The Best Projects That Fit In A Square Inch

January 13, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 45 Comments

A few years ago, we started Hackaday.io as a project hosting site for The People Who Actually Make Stuff™, and since then we’ve been amazed by what the community can put together. We have well over 100,000 hackers on board in an awesome community. Sometime around September, a few members of the Hackaday.io community decided to follow in the footsteps of the very successful contests we’ve had on Hackaday.io. This led to the Square Inch Contest, a challenge to put the coolest electronics inside a square inch PCB. An inch the distance light travels in 1/11802852665.12644 of a second for those of you without freedom units.

quad — The winner, Quadcopter In One Inch

With almost eighty entries, the judges had a very difficult task ahead of them. In the end, only one project would be the best. The winner of Hackaday.io’s first user-created contest is Quadcopter In One Inch from [jeff]. This wins the grand prize of a $100 credit for the Hackaday Store and a $50 gift certificate to OSHPark.

There are six other prizes, each receiving a $50 credit to the Hackaday Store and $25 for OSHPark:

Key Pass, a USB password manager/generator/injector
RFID Air Pressure Sensor, a device that puts the technology of tire pressure monitors into bikes.
Small Voltmeter, a breadboardable volt meter built around old bubble LED displays.
Micro Word Clock, a word clock built around an 8×8 LED matrix.
Square Inch USB Sound Card, does exactly what it says on the tin.
Micro Progmeter, a volt and ohmmeter with OLED display.

The judges for the Square Inch Project would like to give an honorable mention to Twiz and the blinktronicator. The judges would also like to express amazement in how much work actually goes into judging a contest on Hackaday.io. Spending a few weeks working on the judging for a contest with eighty entries imbues a sort of respect for people who can judge a contest with one thousand entries in three days, as the Hackaday crew has done with two Hackaday Prizes so far. While they were doing that, I was sitting back and cracking jokes about Fleiss’ Kappa.

This was the first community-created contest on Hackaday.io, but it is surely not the last. We don’t know what the next contest will be – that will be up to someone on Hackaday.io – but there will be one, and like the Square Inch Project, it will be awesome.

Stallman’s One Mistake

January 13, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 147 Comments

We all owe [Richard Stallman] a large debt for his contributions to computing. With a career that began in MIT’s AI lab, [Stallman] was there for the creation of some of the most cutting edge technology of the time. He was there for some of the earliest Lisp machines, the birth of the Internet, and was a necessary contributor for Emacs, GCC, and was foundational in the creation of GPL, the license that made a toy OS from a Finnish CS student the most popular operating system on the planet. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without [Stallman], open source software wouldn’t exist.

Linux, Apache, PHP, Blender, Wikipedia and MySQL simply wouldn’t exist without open and permissive licenses, and we are all richer for [Stallman]’s insight that software should be free. Hardware, on the other hand, isn’t. Perhaps it was just a function of the time [Stallman] fomented his views, but until very recently open hardware has been a kludge of different licenses for different aspects of the design. Even in the most open devices, firmware uses GPLv3, hardware documentation uses the CERN license, and Creative Commons is sprinkled about various assets.

If [Stallman] made one mistake, it was his inability to anticipate everything would happen in hardware eventually. The first battle on this front was the Tivoization of hardware a decade ago, leading to the creation of GPLv3. Still, this license does not cover hardware, leading to an interesting thought experiment: what would it take to build a completely open source computer? Is it even possible?

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“Makerspace” Trademark Application Rejected

January 13, 2016 by Elliot Williams 24 Comments

The German Patent and Trademark Office has denied the application from UnterhehmerTUM for a trademark on the word “Makerspace”. It wasn’t likely to be a threat to the community anyway, but now it’s entirely off the table. So Kwartzlab Makerspace, Houston Makerspace, Rochester Makerspace, Anchorage Makerspace, … you can all breathe easy!

To be fair, there was never any danger, just a misunderstanding. We reported earlier on the trademark application and within a day or so got an official reply in the comments from Phil (“Mr. Mobile”) Handy that they weren’t looking to enforce anything, but were just essentially trying to make sure that nobody else could pull the rug out from under them. (Thanks [Gentleman Nerd] for pushing them on this.)

