Call For Hack Chat Hosts

Every week Hackaday.io features an AMA of sorts. This is the Hack Chat, a chatroom where we sit down with the best in the business to talk about manufacturing techniques, engineering, and how to build the best hardware around. Over the last few months, we’ve hosted a few hardware celebrities, from [Sprite_TM] talking about the ESP32, [Lady Ada] and MicroPython, [Roger Thornton] of Raspberry Pi discussing how to build everyone’s favorite Linux computer, [Samy Kamkar] talking about reverse engineering, and heard [bunnie’s] take on making and breaking hardware.

Now we’re looking for new co-hosts to lead a discussion and be the expert in the room. If you have the skills, we want to hear from you.

We’re looking for experts to lead a discussion on what they’re doing. If you have a new hardware product and want to share the story of taking it to production while getting some feedback from the Hackaday community, this is the place to do it. We’re looking for a wide range of people who will allow us to pick their brains. If you’ve ever designed a 16-layer PCB, we want to know how (and why) you did it. If you’re into building robotics, we want to hear from you. If you’re an embedded systems wizard, this is your time to shine.

If you want to get in on this, send us an email. We’re doing one Hack Chat a week, every Friday, sometime around noon, Pacific time. This is a great opportunity for you to share what you know with one of the best hardware communities on the Internet. It’s also great practice if you’re thinking about presenting at the Hackaday SuperConference in November.

This Week: How do Magnets Work Anyway?

Do you know how magnets work? Of course you don’t, nobody does. But one of the people with the deepest knowledge on the topic is Jeremy Chan who is a Prototype Engineer at Nano Magnetics Ltd. This Friday at noon PST Jeremy leads a Hack Chat on magnetism.

What is there to talk about? Jeremy will cover how magnets are manufactured and magnetized. He’ll cover the different grades of magnets, and the different magnetic sensing mechanisms. He’ll also go into some of the most interesting magnetic phenomenon. How often do you get to hang out with a magnet expert? See you this Friday!

14 thoughts on “Call For Hack Chat Hosts

  1. Are ‘magnetic monopoles’ posible? If you created a ball where the ‘N’ pole is in the middle and the ‘S’ pole is on the outside do the fields always cancel out?

    1. I don’t think so. Magnetism it turns out is an electrical field that occurs due to relativistic effects of motion near an electrical current (well, you can look at it this way, and I choose to do so…). Move one way and the + charges get denser than the -, move the other way, it’s reversed. All that dam finger curling you did in undergrad E&M would not be necessary if you approached it as an E field (OK, I admit I never took the time to work lots of problems this way, but I did a few and it wasn’t so bad). Just calculate the strength of the E-Field due to special relativity and it gets a lot less mind-twisting. Griffiths derives it for us in the 2nd edition of ‘Introduction to ElectroDynamics’, on or around page 490. I’m sure the publisher has pressured him to produce more editions by now – the chapter is ‘Electrodynamics and Relativity’ and the section is ‘Magnetism as a Relativistic Phenomenon’. You might want to dig into Jackson too if you really want to confuse yourself trying to understand magnetism.

    2. … And a pool table with embedded coil (or permanent magnets) under the surface, producing homogeneous magnetic field with ‘S’ pole facing up. I can recognize your line of thinking ;-) You too imagined magnetic levitation table tennis, didn’t you ?
      Well, maybe we could glue individual patches of magnetic tape on ping-pong ball and magnetise them?

  2. I did one of these a while back, talking about radio construction. The thought of it was intimidating, but in practice the questions were straightforward, I had quite a few of them submitted in advance, and nobody tried to floor me with an impossible answer.

    So if the thought of the hackchat itself intimidates you, don’t let it. It’s a straightforward chat in which you answer with stuff you know and are comfortable with, and needn’t be afraid to say so if something goes outside your expertise.

    I know the Hackaday community holds some people with astounding experience. Come forward, and be counted!

  3. To be honest, I started to leave hackchat on fridays specifically to avoid the hackchats. This format makes it really, really hard to get anything useful from it. The host is only one and has limited typing speed, so either they stick to answering previously prepared questions, and there is zero interaction, or they try to actually answer something on the chat, and that quickly devolves into meaningless blabber.
    I would love to see something similar, but in a bit slower medium that allows for composing proper replies, linking to sources, asking for clarifications, etc. I guess something like “ask me anything” on Reddit, or something similar. We could still have a chat there to discuss the questions among ourselves, but the guest would come and compose replies at their leisure over a longer time span.

  4. It is greate to build a couple of knowledge… And do something with it. There is need for more lively chat where a concept is developed as a result of diverse contributors but anchor by an expert. It happens when the expert pass a band of information about a concept like an article uninterrupted and it is opened for questions, contributions and reminder.

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