Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams are onto an LCD and motors kick this week. Two different LCD screen teardowns caught our eye as one lets you stare into the void while using your iMac and the other tries to convince us to be not afraid of de-laminating the LCD stackup. On the motors front, it’s all about using magnets and coils in slightly different ways; there’s a bike generator that uses a planar alternator design, a dynamometer for testing motor power that itself is built from a motor, and a flex-PCB persistence of vision display that’s a motor/display hybrid. We round out the episode with talk of the newly revealed espionage saga that was Crypto AG, and riveting discussion of calculators, both real and virtual.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

Episode 057 Show Notes:

New This Week:

• Elliot is building an audio shield for an FPGA board and misusing SMD sizes along the way:

YIL: 1206 and 0603 both fit on 0805 footprints, with a little TLC, but it's a lot more fun to solder-bridge the small ones than to heat-the-tracks-and-pray with the 1206s. All's well that ends well… pic.twitter.com/16CEYgRKKJ

— Elliot Williams (@hexagon5un) March 4, 2020

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• A Tetris To Be Proud Of, With Only A Nano
  • tetris.ino uses #include to populate array
  • artwork_tiles.h show the values getting populated
• New Depths For IMac Repair
  • Transparent LCD Makes Everything Look Futuristic
• DIY Monochrome LCD Hack Doesn’t Go As Planned
  • Cellphone Screen Repair in the Shenzhen Markets of Huaqiangbei
  • Hacker Abroad: Cellphone Repair In Huaqiangbei And A Huge Meetup At Seeed
• Latest FlexLED Milestone Refines The POV Display
  • Superconference Interview: Carl Bugeja
• This DIY Dynamometer Shows Just What A Motor Can Do
• Generate Power As You Ride With A Bicycle Planar Alternator
  • [PDF] Design and Testing of a Permanent Magnet Axial Flux Wind Power Generator

Quick Hacks:

• Mike’s Picks:
  • Giant Clock Made In The Nick Of Time
  • Never Miss A Doorbell With This Notifier
  • A Tin Can Phone, But With Magnets
  • DIY Ribbon Element Upgrades A Studio Microphone
• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Dog-Harnessing The Power Of Walkie Talkies
  • ESP32 Rover With PCB Chassis Is Ready To Roll
  • A Minimal ESP8266 Digital Picture Frame

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Project Rubicon: The NSA Secretly Sold Flawed Encryption For Decades
• The Last Scientific Calculator?