Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams unpack great hacks of the past week. We loves seeing the TIL311 — a retro display in a DIP package — exquisitely recreated with SMD electronics and resin casting. You might never need to continuously measure the diameter of your 3D printer filament, but just in case there’s a clever hall-effect sensor mechanism for that. Both of us admire the work being done in the FPGA realm and this week we saw a RISC-V core plumbed into quite the FPGA stack to run a version of Doom originally played on 486 computers. And we’re getting excited for the three ring circus of engineering acrobatics that will land NASA’s Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars next week.
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)
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Episode 105 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- A Modern Homage To The TIL311 Display
- Ice40 Runs DOOM
- Actually, it was 32 kB on a 16 kB CoCo now that I think about it. Sorry.
- Motor Controller Reverse Engineering Releases Smoke
- Simple Sensor Makes Filament Measurements A Snap
- And Hall Effect is the voltage perpendicular to the main current. I said current. Oops.
- Raspberry Pi Takes Over Volvo’s Integrated LCD
- 3D Printer? Laser Cutter? CNC? Yes, Please
Quick Hacks:
- Mike’s Picks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
You mentioned about kicad cross hatch fill. Its purpose used to be on old wave soldered boards without selective plating (i.e. whole pcb is covered in solder => cheaper) . It was to relieve bubbling under the solder mask by breaking up the fill. Solid Copper planes are obviously better (more copper lower impedance) but it would bubble horrendously. Modern boards moved to have selective plating so you only tin the vias and though hole components avoiding all this bubbling and using less solder in the process.
Thanks!
Makes sense!
I still stand by my statement that it also looks boss. :)