Ask Hackaday: What’s In Your Garage?

February 23, 2024 by Al Williams 28 Comments

No matter what your hack of choice is, most of us harbor a secret fantasy that one day, we will create something world-changing, right? For most of us, that isn’t likely, but it does happen. A recent post from [Rohit Krishnan] points out that a lot of innovation happens in garages by people who are more or less like us.

He points out that Apple, Google, and HP all started in garages. So did Harley Davidson. While it wasn’t technically a garage, the Wright brothers were in a bicycle workshop, which is sort of a garage for bikes. Even Philo Farnsworth started out in a garage. Of course, all of those were a few years ago, too. Is it too late to change the world from your workbench?

Basement

We’d argue basements are at least as important (although in southern Texas, they call garages Lone Star basements since no one has proper basements). The real point of the article, though, isn’t the power of the garage. Rather, it is the common drive and spirit of innovators to do whatever it takes to make their vision a reality. A few hundred bucks and an oddball space has given birth to many innovations.

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Mommy, Where Do Ideas Come From?

October 8, 2022 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

We wrote up an astounding old use of technology – François Willème’s 3D scanning and modeling apparatus from 1861, over 150 years ago. What’s amazing about this technique is that it used absolutely cutting-edge technology for the time, photography, and the essence of a technique still used today in laser-line 3D scanners, or maybe even more closely related to the “bullet time” effect.

This got me thinking of how Willème could have possibly come up with the idea of taking 24 simultaneous photographs, tracing the outline in wood, and then re-assembling them radially into a 3D model. And all of this in photography’s very infancy.

But Willème was already a sculptor, and had probably seen how he could use photos to replace still models in the studio, at least to solidify proportions. And he was probably also familiar with making cameos, where the profile was often illuminated from behind and carved, often by tracing shadows. From these two, you could certainly imagine his procedure, but there’s still an admirable spark of genius at work.

Could you have had that spark without the existence of photography? Not really. Tracing shadows in the round is impractical unless you can fix them. The existence of photography enabled this idea, and countless others, to come into existence.

That’s what I think is neat about technology, and the sharing of new technological ideas. Oftentimes they are fantastic in and of themselves, like photography indubitably was. But just as often, the new idea is a seed for more new ideas that radiate outward like ripples in a pond.

Where You Are Influences What You Invent

October 16, 2021 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

[Timon] just bought a new PCB holder setup for his desk. It’s one of those spring-loaded jobbies that uses strong magnets to hold it up off of a work surface, and is made of metal so that you can reflow solder with it. It might be a clone of the PCBite, but frankly I’ve seen similar projects everywhere — it’s hard to say who is copying whom these days. And anyway, that’s not the point.

What struck me about the holders was their tops: they’re repurposed 3D printer nozzles. That’s a fantastic idea because they’re non-magnetic, heat tolerant, relatively uniform, and probably dirt cheap in Shenzhen, where the designer of this board almost certainly lives. Maybe he or she even works in a 3D printer factory? Who knows? But the designer almost certainly looked around for something that would fit the bill, and found the nozzles.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of innovation in all things board-holding coming out of China over the last decade. I can remember when the state of the art was a vise-like affair. (I still like my homebrew Stickvise clone for low, square jobs.)

But with cell phone repairs requiring the ability to hold and reflow ever stranger board shapes, there’s been a flourishing of repositionable holders. The pawn-pillar designs are cool, but their utility rests firmly in how strong the magnets are. (I wouldn’t buy the one linked, for instance, without trying it first-hand.) I really like the look of these jobbies, which have springs to maintain tension. (Will the 3D-printed plastic jaws hold up to multiple reflows?) Anyway, it’s no coincidence that the inventors of these devices are in the cellphone-repair capital of the universe.

The old saying is that necessity is the mother of invention. But what if, like with real estate, it’s location, location, location? You dream up solutions to problems around you, using parts that you’ve got on-hand. If that sounds a little fatalistic, consider that you can also change your surroundings, either physical or even virtual. Are you in the middle of the right challenges and opportunities?

Reinventing The Wheel

May 8, 2021 by Elliot Williams 62 Comments

You’ve got a perfectly working software library to do just exactly what you want. Why aren’t you using it? Some of you are already yelling something about NIH syndrome or reinventing the wheel — I hear you. But at least sometimes, there’s a good enough reason to reinvent the wheel: let’s say you want to learn something.

