Reverse-Engineering A Superior Chinese Product

January 1, 2015 by Matt Freund 116 Comments

It makes an Arduino look like a 555. A 364 Mhz, 32 bit processor. 8 MB RAM. GSM. Bluetooth. LCD controller. PWM. USB and dozens more. Smaller than a Zippo and thinner than corrugated cardboard. And here is the kicker: $3. So why isn’t everyone using it? They can’t.

Adoption would mandate tier after tier of hacks just to figure out what exact hardware is there. Try to buy one and find that suppliers close their doors to foreigners. Try to use one, and only hints of incomplete documentation will be found. Is the problem patents? No, not really.

[Bunnie] has dubbed the phenomenon “Gongkai”, a type of institutionalized, collaborative, infringementesque knowledge-exchange that occupies an IP equivalent of bartering. Not quite open source, not quite proprietary. Legally, this sharing is only grey-market on paper, but widespread and quasi-accepted in practice – even among the rights holders. [Bunnie] figures it is just the way business is done in the East and it is a way that is encouraging innovation by knocking down barriers to entry. Chinese startups can churn out gimmicky trash almost on whim, using hardware most of us could only dream about for a serious project.

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Parametric Spherical Speakers Are Not A Moon

January 1, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

A good speaker enclosure is not just about building a box out of plywood and covering it with carpet, although playing with 1F capacitors is pretty cool. No, for a good speaker enclosure you need the right internal volume, the right size bass port, the right speaker, and it should definitely, certainly, not be a moon. [Rich] figured out he could do all of this with a 3D printer, resulting in the NOMOON: The NOMOON Orbital Music-Making Opensource, Openscad-generated Nihilator.

This work is a continuation of earlier work that designed parameterized speakers in the shape of Borg cubes. Now [Rich] is on to Borg scout ships, and this version has everything you would expect for speaker design.

The NOMOON is available on the Thingiverse Customizer with variables for the internal diameter, the volume of the enclosure in liters, wall thickness, speaker hole, bass port, and wire holes. Of course a customized design is also possible with a stock OpenSCAD installation.

[Rich] has printed a few of these not moons and even with a speaker with terrible bass response, he has a pretty good-sounding setup as far as Youtube videos go. You can check that out below.

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Trinket EDC Contest – The Deadline Approaches

January 1, 2015 by Adam Fabio 2 Comments

We’ve got just under 2 days left in the Trinket Everyday Carry Contest. With 79 entries, and t-shirts going to the top 50 entrants, you’ve got pretty darn good odds of getting a shirt out of all of this! The design is great too, [Joe Kim] really did a great job with it!

shirt-low

The idea is simple: Build small, pocketable projects which are useful everyday.

We explained everything in our announcement post, and the full rules are available on the contest page. But just as a reminder, the main requirements are

The project Must use a Pro Trinket, or a board based on the open source Pro Trinket design.
The project must have at least 3 project logs
The project must have at least one video
The Hackaday.io project must include enough documentation to allow an average hobbyist to replicate the project

There are already some awesome entries vying for the top prize, but who knows – someone may come out of nowhere and walk away with a sweet Rigol ds1054z oscilloscope!

The contest deadline is January 3rd, at 12:00 am PDT. The clock is ticking, so stop waiting, and go build something awesome! Good luck to everyone who enters!