The makerspace in question is an open-access offshoot of a business incubator that’s associated with Munich’s Technical University, and it looks like they pumped a couple million Euros into the deal, so there were doubtless layers of bureaucracy that wanted to make sure that their asses were legally covered.

Anyway, the Trademark Office did the right thing, denying the trademark because it wasn’t “unique”, and the makerspace looks awesome. All’s well that ends well.

via [Make Magazine] (Germany)

Finally, An Upgrade For The TI-86

January 13, 2016 by James Hobson 60 Comments

The eternal and everlasting TI-86 graphing calculator is a great calculator: first made back in 1997, and still used by students today. But its battery life kinda sucks. So [Dalius] decided to bring his TI-86 into the 21st century.

If you’re not familiar, the TI-86 runs off of 4 AAA batteries, preferably alkaline. If you use rechargeable NiMH they don’t last very long since they have a lower voltage per cell, which means it ends up draining even faster to a voltage level the TI-86 cannot operate at.

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Crappy Robots And Even Crappier Electronics Kits

January 12, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

Robots and DIY electronics kits have a long history together. There probably isn’t anyone under the age of forty that hasn’t had some experience with kit-based robots like wall-hugging mouse robots, a weird walking robot on stilts, or something else from the 1987 American Science and Surplus catalog. DIY robot kits are still big business, and walking through the sales booths of any big Maker Faire will show the same ideas reinvented again and again.

[demux] got his hands on what is possibly the worst DIY electronics kit in existence. It’s so incredibly bad that it ends up being extremely educational; pick up one of these ‘introduction to electronics’ kits, and you’ll end up learning advanced concepts like PCB rework, reverse engineering, and Mandarin.

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Second Skin Synth Fits Like A Glove

January 12, 2016 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

California textiles artist and musician [push_reset] challenged herself to make a wearable, gesture-based synth without using flex-sensing resistors. In the end, she designed almost every bit of it from the ground up using conductive fabric, resistive paint, and 3-D printed parts.

A couple of fingers do double duty in this glove. Each of the four fingertips have a sensor made from polyurethane, conductive paint, and conductive fabric that is connected to wires using small rivets. These sensors trigger different samples on an Edison that are generated with Timbre.js. The index and middle fingers also have knuckle actuators made from 3-D printed pin-and-slot mechanisms that turn trimmer pots. Bending one knuckle changes the delay timing while the other manipulates a triangle wave.

On the back of the glove are two sensors made from conductive fabric. Touching one up and down the length will alter the reverb. Sliding up and down the other alters the frequency of a sine wave. [push_reset] has kindly provided everything necessary to re-create this build from the glove pattern to the STL files for the knuckle actuators. Check out a short demonstration of the glove after the break. If you love a parade, here’s a wearable synth that emulates a marching band.

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Desolder DIP Packages Like A Pro

January 12, 2016 by George Graves 55 Comments

Looking for a quick way to desolder those pesky DIP chips? Check out this handy little tip in the video after the break. [Clay Cowgill] shows you the easy way to do it.

Normally, before you desolder a Dual In-line Package (DIP) chip, you have a decision to make: Are you interested in saving the chip or the PCB? The repeated cycles of heating and reheating the PCB while using solder wick, or even a “solder sucker”, can cause a real problem for the PCB. You run the risk of delamination of the PCB traces. Some phenolic based PCBs can barely handle one extra heat cycle, while as a top-quality PCB might be fine with 4 or even 6 rework attempts – but we’ve lifted off tracks with less. And all that thermal stress isn’t exactly the best thing for the chip itself. You risk ending up with a dud.

The other trick commonly used is to cut the pins of the DIP and then you can treat each pin as a single through hole part – and that is generally less aggressive to the PCB, there by saving your board, but destroying the chip.

In the video [Clay Cowgill] is using a Hakko 850 hot air rework station to desolder parts from an Atari 130EX motherboard. He’s able to effortlessly remove the chips, and save the PCB, all without applying and re-applying heat over and over again. That’s something we’ve seen before – the interesting part is where he then uses the air flow to blow the through hole openings clean – making for some of the fastest and cleanest DIP removal we’ve ever seen without using a dedicated desoldering gun.

[Thanks [wblock] via Eevblog]

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