Mike and I were talking about a cool hack on the podcast: a library that makes a floppy drive work with an Arduino, and even builds out a minimalistic DOS for it. The one thing that [David Hansel] didn’t do by himself was write the FAT library; he used the ever-popular FatFS by [Elm-ChaN]. Mike casually noted that he’s always wanted to write his own FAT library from scratch, just to learn how it works at the fundamental level, and I didn’t even bat an eyelash. Heck, if I had the time, I’d want to do that too!

Look around on Hackaday, and you’ll see tons of hacks where people reinvent the wheel. In this superb soundbar hack, [Michal] spends a while working on the IR protocol by hand until succumbing to the call of IRMP, a library that has it all done for you. But if you read his writeup, he’s not sad; he learned something about IR protocols. This I2C paper tape reader is nothing if not a reinvention of the I2C wheel, but isn’t that the best way to learn?

Yes it is. Think back to the last class you took. The teacher or professor certainly explained something to you in reasonable detail — that’s the job after all. And then you got some homework to do by yourself, and you did it, even though you were probably just going over the same stuff that the prof and countless others have gone through. But by doing it yourself, even though it was “reinventing the wheel”, you learned the material. And I’d wager that you wouldn’t have learned it without.

Of course, when the chips are down and the deadline is breathing hot down your neck, that might be the right time to just include that tried-and-true library. But if you really want to learn something yourself, you have every right to reinvent the wheel.

Harnessing Your Creativity Hack Chat

November 16, 2020 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, November 18th at noon Pacific for the Harnessing Your Creativity Hack Chat with Leo Fernekes!

(Note: this Hack Chat was rescheduled from 10/14/2020.)

You’re sitting at your bench, surrounded by the tools of the trade — meters and scopes, power supplies and hand tools, and a well-stocked parts bin. Your breadboard is ready, your fingers are itching to build, and you’ve got everything you need to get started, but — nothing happens. Something is missing, and if you’re like many of us, it’s the one thing you can’t get from eBay or Amazon: the creative spark that makes innovation happen.

Creativity is one of those things that’s difficult to describe, and is often noticed most when it’s absent. Hardware hacking requires great buckets of creativity, and it’s not always possible to count on it being there exactly when it’s called for. It would be great if you could somehow reduce creativity to practice and making it something as easy to source for every project as any other commodity.

While Leo Fernekes hasn’t exactly commoditized creativity, judging from the breadth of projects on his YouTube channel, he’s got a pretty good system for turning ideas into creations. We’ve featured a few of his builds on our pages, like a discrete transistor digital clock, the last continuity tester you’ll ever need, and his somewhat unconventional breadboarding techniques. Leo’s not afraid to fail and share the lessons learned, either.

His projects, though, aren’t the whole story here: it’s his process that we’re going to discuss. Leo joins us for this Hack Chat to poke at the creative process and see what can be done to remain rigorous and systematic in your approach but still make the process creative and flexible. Join us with your questions about finding the inspiration you need to turn parts and skills into finished projects that really innovate.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 18 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

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Add Creativity To Your BOM: Hack Chat

October 12, 2020 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 14th at noon Pacific for the Harnessing Your Creativity Hack Chat with Leo Fernekes!

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 14 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones baffle you as much as us, we have a handy time zone converter.

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Ideas To Prototypes Hack Chat With Nick Bild

July 27, 2020 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, July 29 at noon Pacific for the Ideas to Prototypes Hack Chat with Nick Bild!

For most of us, ideas are easy to come by. Taking a shower can generate half of dozen of them, the bulk of which will be gone before your hair is dry. But a few ideas will stick, and eventually make it onto paper or its electronic equivalent, to be played with and tweaked until it coalesces into a plan. And a plan, if we’re lucky, is what’s needed to put that original idea into action, to bring it to fruition and see just what it can do.

No matter what you’re building, the ability to turn ideas into prototypes is what moves projects forward, and it’s what most of us live for. Seeing something on the bench or the shop floor that was once just a couple of back-of-the-napkin sketches, and before that only an abstract concept in your head, is immensely satisfying.

The path from idea to prototype, however, is not always a smooth one, as Nick Bild can attest. We’ve been covering Nick’s work for a while now, starting with his “nearly practical” breadboard 6502 computer, the Vectron, up to his recent forays into machine learning with ShAIdes, his home-automation controlling AI sunglasses. On the way we’ve seen his machine-learning pitch predictor, dazzle-proof glasses, and even a wardrobe-malfunction preventer.

All of Nick’s stuff is cool, to be sure, but there’s a method to his productivity, and we’ll talk about that and more in this Hack Chat. Join us as we dive into Nick’s projects and find out what he does to turn his ideas into prototypes.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 29 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you down, we have a handy time zone converter.