adjustable, but you have the physical limitations of the RAM on the board to consider. This seems like a pretty handy piece of code stored around, effectively giving you a passable I2C sniffer in a pinch.