Hipster hardware! [Bunnie] found something interesting in Tokyo. It’s a LED matrix display, with a few PDIP chips glued onto the front. There are no through-holes or vias, and these PDIPs can’t be seen through on the back side of the board. Someone is gluing retro-looking chips onto boards so it looks cool. It’s the ‘gluing gears to everything therefore steampunk’ aesthetic. What does this mean for the future? Our tubes and boxes of 74-series chips will be ruined by a dumb kid with a hot glue gun when we’re dead.
Is it Kai-CAD or Key-CAD? Now you can share your troubles with the greatest problem in Electronic Design Automation with others.
Speaking of unimaginable problems in EDA suites and PCB design tools, here’s a Git-based visual version control thingy for Eagle. Cadlab.io is a version control system for Github and Eagle that offers visual diff of PCB layouts and schematics. Neat? Yes, especially if you have more than one person working on a board.
How about a 3D printed business card embosser? [Taekyeom] designed and printed a pair of 3D rollers, one of which is embossed with the ‘negative’ of a design, the other with the ‘positive’ of a design. When rolled against each other, these rollers mesh and putting a piece of paper through the pinky pinching machine embosses paper. Add a frame, a handle, and a few zip ties for belts, and you have a fully 3D printed paper embosser.
There’s a new ransomware that encrypts your files and won’t allow you to access them until you pay someone some crypto. Big news, huh? Well, yes, actually. The HC7 Planetary ransomware is apparently the first bit of ransomware that accepts Etherium. ETH is all grown up now.
Aw, snap, 3D printers with automatic tool changing. This is a project from E3D that shows off magnetic (?) extruders and hot ends for 3D printers. You can change your hot end (and nozzle, and filament) in mid-print. What does this mean? Well, swapping filament is the most obvious use case, but the Prusa system might have this nailed down. What is more interesting is swapping hotends, allowing you to print in multiple temperatures (and different materials), and maybe even different nozzle sizes. This is coming to MRRF, the greatest 3D printing con on the planet. MRRF is happening in March 23-25th in beautiful scenic Goshen, Indiana.
A hardware demoscene? Yes, it’s true! #badgelife is a hardware demoscene wrapped up around wearable conference badges. We just had a meetup in San Francisco this week, and the talks were amazing. [Kerry Scharfglass] talked about scaling one Diamond Age badge to one hundred Diamond Age badges. [Whitney Merrill] talked about building badges for the Crypto and Privacy village at Defcon. If you’re into electronics, you are, by default, into manufacturing and this is the best education in manufacturing and logistics you will ever get. The true pros know how to reduce air freight costs by two hundred percent!
Hackaday in a nutshell. It’s why we come here.
Most of these old 74-series chips are pretty useless these days. Where’s the “low-power” in LS chips? And even chips waste even more power. Many microprocessors use less power and have a lot more functionality. I like the way they gave these useless old chips a creative new life, really clever, and a way to save the recycling fee ;)
Maybe not if you’re connecting over baling wire.
if you cant fix it with baler twine, it really is broke
What about those that pronounce it “kicked”?
Well, those people are *wrong*.
I could swear I saw one of the creators on Youtube who called it keykad and said NOT kykad. I thought this was settled science.
https://hackaday.com/2018/02/10/whats-coming-in-kicad-version-5/ “Additionally, this is one of the rare times you get to hear [Wayne] speak. This means the argument over the pronunciation of KiCad is over. It’s ‘Key-CAD‘ not ‘Kai-CAD‘.”
But by all means, keep arguing, everybody.
And oh-by-the-way, it was Benchoff that wrote that.
” Someone is gluing retro-looking chips onto boards so it looks cool. It’s the ‘gluing gears to everything therefore steampunk’ aesthetic.”
And yet oddly enough, no steam is to be found.
I’ll leave this here, re: gluing gears on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA
1) Find the landfill where the 486 plastic cache chips were buried
2) Sell in Tokyo
3) Profit
Still trying to figure out what to do with the Atari E.T. Cartridges
It is pronounced like two fish “koi-cod”.
I always pronounce Ki as in kick without the strong e sound as in key. CAD is the cad in caddy.
I forgot to put a smiley on my comment!
B^)
That version visualization is pretty sweet. Free for open source projects too.
On the card embosser, the zip ties are not acting as belts; they’re bearings. I would modify the design to add gear teeth the synchronize the two dies (dice?) – as shown it could have problems if there was a significant amount of area without any embossing. Especially with those zip ties trying to make both sides turn the same direction.