The 39th annual Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) is underway, and it kicked off with a talk that will resonate deeply with folks in the Hackaday universe. [Kliment] gave an impassioned invitation for everyone to start making hardware based on his experience both in the industry and in giving an intro-to-surface-mount workshop to maybe thousands of hackers over the years.
His main points are that the old “hardware is hard” cliche is overdone. Of course, working on a complicated high-reliability medical device isn’t child’s play, but that’s not where you start off. And getting started in hardware design and hobby-scale manufacture has never been easier or cheaper, and the open-source tooling gives you a foot in the door.
He tells the story of an attendee at a workshop who said “I kept waiting for the hard part to come, but then I was finished.” Starting off with the right small-scale projects, learning a few techniques, and ramping up skills built on skills is the way to go. ([Kliment] is a big proponent of hand-placed hot-plate reflow soldering, and we concur.)
This is the talk that you want to show to your software friends who are hardware-curious. It’s also a plea for more experimentation, more prototyping, more hacking, and simply more people in the hardware / DIY electronics scene. Here at Hackaday, it’s maybe preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s just nice to hear saying it all out loud.
Kliment has through the time I have known him been a major player in so many Opensource projects it amazes me. I am often more surprised to not see his name on a project than to see it there.
He did an amazing job helping us on the V2 Smoothieboard (very much saved us). We owe more than we can ever repay.
The amount he gives to opensource (and for the most part anyone who needs help) is an example to follow for everyone.
I mostly agree with him. I’m not good at Hardware stuff. But doing things with jumper wires is so annoying, that buying 3 populated boards at JLC is often the easier way to do things. DIY soldering is even cheap for single quantities, even if you have to buy 5 pcbs.
What is hard for me sometimes is selecting components. Like I’m looking for an integrated BLDC driver IC, 5-12V supply, ~2W, sensorless operation, small. JLC has the shittiest search, linked datasheets often in chinese (even if available in english). There are numerous potential manufacturers, where the parametric search has limited filter capabilities. Thats where projects often die for me or are delayed till the next holidays…
Any tips?
Use LCSC search. Same library, better interface.
Is everything available on LCSC ready to use on JLCPCB?
Also I can’t even find the BLDC category o LCSC. There are 11k Motor driver boards. Also 3k “Motor drivers, Controllers” but if I limit that to BLDC, there are only 2 left with stock. I chose a random one on JLC and it was sorted in that category, but not marked as BLDC… So IDK, the search is maybe not universally better?
Sometimes I use this page:
https://yaqwsx.github.io/jlcparts/#/
but it’s also not universally good…
I did not say the search was good. But yeah, I believe all LCSC stocks are available at JLC.
In this case I would filter on 3-phase topology.
Im always quite suprised so many people buy assembled pcb´s there.
Like, its + ~3$ per special component, and ~10$ for setup fee and many (cheaper) IC options are not available at all (+ the guarantee your design will be copied when its good)
“the guarantee your design will be copied when its good.”
Typical pathetic american paranoid brain fart.
Nobody will loose time to reverse engineer your PCB to a schematic AND assess IF your design even works.
And China has plenty of talented electronic engineers who do excellent job.
If you get crap, blame Americans for always wanting the cheapest junk. Not China for producing what they demand !
Whatever you say bro
For this kind of thing, it’s helpful to identify manufacturers that do that kind of thing, and use their parametric search. In this case, Trinamic, TI and ST would be my candidates of choice. Maybe DRV8317 would work for you?
I remember the guy who did all our ordering had the big volumes listing all the manufacturers and their entire catalogs indexed by parts. Expensive subscription but a big time saver.