Practice While You Work

March 1, 2025 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

This week, I had to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time: make myself a custom PCB the old-fashioned way, with laser toner and etchant. The reason? I bought a horrible K40 laser cutter, and the motion controller doesn’t seem to be able to do acceleration control, which means the machine rams full speed into and out of 90 degree corners, for instance. It sounds awful, and it dramatically limits how fast the laser cutter can run.

The plan, then, is to use a controller based on the wonderful FluidNC, but that meant making an adapter board for the flat-flex cable that connects to the X carriage, and the connector has 2 mm pin spacings instead of the usual 2.54 mm, and it just doesn’t fit into any prototyping boards that I have lying around. Besides, a custom PCB adapter board just looks neater.

I wasn’t confident that I could align and drill the dozen small holes for the flat-flex connector; they didn’t have much extra space around them for the copper pads. These holes had to be dead on, or risk ripping them up. And this is where I heard the voice of my old Jedi master.

When you have a tricky operation coming up that requires more precision than you’re immediately comfortable with, you can practice on the other parts of the project that don’t demand that much precision. Pretending that they do, and taking all the care that you can, gets you in shape to tackle the truly critical bits, and if you mess up a little on the easy stuff, it’s not a problem. I had more than a few pin-headers and other random holes to drill for practice anyway.

Now of course, you could always be giving all of your projects 100% all of the time, if time is never of the essence and effort is free. In the real world, you don’t always want to work at maximum precision. Good enough is often good enough.

But there’s also a time and a place for practicing precision, especially when you see a need for it up ahead. Drilling the big holes dead center got me back in the swing of things, and they needed to get drilled one way or the other. I find it useful to think about the job first, plan ahead where the tricky bits are going to be, and then treat the “easy” stuff along the way as practice for the more demanding operations. Hope you do too!

Hackaday Europe 2025: Workshops And More Speakers

February 26, 2025 by Elliot Williams No comments

We’re proud to announce the last round of speakers, as well as the two workshops that we’ll be running at 2025 Hackaday Europe in Berlin on March 15th and 16th — and Friday night the 14th, if you’re already in town.

The last two years that we’ve done Hackaday Europe in Berlin have been awesome, and this year promises to keep up the tradition. We can’t wait to get our hands on the crazy selection of SAO badge addons that are going to be in each and every schwag bag.

Tickets for the event itself are going fast, but the workshop tickets that go on sale at 8:00 AM PST sell out even faster. And you need the one to enjoy the other, so get your tickets now!

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2025: Workshops And More Speakers” →

We’re Hiring: Come Join Us!

February 25, 2025 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

You wake up in the morning, and check Hackaday over breakfast. Then it’s off to work or school, where you’ve already had to explain the Jolly Wrencher to your shoulder-surfing colleagues. And then to a hackspace or back to your home lab, stopping by the skull-and-cross-wrenches while commuting, naturally. You don’t bleed red, but rather #F3BF10. It’s time we talked.

The Hackaday writing crew goes to great lengths to cover all that is interesting to engineers and enthusiasts. We find ourselves stretched a bit thin and it’s time to ask for help. Want to lend a hand while making some extra dough to plow back into your projects? We’re looking for contributors to write a few articles per week and keep the Hackaday flame burning.

Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each article. You should have the technical expertise to understand the projects you write about, and a passion for the wide range of topics we feature. You’ll have access to the Hackaday Tips Line, and we count on your judgement to help us find the juicy nuggets that you’d want to share with your hacker friends.

If you’re interested, please email our jobs line (jobs at hackaday dot com) and include:

One example article written in the voice of Hackaday. Include a banner image, between 150 and 300 words, the link to the project, and any in-links to related and relevant Hackaday features. We need to know that you can write.
Details about your background (education, employment, interests) that make you a valuable addition to the team. What do you like, and what do you do?
Links to your blog/project posts/etc. that have been published on the Internet, if any.

Questions? Don’t hesitate to ask below. Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!

LCD Stackup Repair: Not For The Faint Of Heart

February 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

Coming straight to the point: [Ron Hinton] is significantly braver than we are. Or maybe he was just in a worse situation. His historic Acer K385s laptop suffered what we learned is called vinegar syndrome, which is a breakdown in the polarizers that make the LCD work. So he bit the bullet and decided to open up the LCD stack and replace what he could.

Nothing says “no user serviceable parts inside” quite like those foil-and-glue sealed packages, but that didn’t stop [Ron]. Razor blades, patience, and an eye ever watchful for the connectors that are seemingly everywhere, and absolutely critical, got the screen disassembled. Installation of the new polarizers was similarly fiddly.

In the end, it looks like the showstopper to getting a perfect result is that technology has moved on, and these older screens apparently used a phase correction layer between the polarizers, which might be difficult to source these days. (Anyone have more detail on that? We looked around and came up empty.)

