Author: Jenny List

3373 Articles

Identify That Antenna By Sight

November 1, 2022 by 75 Comments

It’s a skill that radio amateurs pick up over years but which it sometimes comes as a surprise to find that is not shared by everyone, the ability to casually glance at an antenna on a mast or a rooftop and guess what it might be used for. By which of course I mean not some intuitive ability to mentally decode radio signals from thin air, but most of us can look at a given antenna and immediately glean a lot of information about its frequency and performance. Is this privileged knowledge handed down from the Elmers at the secret ceremony of conferring a radio amateur’s licence upon a baby ham? Not at all, in fact stick around, and I’ll share some of the tricks. Continue reading “Identify That Antenna By Sight” →

Moving Big Stuff Without The Tears

October 31, 2022 by 104 Comments

It’s something that has probably happened to more than one of us over the years, there’s an unmissable opportunity at the machinery auction or on eBay, with the small snag that it weighs a ton and requires a flatbed truck to transport. A big lathe, a bandsaw, or the like.

The sensible option would be to hire a crane or a forklift to do the job, but cash is tight so at the appointed hour the truck turns up at the end of your driveway to meet you and as big a group of your friends as you could muster. You’re going to shift this thing with pure muscle power! If you grow up around any form of workshop-based small business it’s something you’ll no doubt be familiar with. Craftsmen seem to have a network for such moments, so just as the blacksmith might find himself helping the woodworker unload a huge saw bench, so might they both spend an unexpected afternoon at the engineering shop manhandling a lathe.

It came as a shock in a casual hackerspace conversation to realise how many times I’d been involved in such maneuvers at home, for friends, or at hackerspaces, and how that experience in doing so safely isn’t necessarily something that’s universal. Maybe it’s time to tell the story of moving big machines on limited resources. This is something that starts by thinking ahead and planning what you’ll need and where you’ll need it. Continue reading “Moving Big Stuff Without The Tears” →

All Your Pixels Are (Probably Not) Belong To Pantone

October 29, 2022 by 80 Comments

There’s a piece of news floating around the open IP and allied communities at the moment which appears to have caused some consternation. It comes from Adobe, who have announced that due to an end of their licensing deal with Pantone LLC, PSD images loaded into Photoshop will have pixels containing unlicensed Pantone colours replaced with black. What, Pantone owns colours now? Are we expected to pay a royalty every time we take a picture of a blue sky? It’s natural to react with suspicion when hearing a piece of news like this, but for once we think this might not be the unreasonable intellectual property land grab it may first appear. To illustrate this, it’s necessary to explain what Pantone does, and what they don’t do. Continue reading “All Your Pixels Are (Probably Not) Belong To Pantone” →

2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Prototype Cyberdeck Is Anything But Questionable

October 26, 2022 by 5 Comments

We see many projects here at Hackaday, about which their creators are unreasonably modest. We like a good cyberdeck, and we think [betaraybiff] is one of those creators from their project description for a Prototype Cyberdeck of Questionable Practical Use. It may be a prototype, but we think it could be quite a practical computer.

At its heart is the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi 4 paired with a PiSugar power supply and a minimalist mechanical keyboard. The case is the interesting part, because it’s well-designed to be 3D printed in sections with the HDMI display hinging up from above the keyboard. The Pi is open and visible on top of the deck, but this could easily be covered with another printed piece if desired.

So we disagree on the practicality, given a train journey and this cyberdeck we think we could easily crack out a Hackaday article or two. Never undersell your creations, like this one they’re almost certainly better than you think.

If you’d like to see more of the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest, take a look at the best of the best.

Hackaday.io Cyberdeck Contest

Fiber Laser Your Way To Flexible PCB Success!

October 26, 2022 by 10 Comments

It’s not often we feel that something we’re featuring is a genuinely new and groundbreaking technique, but a team from the University of Maryland’s Small Artifacts Lab may have done just that with their foldable and flexible PCBs created using a fiber laser engraver.

Laser engraving a PCB is nothing new, but they’ve taken a custom PCB material made using Kapton tape and copper foil, and fine-tuned the engraver to not only selectively remove copper, but also to create in-place folds in the Kapton substrate. They have even used the laser to melt solder paste and solder components, though we’re not so convinced about the quality as seen in the video below the break. This means that they can not only create 3-dimensional PCB sculptures but also useful structures such as their example of an all-PCB micro switch. To make things easy they’ve even created a custom CAD package for designing in this medium.

Perhaps best of all, there appears to be nothing here that couldn’t be also performed outside the lab by anyone with enough Kapton and copper, and a fiber laser. We’re looking forward to where this technique will go. If you’re interested, you can read their paper here.

Continue reading “Fiber Laser Your Way To Flexible PCB Success!” →

Scripting Coils For PCB Motors

October 25, 2022 by 12 Comments

PCB inductors are a subject that has appeared here at Hackaday many times, perhaps most notably in the electromagnetic exploits of [Carl Bugeja]. But there is still much to be learned in the creation of the inductors themselves, and [atomic14] has recently been investigating their automatic creation through scripting.

A simple spiral trace is easy enough to create, but when for example creating a circular array of coils for an electric motor there’s a need for more complex shapes. Drawing a trapezoidal spiral is a surprisingly difficult task for a script, and we’re treated to a variety of algorithms in the path to achieving a usable design.

Having perfected the algorithm, how to bring it into KiCAD?  The PCB CAD package has its own Python environment built-in, but it’s not the most flexible in which to develop. The solution is to write a simple JSON interpreter in KiCAD, and leave the spiral generation to an external script that passes a JSON. This also leaves the possibility of using the same code in other PCB packages.

You can watch the whole video below the break. Meanwhile for more PCB electromagnetics, watch [Carl Bugeja]’s 2019 Supercon interview.

Continue reading “Scripting Coils For PCB Motors” →

One Of The Worst Keyboards Ever, Now An Arduino Peripheral

October 24, 2022 by 39 Comments

For British kids of a certain age, their first experience of a computer was very likely to have been in front of a Sinclair ZX81. The lesser-known predecessor to the wildly-successful ZX Spectrum, it came in at under £100 and sported a Z80 processor and a whopping 1k of memory. In the long tradition of Sinclair products it had a few compromises to achieve that price point, the most obvious of which was a 40-key membrane keyboard. Those who learned to code on its frustrating lack of tactile feedback may be surprised to see an Arduino project presenting it as the perfect way to easily hook up a keyboard to an Arduino.

Like many retrocomputing parts, the ZX81 ‘board has been re-manufactured, to the joy of many a Sinclair enthusiast. It’s thus readily available and relatively cheap (we think they can be found for less than the stated 20 euros!), so surprisingly it’s a reasonable choice for an Arduino project. The task of trying to define by touch the imperceptible difference in thickness of a ZX81 key will bring a true retrocomputing experience to a new generation. Perhaps if it can be done on an Mbed then someone might even make a ZX81 emulator on the Arduino.

We’re great fans of the ZX81 here at Hackaday, for some of us it was that first computer. Long may it continue to delight its fans!