BOM Cost Optimization And Tindie Badge Engineering

October 6, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

For the last few months, I’ve been up to my neck in electronic conference badges. This year, I created the single most desirable badge at DEF CON. I also built a few Tindie badges, and right now I’m working on the logistics behind the Hackaday SuperConference badge. Sit tight on that last one — we’re doing something really, really special next month.

Most badge projects are one-off production runs. This is to be expected from a piece of hardware that’s only meant to be distributed at a single event. The Tindie badge is different. It’s now a thing, and we’re building multiple badges for all the cons and conferences Hackaday and Tindie are attending for the rest of the year. This means I have the opportunity to do hardware revisions on the Tindie badge. Right now I’ve built three versions of the Tindie and we’ve distributed about two thousand of these kits at DEF CON, Maker Faire New York, and the Open Hardware Summit.

After about two thousand units, I think we finally have this down. This is how I designed three versions of hardware in as many months and cut the BOM cost of each badge in half. This is bordering on a marginally impressive piece of engineering, and a great lesson on BOM cost optimization.

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Adding Screws To A DIY CNC Machine

October 4, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

When it comes to CNC machines, your SureFine has screws on its axes, and the Bodgeport does too. A shopbot has an amazing rack gear system, but when you start to dig into the small CNC routers available for under $2,000, you’ll only find belts moving a router back and forth. This isn’t to say belts won’t work — you can create a fine CNC machine with bits of rubber. However, belts stretch, they wear out, and if you want more precision screws and racks are the way to go.

The WorkBee CNC machine is the first desktop CNC router we’ve seen that uses screws instead of belts. It’s a project on OpenBuilds, and a reasonably well-configured machine is now available from ooznest for about £1,700 ($2,200 USD), or just a bit more than other CNC routers that consist of a Dewalt router and some aluminum extrusion.

The WorkBee CNC is based on the OX CNC machine, another cartesian router machine built around the OpenBuilds aluminum extrusion. The OX, while a fine machine for DIY tinkerers, uses belts. The WorkBee trades them out for screws, and should gain better accuracy, much lower maintenance, and deeper cuts. Screws are slower, yes, but do you really need that much acceleration when routing a thick piece of wood?

SiFive Announces RISC-V SoC

October 4, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

At the Linley Processor Conference today, SiFive, the semiconductor company building chips around the Open RISC-V instruction set has announced the availability of a quadcore processor that runs Linux. We’ve seen RISC-V implementations before, and SiFive has already released silicon-based on the RISC-V ISA. These implementations are rather small, though, and this is the first implementation designed for more than simple embedded devices.

This announcement introduces the SiFive U54-MC Coreplex, a true System on Chip that includes four 64-bit CPUs running at 1.5 GHz. This SoC is built with TSMC’s 28 nm process, and fits on a die about 30 mm². Availability will be on a development board sometime in early 2018, and if our expectations match the reality of SiFive’s previous offerings, you’ll be able to buy this Open SoC as a BGA package some months after that.

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Friday Hack Chat: Hardware Games

October 4, 2017 by Brian Benchoff No comments

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking all about hardware games. What’s a hardware game? Anything where we use hardware, electronics, or code for user interaction. This is a vast, vast topic and there are a lot of tips and tricks that go into making a unified experience that’s both valuable and can stand up to the rigors of any crowd.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Phoenix Perry], lecturer, CS PhD researcher, game company owner, artist, programmer, game designer, and activist. For every human-computer computer interaction to teaching computer science, [Phoenix] has had her hand in it. She founded Code Liberation Foundation, which teaches women to program games for free. She’s a lecturer in Physical Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, she’s given talks at Hackaday conferences, she’s created low-poly trees,

For this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about integrating hardware into gaming, or turning the idea for a game into a reality with hardware. We’ll be discussing game design, hardware design for games (need to make it idiot-proof, after all), building communities, and educating others.

