Laser cutter owners may find this online box design tool which [Jon] built quite useful. It’s got a few more joint options than the Inkscape box design add-on does.
Apparently the US Navy has the ability to bring down drones in a flaming pile of laser-caused death. [Thanks Joshua]
[Michail] has been working on a transistor-based full adder. He’s posted a Spice simulation if you want to learn about the design.
Turn your crystal clear LED bodies into diffuse ones using a wooden dowel, power drill, and sandpaper. The results look better than what we’ve accomplished by hand. [Thanks Vinnie]
Play your favorite Atari Jaguar games on an FPGA thanks to the work [Gregory Estrade] did to get it running on a Stratix-II board. You can pick up the VHDL and support tools in his repo. If you’re just curious you can watch his demo vid.
Members of Open Space Aarhus — a hackerspace in Risskov, Denmark — have been playing around with a bunch of old server fans. They made a skirtless hovercraft by taping them together and letting them rip. Too bad it can’t carry its own power supply
Here’s another final project from that bountiful Cornell embedded systems class. This team of students made a maze game that forms the maze by capturing walls drawn on a white board.
And finally, here’s a unique chess board you can build by raiding your parts bin. [Tetris Monkey] made the board from the LCD screen of a broken monitor. The playing pieces are salvaged electronics (like big capacitors) against corroded hardware (like nuts and bolts). We think it came out just great!
Please put back the full post on the front page these bits are killing the site for me and I suspect many others.
I agree with this. The “links” posts are nice but I would prefer at least a micro-writeup on the sit for MOST of these things. Even if they are posted random and at odd hours for no real reason. Makes the site more dynamic and interesting. Less of a “ive checked 6 times today and only 1 update” kind of site.
We realize you have a social life… But a bordem post for most of us… would get rid of our bordume (at least for a few minutes).
Please put it back. I have yet to find a single person who likes it this way.
Old way was much better.
Agreeing, this new way involves much more clicking to navigate around. Please tell me this isn’t ad-sense driven.. At least you guys haven’t given in and made every article span multiple [NEXT] links with page indexes.
Hear-Hear!
We understand that you guys are reliant on ads for income, but this is one shameless step away from those annoying slideshows that reload the whole page every time. (might as well start reading the makezine blog at this rate).
Yes I too do not like the new layout
Actually, the server-fans /can/ carry their own PSU. We managed to put the fans on a plastic box and it lifts ~5mm up into the air while carrying a 480W server PSU (although we needed a 230V powercord). I’ve been asking for a new video, but the new one has not yet been uploaded to the channel. We tested the lifting capabilities and it can carry about 1.5kg on top of the box, fans and PSU. Quite an achievement for some spare fans. It should be possible to use a lead-acid battery and still get it going.
Can I ask what prompted the change to how the articlles on the front page are now truncated and the clibkable links removed?
I find myself skipping over more articles (some of which might actually interest me) because to read the whole article and find the links I have to click the “[Read more…]” link and then re-read the article from the start because there’s no indication as to where the arcle was truncated!
Truncating the articles on the front page after many many years of have full and complete articles (with links) on the front page is a step backwards in user-friendliness IMHO.
Please restore the full articles.
This.
Good lord, this. You’re not Engadget and you’re not /b/; you don’t need a three millimeter posting height limit to keep up with the tidal wave of data. If Hackaday is so desperate to generate clicks and pageviews for ad revenue it’s willing to beat usability to death and light it on fire like this, tell us and we’ll just donate.
I would rather donate as well
++
Or perhaps some sort of premium member plan that gives back benefits, like no longer seeing advertising and not having to wait for your comments to be approved, etc. I would gladly give say $15 or $20 a year to for example be able to edit my comments to fix typos.
Regardless though please stop with the truncated articles or at least put some kind of indicator after click through so I don’t have to reread the entire lead in trying to find where the break was.
Yeah, I’d do premium just to have less “adnoyance”.
I already use No Script on my work PC to filter Hack-an-Ad, but I also read from home.
I’d gladly donate to get it back to how it was. Hell, I’d donate just because Hackaday is awesome. But please fix it. If it’s for money’s sake, there *must* be something else you can do to offset costs that doesn’t make people quite as upset.
hmm… NOW I get it! It was done this way to blackmail us into buying memberships! B^)
Until you mentioned it, I never noticed. I just watch the RSS feed and go straight to the articles I’m interested in.
Have you noticed the images are missing in the truncated version which is now pushed to RSS?
This.
I absolutely agree. The old hackaday style was perfect
Please put back the full post on the front page these bits are killing the site for me and I suspect many others.
If, like many of us, you’re incredibly lazy then a tumbler does a good job diffusing LEDs. A sandblaster works, but tends to work a little too well.
Everyone needs a tumbler & sandblaster anyway (you’ve already got a drill).
To be honest, I think the new layout looks clean and neat. And until now, I haven’t had to click through unnecessarily – the first few lines have sufficient to determine interest on any particular post.
But the smaller format really isn’t appropriate for “Hackaday Links”. If you can pick format on a post-by-post basis, use the old style for this kind of post. If it’s an all or none template kind of thing, I suppose I’d prefer the old style for everything.
Also noticed some text flow issues, see “Controlling a terminal with Google Voice” on the main page for an example; where there’s a narrow channel of text on the right side of the picture.
With clickable links stripped, the Links post turns into an incoherent block of non-sequiters. Agreed that truncating (or, more ideally, summarizing) the articles for the front page isn’t a big deal, but how about doing that on a sentence or paragraph boundary? The ellipsis disrupts parsing of the text and I find it discourages me from clicking through, rather than provoking interest.
I’ve made an adjustment and links are no longer stripped. That’s the best I can do for now.
Then it’s good enough for now. Flow issues gone too. Thanks Caleb.
Do you mind telling us what’s up? What motivated the change in format? Is it about the ad revenue? Why are you seemingly powerless to fix it?
Also, is http://shop.hackaday.com/products.php?21&cPath=11 still the best way to support you guys? I know stuff isn’t free, and I appreciate everything Hackaday does.
that should be disabled at the moment. Not sure why it isn’t.
Noticed links are back–thanks, Caleb!
Hey Hackaday thanks for the write up it had drive lots of traffic to the new blog over 1,000 hits just awesome i had a lot of fun making the chess set and love playing it. I have at least one more in the works but with a different theme and trying to get more ideas. each set will be one of a kind. Thanks again Tetrismonkey (nate)