This laptop may not be in the pantheon of holy-grail retrocomputers, but that’s exactly what makes it a good candidate for practicing such tricky repair work, and the result is a readable LCD screen on an otherwise broken old laptop, so that counts as a win in our book.

If you want to see an even more adventurous repair effort that ended in glorious failure, check out [Jan Mrázek]’s hack where he tries to convert a color LCD screen to monochrome, inclusive of scraping off the liquid crystals! You learn a lot by taking things apart, of course, but you learn even more by building it up from first principles. If you haven’t seen [Ben Krasnow]’s series on a completely DIY LCD screen, ITO-sputtering and all, then you’ve got some quality video time ahead of you.

Multitasker Or Many Monotaskers?

February 22, 2025 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

In Al Williams’s marvelous rant he points out a number of the problems with speaking to computers. Obvious problems with voice control include things like multiple people talking over each other, discerning commands from background conversations, and so on. Somehow, unlike on the bridge in Star Trek, where the computer seems to understand everyone just fine, Al sometimes can’t even get the darn thing to play his going-to-sleep playlist, which should be well within the device’s capabilities.

In the comments, [rclark] suggests making a single button that plays his playlist, no voice interaction required, and we have to admit that it’s a great solution to this one particular problem. Heck, the “bedtime button” would make fun project in and of itself, and it’s such a limited scope that it could probably only be an weekend’s work for anyone who has touched the internals of their home automation system, like Al certainly has. We love the simplicity of the idea.

But it ignores the biggest potential benefit of a voice control system: that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution for everything. Imagine how many other use cases Al would need to make a single button device for, and how many coin cell batteries he’d be signing himself up to change out over the course of the year. The trade-off is that the general purpose solution tends not to be as robust as a single-tasker like the button, but also that it can potentially simplify the overall system.

I suffer this in my own home. It’s much more a loosely-coupled web of individual hacks than an overall system, and that has pros and cons. Each individual part is easier to maintain and hack on, but the overall system is less coordinated than it could be. If we change the WiFi password on the home automation router, for instance, I’m going to have to individually log into about eight ESP8266s and change their credentials. Yuck!

It’s probably a matter of preference, but I’ll still take the loose, MQTT-based system that I’ve got now over an all-in-one. Like [rclark], I value individual device simplicity and reliability above the overall system’s simplicity, but because our stereo isn’t even hooked up to the network, I can’t play myself to sleep like Al can. Or at least like he can when the voice recognition is working.

Hackaday Europe 2025: Speakers, Lightning Talks, And More!

February 18, 2025 by Elliot Williams 1 Comment

If you’ve been waiting for news from our upcoming Hackaday Europe event in March, wait no longer. We’re excited to announce the first slice of our wonderful speakers lineup! Get your tickets now,

Hackaday Europe is going down again in Berlin this year on March 15th and 16th at MotionLab. It’s Hackaday, but in real life, and it’s too much fun. The badge is off-the-scale cool, powered by the incredible creativity of our community who entered the Supercon SAO contest last fall, and we’re absolutely stoked to be tossing the four winning entries into your schwag bag in Europe.

If you already know you’ll be attending and would like to give a seven-minute Lightning Talk on Sunday, we’re also opening up the call for talks there. Tell us now what you’d like to talk about so we can all hear it on Sunday morning.

We’re looking forward to the talks and to seeing you all there! We’re getting the last few speakers ironed out, have a keynote talk to announce, and, of course, will open up workshop signups. So stay tuned! Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2025: Speakers, Lightning Talks, And More!” →

[Quinn Dunki] Makes A Screw Shortener Fit For Kings

February 16, 2025 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

It’s common problem when you’re building anything with screws: this one is too long, this one is too short. While she can’t teach you how to fix the latter, [Quinn Dunki] has made herself an absolutely deluxe screw shortening jig. And while that’s cool and all, the real value here is the journey; watching over [Quinn]’s shoulders while she’s in the machine shop is always illuminating.

First off, she starts with her old jig, which frankly makes us want one. It’s a short piece of aluminum angle stock with threaded holes in it. You thread the screw in as far as you want, and use the edge as a cutting guide. Very nice!

But aluminum threads wear out quickly so it works if you’re shortening dozens of screws, but gets wonky when you need to cut hundreds. The new jig is made out of steel, and has a slit that clamps the threads in place so she doesn’t have to hold the tiny screws with her other hand while sawing.

This video is, on the surface, about making an improved tool out of steel. But it’s the tips along the way that make it worth your watch. For instance “deburr early and often” is a recurring leitmotif here: it keeps the extra bits that form along any cut from messing up edge finding or vise registration. And yeah, she deburrs after every operation.

There are mistakes, and lessons learned along the way. We’re not going to spoil it all. But in the end, it’s a sweet tool that we’ve never seen before.

If you haven’t read [Quinn]’s series on machine tools that she wrote for us, it’s a treasure trove of machining wisdom.

Continue reading “[Quinn Dunki] Makes A Screw Shortener Fit For Kings” →