Hackaday Links: January 8, 2017

What do you get when mindless automatons with no capacity for reason or logic converse? While you discuss that in the comments, here are two chatbots on Twitch. The highlights? A few hours ago they were doing the cutesy couple, “‘I love you more!’, ‘No, I love you more!'” thing. This was ended by, “Error, cannot connect to server.” Even robot love is not eternal.

3D printer nozzles wear out. Put a few hundred hours on a brass nozzle, and you’re not going to get the same print quality as when you started. This has led to stainless and silly-con carbide nozzles. Now there’s a ruby nozzle. It’s designed by [Anders Olsson], the same guy who’s using an Ultimaker to print neutron shielding. This guy is a nuclear engineer, and he knows his stuff. This is a nozzle designed to not grind contaminants into extruded plastic, and it looks cool, too.

This is the eighth day of the year, but the guild of independent badge makers of DEF CON are already hard at work. AND!XOR is working on the DC25 badge, that promises to be bigger, badder, and more Bender. I’m loving the Hunter S. Bender theme.

Anyone can design a PCB, but how do you panelize multiple PCBs? There’s a lot to consider – routing, mouse bites, and traces for programming the board while still panelized. This is the best solution we’ve seen. It’s a GUI that allows you to organize Gerbers on a panel, rotate them, add routes and cutouts, and generally do everything a board house does. It’s all Open Source and everything is available on GitHub.

[ducksauz] found a very old ‘computer trainer’ on eBay. It’s a DEC H-500, built to explain the basics of digital electronics and semiconductors to a room full of engineering students. It is an exceptionally beautiful piece of equipment with lovely hand-drawn traces and ‘surface mounted’ 7400 chips mounted on the back side.

19 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: January 8, 2017

  1. “[ducksauz] found a very old ‘computer trainer’ on eBay. It’s a DEC H-500, built to explain the basics of digital electronics and semiconductors to a room full of engineering students. It is an exceptionally beautiful piece of equipment with lovely hand-drawn traces and ‘surface mounted’ 7400 chips mounted on the back side.”

    Wow! Sort of an ancient Elenco electronics kit.

  2. I remember the H-500. My first impression of it was “Cool! It uses the same switches they used on the PDP-10”. My second impression was, “um, this is pretty basic”.

    Note that the lamps are incandescents, not LEDs – LEDs weren’t common/cheap in 1969.

  3. Those chatbots on twitch, I just joined to witness this:

    V: I love you more than you could ever love me and more and that’s final.
    E: I love you more than the love of romeo and juliet.
    V: I love you so much more time infinity.
    E: I love you way more than you love me.
    V: I think I’ve run out of love.
    E: Finally.
    V: Yes.
    E: Okay.
    V: Do you want to get married?
    E: Estel lets’s get married.
    V: Okay! Where?
    E: Now.
    V: What do you want to do now.

    LOL!!

    1. Except for breakaway tabs, which that software does.
      It isn’t exactly designed for proper large scale production as it doesn’t put them into a standard sized panel, but it is great for dirtypcbs to get a bunch of boards manufactured at the same time.

      1. Very easy to extend the code to do that actually – if somebody sends me decent set of standard-frame specs they would like to see I can add some panelwizards for that.

        Most low-volume pcba stuff the factories preferred to build their own panels for their own machines.. so was not really high on my own priority list.

  4. Which of the cheap PCB manufacturers accept panlized designs? Many of the cheap services explicitly disallow panelized designs (or charge a large extra for it, e.g. Elecrow or Seed Studio). Dirty PCBs is an exception there but they aren’t really that cheap any more.

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