Hackaday Links: March 1, 2015

Hackaday Links Column Banner

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 :)

Leave a Reply to red65stangCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.