Your Weekend Plans: Hardware Freedom Day

March 14, 2014 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

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Hardware Freedom Day is tomorrow: Saturday, March 15th 2014. This is the third year for the event, which seeks to raise awareness about what Open Hardware is, and to encourage hackers and makers to share their own work with the world.

This is a concept that we believe in strongly here at Hackaday. There are a multitude of reasons to support open hardware. We usually look at it from two angles: education and user freedom. If the design for your projects are available, others can learn from your successes and produce even cooler things that in turn should be made open. At the same time, if you have a device that’s nearly-awesome, a skilled hacker will have a much easier time getting it there if the original design can be used as a reference.

If you want to see what’s going on near you there are events on every continent (except Antarctica… lame!). If continental adjacency isn’t close enough consider pulling together an adhoc event, or just going through that project you finished last year and publishing the files for others to use.

Fail Of The Week: Unconnected Nets In KiCad

March 13, 2014 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

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From the title and the image above you surely have already grasped this Fail of the Week. We’ve all been there. Design a board, send it to fab or etch it yourself, and come to find out you’ve missed a connection. Automatic checks in your software should prevent this, but when making small changes it’s easy to overlook running the checks again. This is exactly what [Clint] did with this board; leaving a net unconnected in the schematic, which made its way through to the board layout and into the OSHPark boards.

Okay, so fix it with jumper wire which is clearly what he did (white wire in the lower left image above). But since this is rev3 of his PCB it’s pretty upsetting that it happened. The meat and potatoes of the fail is the missing software feature that led to it. KiCad doesn’t have a pin swap tool in the board layout. Really? We use KiCad frequently and didn’t realize that the feature was missing. Needing to simplify his board layout, [Clint] went back to the schematic to swap some resistor network pins by hand. He pushed the change through the netlist and into the board layout, not realizing he had left an input gate unconnected.

A bit of searching proves that pin swapping may be coming to KiCad soon. It’s on the CERN roadmap of features they plan to add to the open source PCB layout software. We remember hearing about CERN’s plans quite a while ago, and thought we featured it but the only reference we could find is [Chris Gammell’s] comment on a post from back in December. It’s worth looking at their plans, these are all features that would make KiCad a juggernaut.

EDITORIAL NOTE: We’ll soon be out of story leads for this series. If you have enjoyed reading weekly about fails please write up your own failure and send us the link. Of course any documented fails you find around the internet should also be sent our way. Thanks!

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which runs every Wednesday. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Staff Update

March 12, 2014 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

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Has it really been three months since our last Staff Update? Even though you’ve been enjoying posts from these guys for quite some time now a proper introduction is in order. From left to right, please join me in welcoming [Bil Herd], [Rich Bremer], [Nick Conn], and [Abe Connelly] to the team.

[Bil] started out with a guest post on the C128 which I absolutely loved. We got to talking and he mentioned an interest in putting out some video content. His first offering for Hackaday was the segment on calculating component heat. He has a few more in the pipeline and I’m sure he’d love to hear your ideas for the subjects of future videos.

I like to choose contributors who have a wide range of interests: [Rich] has a mechanical engineering background. Nick, who is working on his Ph.D., has quite a bit of experience with medical devices. This is not to be confused with the type of bio-medical hacking which [Abe] is interested in. Learn more about all of their backgrounds over on the Hackaday Staff page.

All of the people who have joined us over the last six months came form a pool of applications received after a September hiring announcement. I posted another one last week and have received numerous applications. I’m still reviewing them so don’t worry if you haven’t heard from me, you will soon!

Hackaday Gathering: Shanghai

March 11, 2014 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Does Hackaday have any readers living in Shanghai? You bet! We’re going to be in Shanghai next week so we decided to invite the Hackaday community to a Shanghai Gathering!

We booked a venue and want to pack the place with at least 150 people on Thursday, March 20th. We’re picking up the bar tab and bringing along a few cases of T-shirts. At some point we’ll make some formal remarks about the path on which Hackaday is traveling, and where we hope to go. Get your tickets now, and start the perplexing process of deciding which piece of portable hacked hardware you want to bring along with you to show off to all of the other Hackaday aficionados.