As usual with Hack Chats, we’re taking questions from the audience. If you have a question that simply must be answered, here’s a discussion sheet. Fill that out, and we might get around to your question

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will be going down noon, Pacific time on Friday, October 6th. Wondering why the Brits were the first to settle on a single time zone when the US had a more extensive rail network and the longitude so time zones made sense? Here’s a time zone converter! Use that to ponder the mysteries of the universe.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Open Hardware Summit This Thursday

October 4, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

This Thursday, Hackaday and Tindie are going to be rolling into Denver to attend the 2017 Open Hardware Summit.

What’s the big draw for the Open Hardware Summit? The attendees, of course. These are the people who make all the cool bits and bobs in Open Hardware. [Prusa] will be there, Seeed will be there, OSH Park and OSH Stencils will be there (yeah, they’re different companies), BeagleBoard will be there, and Great Scott Gadgets will be there. This is the place you want to be if you want to meet the heroes of Open Hardware.

Of special interest at the Open Hardware Summit this year will be the state of certification talk. Last year, a certification process for Open Hardware was started. If you’re not aware, this is a nearly intractable problem. Copyright covers design files, not implementation, and design patents only cover ornamental fluff on the stuff that actually makes things go. Creating a certification for Open Hardware is exponentially harder than arguing over an Open Source license, and we’re excited to see how the first year of the Open Hardware Certification went.

If you’re going and hanging around in Denver until Friday, there’s a road trip being planned by Sparkfun to visit the awesome companies along the Front Range. The itinerary includes a trip to Sparkfun, lunch at a brewery, and a trip to Lulzbot. Basically, Sparkfun rented a bus. The deadline to RSVP passed long ago, but I’m renting a van for the Hackaday and Tindie crew, and I’m sure there’s going to be some overflow. After the event on Thursday, there will be a Women Who Hack Dinner and Drinks. Hackaday’s evil overlords are graciously providing the drinks and appetizer there.

This Synth Is Okay

October 3, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

While this 3D printed synthesizer might just be okay, we’re going to say it’s better than that. Why? [oskitone] did something with a 555 timer.

The Okay synth from [oskitone] uses a completely 3D printed enclosure. Even the keys are printed. Underneath these keys is a small PCB loaded up with tact switches and small potentiometers. This board runs to another board loaded up with a 555 timer and a CD4040 frequency divider. This, in turn, goes into an LM386 amplifier. It’s more or less the simplest synth you can make.

If this synth looks familiar, you’re right. A few months ago, [oskitone] released the Hello F0 synth, a simple wooden box with 3D printed keys, a few switches, and a single 4046 PLL oscillator. It’s the simplest synth you can build, but it is something that can be extended into a real, proper synthesizer with different waveforms, LFOs, and envelope generators.

The sound of this chip is a very hard square wave with none of the subtleties of A,S,D, or R. Turn down the octave knob and it makes a great bass synth, or turn the octave knob to the middle for some great chiptune tones. All the 3D models for this synth are available on Thingiverse, so if you’d like to print your own, have at it.

You can check out the demo of the Okay synth below.

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Teaching Electronics With A Breadboard Badge

October 3, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Over the last year, the production of homebrew electronic badges for conferences has exploded. This is badgelife — the creation of custom hardware, a trial by fire of manufacturing, and a mountain of blinky LEDs rendered in electronic conference badges. It’s the demoscene for hardware, and all the cool kids are getting into it.

At this year’s World Maker Faire in New York, there was a brand new badge given out by the folks at Consumer Reports. This badge goes far beyond simple swag, and if you take a really good look at it, you’ll see magic rendered in breadboards and wire.

The Consumer Reports breadboard badge is simple and apparently designed to introduce kids to the world of electronics like the old Radio Shack, ‘100-in-1 Electronics Projects’ kits. Unlike most of the ‘beginner badges’ we’ve seen, this isn’t a badge where you only solder a few LEDs and a battery holder to a PCB. This is a breadboard badge. This is hacking with 74-series logic. This is an impressive piece of engineering given away by Consumer Reports. No one saw this one coming. I don’t think anyone at Maker Faire realized there’s now a viable way to create breadboard badges.

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