Fixing a hoodie zipper with a drinking straw and hot glue.

Hack That Broken Zipper!

February 9, 2025 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

We’ve all been there. That sad day when the zipper on our favorite hoodie, bag, or pair of pants breaks in some seemingly irreparable way. But there is hope, and [Magic Stitches] is gonna show you how to make some common repairs using household items and, in some cases, just a little bit of easy hand sewing. After a warm up with a kitchen fork, the video moves on to more significant problems.

The first problem — a chewed-away zipper bottom — is quite common, but requires no sewing to fix. As you’ll see in the video below, all it takes is a drinking straw, some hot glue, a lighter, and a pair of scissors to recreate the plastic bit that keeps the zipper from splitting in twain.

Now the second issue concerns a pair of pants wherein the head has come off the static side of the zipper. This one seems impossible to fix, but [Magic Stitches] cuts into the static side about five teeth from the bottom, slides the head back on, and sews the bottom of the zipper together.

This one we take a little bit of an issue with, because it assumes that you can get your jeans on over your hips without needing the zipper head to be fully down. But what else are you going to do but ~~throw the jeans away~~ upcycle the jeans into a fanny pack or something to immortalize them?

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Lorem Ipsum 36? Dolor Sit Amet Keyboard!

February 6, 2025 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

You know, it’s a tale as old as custom mechanical keyboards. [penkia] couldn’t find any PCBs with 36 keys and Gateron low-profile switch footprints, so they made their own and called it the LoremIpsum36. Isn’t it lovely?

This baby runs on an RP2040, which sits flush as can be in a cutout in the PCB. This maneuver, along with the LP switches in hard-to-find SK-33 sockets results in quite the thin board.

[penkia] says that despite using a 3 mm tray for added rigidity, the entire thing is thinner than the Nuphy Air60 v2, which is just over half an inch (13.9 mm) thick. For keycaps, [penkia] has used both XVX profile and FKcaps’ LPF.

And yeah, that area in the middle is crying out for something; maybe a trackball or something similar. But [penkia] is satisfied with it as-is for the first version, so we are, too.

Do you like 36-key boards, but prefer curves? Check out the Lapa keyboard, which doubles as a mouse.

A Raspberry Pi HAT with retro LED displays and a buttons, sitting on the keys of a laptop.

Good-Looking HAT Does Retro Displays Right

February 5, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Mick Jagger famously said that you cain’t always get what you want. But this is Hackaday, and we make what we want or can’t get. Case in point: [Andrew Tudoroi] is drawn to retro LEDs and wanted one of Pimoroni’s micro-LED boards pretty badly, but couldn’t get his hands on one. You know how this ends — with [Andrew] designing his first PCB.

The Pitanga hat is equally inspired by additional fruit that [Andrew] had lying around in the form of an 8devices Rambutan board. (Trust us, it’s a fruit.) With some research, he discovered the HT16K33 LED driver, which checked all the boxen.

The first version worked, but needed what looks like a couple of bodge wires. No shame in that! For the next revision, [Andrew] added buttons and decided to make it into a Raspberry Pi HAT.

This HAT is essentially a simple display with a basic input device, and a beauty at that. You can see all the various cool displays that [Andrew] tried both here and in the project log. Although he included pads for an ARM M0 microcontroller, he never did populate it. Maybe in the future.

Of course, this project was not without its challenges. For one thing, there was power compatibility to wrestle with. The Pi can sometimes work with I²C devices at 5 V, but this isn’t ideal long-term. So [Andrew] put the LED driver on the 3.3 V I²C bus. Despite the data sheet calling for 4.5 to 5.5 V, the setup worked fine. But for better reliability, [Andrew] threw a dedicated I²C logic level converter chip into the mix.

Don’t forget, you can run a noble amassment of HATs with the PiSquare.

A glowing pocket watch with Roman numerals.

What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock

February 4, 2025 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

When live-action role playing, or LARPing, one must keep fully in tune with the intended era. That means no digital watches, and certainly no pulling out your fantastic rectangle from the future to find out if you’re late picking up the kid.