Still not convinced? Check out the follow-up post from our Los Angeles Gathering back in January to see how much fun it is to get together with other readers. The Xin Che Jian hackerspace in Shanghai is helping us get this organized; we saw a hackerspace intro from them a couple of years back. Thank you so much to [David] and [Paul] for their help with this! If you haven’t checked out the hackerspace, this gathering is a great way to meet some of the members.

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Sci-Fi Contest Prizes Make You Drool Like A Rancor

March 11, 2014 by Mike Szczys 61 Comments

It’s been awhile since we hosted a contest, now is the time to up our game. You have a few weeks to come up with the best Sci-Fi themed hack. We’ve amassed a number of prizes well worth fighting for, and the challenge will be won by a combination of clever, collaborative, and open. The booty includes rad (yeah, we said it) tools like Oscilloscopes, Logic Sniffers, Solder Stations, and Dev Boards, as well as themed offerings like classic Sci-Fi films and tchotchkes from our favorite fictional universes.

Yesterday we announced that Hackaday Projects is open for public registration and now we’re taking the new site for a spin. Previous contests like the Trinket and Fubarino versions became unwieldy for the Hackaday crew just because of the sheer volume of entries. The new interface will make it much easier. We also want to test out the collaborative features so one of the requirements for entry is to participate as a team. The winners will be picked based on how well the project is documented, how open (as in software and hardware) it is, how it fits the theme, and on how well the team worked together.

The contest starts right now and ends at 12:00:00am Pacific time (we know a lot of you like to push deadlines) on April 29th, 2014. Head over to the contest page to see all of the details. Let the games begin!

[Official Contest Page]

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Hackaday Projects: Open To The Public

March 10, 2014 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

We’re letting anybody in — now’s your chance to lay claim to your piece of Hackaday Projects.

We’ve been watching as a few thousand Hackadayers kick the tires and light the fires of our new hosting website: Hackaday Projects. But you can’t keep these things under wraps forever, and we’re happy to open up the service to anyone who would like an account. Join this vibrant little community by setting up your profile (real or anonymous, we don’t really care) and showing everyone what you’ve been working on in that basement lab of yours. Perhaps we should mention that public doesn’t mean finished. We’re still in Alpha with the site, but with the help of the testers over the last few months this is a very respectable alpha!

If you already had a testing account there are a few new things to note. Astute readers who hovered over the link above noticed that it’s a different URL from the one to which you’re accustomed. We registered hackaday.io as the main domain and also hac.io which will eventually be a URL shortener. We also implemented “The Stack” which is the complement to “The Heap” (currently unimplemented). The two serve as… well, why don’t you go and find out for yourself what they’re for? After all, hackers don’t need to be told how to do things, right?

We’re Hiring

March 6, 2014 by Mike Szczys 75 Comments

The title says it all. We need more writers to keep the fresh hacks coming, now’s your chance to apply for the job.

Contributors are hired as private contractors and paid for each post. Writers should have the technical expertise to understand the projects they are writing about, and a passion for the wide range of topics we feature. If you’re interested, please email our jobs line and include:

Details about your background (education, employment, etc.) that make you a valuable addition to the team
Links to your blog/project posts/etc. which have been published on the Internet
One example post written in the voice of Hack a Day. Include a banner image, 150 words, the link to the project, and any in-links to related and relevant Hack a Day features.

Words of encouragement

First off, we won’t be discussing compensation publicly. Want to know what we pay? Send in a successful application and we’ll talk about it.

Secondly, don’t pass up this opportunity. I watched one of these posts go by and waited another year before I saw the next one and applied. Now I’m running the place. Our team is made up of avid readers. If you’re passionate about the stuff here and you have a few hours each week to do some writing you need to apply now!

Why are we hiring more writers?

You may have noticed that we’re starting to send people to events, and continuing our push to develop our own unique original content. Both of these take time and we need more team members to fill in the publishing schedule so that the Hackaday community gets the posts that it deserves.

So what are you waiting for? Ladies and Gentlemen, start your applications!