So what do you do when you’re LARPing at 2 PM, but you gotta be back at the soccer practice field by 5 PM? Well, you fashion a period-appropriate timepiece like [mclien]’s 17 o’ Clock. Visually, it’s about as close to a pocket sundial as you can get. It’s deliberately non-connected, and its only function is to tell the time.

But how? If you visually divide the watch across the top and bottom, you get two sets of Roman numerals. The top half handles the hour, and the bottom half the minute. [mclien] started designing this in 2018 and picked it back up in the second half of 2024.

Back to the non-connected part. The only permanently-powered part of the project is a high-precision real-time clock (RTC). The rest uses a power latching circuit, which turns on the Adafruit Trinket M0 to show the time using a NeoPixel ring. Be sure to check out the awesome project logs with fantastic pictures throughout.

Looking for a smarter pocket watch? It’s time you built one yourself. And speaking of pocket sundials…

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator

February 3, 2025 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

Have you ever wished you could experiment with different layouts super easily, just by adding or removing a few switches here and there and printing a new case? Well, [heyisjambo] says that it’s more than possible with menura, the modular keyboard system.

A collage of menura keyboards, which are modular via the VIK standard. — So many lovely options! Image by [heyisjambo] via GitHub

[heyisjambo] is happy with 36 keys, but is reduced-count-curious and wanted a way to explore without a lot of wasted time and PCBs.

At the same time, [heyisjambo] wanted to experiment with split vs. uni-body construction, and especially the different shapes that are possible when tweaking the angle and distance between them.

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s support for [Sadek Baroudi]’s VIK standard for interfacing data between PCBs, which calls for an FPC 12-pin, 0.5 mm pitch connector and allows for ultra-cool magnetic connectors. This way, you can easily add things like displays, trackpads, and trackballs in the between the halves.

Thanks for the tip, [calculus]!

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Wearables queen [Becky Stern] with a microcontroller and a speaker. And a skull!

Wearable Tech Tips Directly From The Queen

February 2, 2025 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

What’s the only thing cooler than building something electronic? That’s right — wearing it proudly for all to see.

But maybe you’re not into wearables. Maybe it’s because you’re afraid of sewing, or simply scared that you won’t be able to launder that blinkenshirt you’ve always wanted to make. Well, the undisputed queen of wearables — [Becky Stern] — has a bunch of beginner tips for making DIY wearables. She’s created dozens and dozens of wearable projects and matching tutorials over the years and has graced these pages many times.

As [Becky] points out, once you have your idea sorted, the next thing you need is the tools to get the skills to do the parts you don’t know how to do yet. Even if that’s almost all of it, then this is the guide for you. Importantly, [Becky] reminds us that we should only bite off what we can chew, and that ready-made modules and such are perfectly fine.

There are some tips here that may surprise you. For instance, [Becky] recommends against conductive thread for beginners who already know how to sew by hand, largely because of power delivery and other issues. She also is somewhat anti-lithium battery pouch, preferring instead to use a couple of AAs or a USB battery bank for the renewability aspect.

Be sure to check out the video after the break, which has these tips and more.
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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The DIY Homing Keys

January 28, 2025 by Kristina Panos 42 Comments

r/keebgirlies Is Totally a Thing Now

When [coral-bells] posted her first build to r/mechanicalkeyboards, she likely felt some trepidation. After all this is reddit we’re talking about, so right away you’ve got two layers of male-domination hobby.

Most of a lovely plant-themed keyboard. — Image by [coral-bells] via reddit

What she likely didn’t expect was to be upvoted into the tens of thousands, or to receive such a response from other girlies who came out of the woodwork to share their builds.

And so r/keebgirlies was born, and already has a few thousand members. This is a brand-new subreddit for women and non-binary folks who are into mechanical keyboards. As it says in the sidebar, men are welcome but limited to the comments for now, so don’t go trying to post your builds. The girlies are currently seeking moderators, so give that some thought.

As for [coral-bells]’ lovely build, this is an Epomaker MS68 with MMD Vivian V2 switches, and those flowery keycaps are from Etsy. She is currently waiting for supplies to mod a Yunzii AL66, but wants to build a kit at some point.

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