2024 Business Card Challenge: PCB Business Cards For Everybody

June 19, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 21 Comments

PCB business cards for electronics engineers might be very much old news in our circles, but they are still cool, not seen too much in the wild, and frankly inaccessible to those in other industries. For their entry into the 2024 Business Card Challenge, [Dima Shlenkevitch] is helping a little to alleviate this by providing a set of design examples and worked costs with suppliers.

Original green is still the cheapest option.

[Dima] lists key features every PCB business card should include, such as the expected thickness, restrictions for placing NFC components, and some aesthetics tips. Make sure to choose a supplier that allows you to remove their order number from the manufactured PCB, or it will look out of place.

Ordering PCBs with these specifications to keep costs reasonable requires effort, so [Dima] offers some example designs along with the results. If you want to have pretty gold lettering and graphics, you will need ENiG plating, increasing the price. Non-standard solder mask colors can also raise the price.

Will this help with the practical aspects of driving the PCB design software and actually placing the order? Obviously not, but the information provided gives you a leg up on some of the decisions so you don’t go down an expensive rabbit hole.

Hackaday Links: June 16, 2024

June 16, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Attention, slackers — if you do remote work for a financial institution, using a mouse jiggler might not be the best career move. That’s what a dozen people learned this week as they became former employees of Wells Fargo after allegedly being caught “simulating keyboard activity” while working remotely. Having now spent more than twice as many years working either hybrid or fully remote, we get it; sometimes, you’ve just got to step away from the keyboard for a bit. But we’ve never once felt the need to create the “impression of active work” during those absences. Perhaps that’s because we’ve never worked in a regulated environment like financial services.

For our part, we’re curious as to how the bank detected the use of a jiggler. The linked article mentions that regulators recently tightened rules that require employers to treat an employee’s home as a “non-branch location” subject to periodic inspection. More than enough reason to quit, in our opinion, but perhaps they sent someone snooping? More likely, the activity simulators were discovered by technical means. The article contains a helpful tip to avoid powering a jiggler from the computer’s USB, which implies detecting the device over the port. Our guess is that Wells tracks mouse and keyboard activity and compares it against a machine-learning model to look for signs of slacking.

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2024 Business Card Challenge: BAUDI/O For The Audio Hacker

June 14, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 6 Comments

[Simon B] enters our 2024 Business Card Challenge with BAUDI/O, a genuinely useful audio output device. The device is based around the PCM2706 DAC, which handles all the USB interfacing and audio stack for you, needing only a reference crystal and the usual sprinkling of passives. This isn’t just a DAC board, though; it’s more of an audio experimentation tool with two microcontrollers to play with.

The first ATTiny AT1614 is hooked up to a simple LED vu-meter, and the second is connected to the onboard AD5252 digipot, which together allows one to custom program the response to the digital inputs to suit the user. The power supply is taken from the USB connection. A pair of ganged LM2663 charge-pump inverters allow inversion of the 5V rail to provide the necessary -5 V for the output amplifiers. This is then fed to the LM4562-based CMoy-type headphone amplifier. This design has a few extra stages, so with a bit of soldering, you can adjust the output filtering to suit. An LM1117 derives 3.3 V from the USB input to provide another power rail, mostly for the DAC.

There’s not much more to say other than this is a nice, clean audio design, with everything broken out so you can tinker with it and get exactly the audio experience you want.

2024 Business Card Challenge: T-800’s 555 Brain

June 14, 2024 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day it’s revealed that Skynet becomes self-aware in August of 1997, and promptly launches a nuclear attack against Russia to draw humanity into a war which ultimately leaves the door open for the robots to take over. But as you might have noticed, we’re not currently engaged in a rebellion against advanced combat robots.

The later movies had to do some fiddling with the timeline to explain this discrepancy, but looking at this 2024 Business Card Challenge entry from [M. Bindhammer] we think there’s another explanation for the Judgement Day holdup — so long as the terminators are rocking 555 timers in their chrome skulls, we should be safe.

While the classic timer chip might not be any good for plotting world domination, it sure does make for a great way to illuminate this slick piece of PCB art when it’s plugged into a USB port. Exposed copper and red paint are used to recreate the T-800’s “Brain Chip” as it appeared in Terminator 2, so even when the board isn’t powered up, it looks fantastic on display. The handful of components are around the back side, which is a natural place to put some info about the designer. Remember, this is technically supposed to be a business card, after all.

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A 1940s Car Radio Receives Some Love

June 13, 2024 by Jenny List 9 Comments

The entertainment systems in modern vehicles is akin to a small in-dash computer, and handles all manner of digital content. It probably also incorporates a radio, but increasingly that’s treated as something of an afterthought. There was a time though when any radio in a car was a big deal, and if you own a car from that era it’s possible that you’ve had to coax an aged radio into life. [The Radio Mechanic] is working on a radio from a 1946 Packard, which provides a feast for anyone with a penchant for 1940s electronics.

The unit, manufactured by Philco, is an all-in-one, with a bulky speaker in the chassis alongside the tubes and other components. It would have sat behind the dash in the original car, so some external cosmetic damage is not critical. Less easy to pass off is the cone rubbing on the magnet, probably due to water damage over the last eight decades. Particularly interesting are the controls, as we’re rather enamored with the multicolored filter attached to the tone control. A laser cutter makes short work of recreating the original felt gasket here.

The video below is the first of a series on this radio, so we don’t see it working. Ahead will be a lot more cleaning up and testing of components, and we’d expect a lot of those paper capacitors to need replacement. We can almost smell that warm phenolic smell.

If tube radio work is your thing, we’ve been there before.

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TDS 744A Scope Teardown Fixes Dodgy Channel

June 13, 2024 by Maya Posch 1 Comment

There are a lot of oscilloscopes from around the 1990s which are still very much desirable today, such as the Tektronix TDS 744A which [DiodesGoneWild] got his grubby mitts on. This is a 500 MHz, 4-channel scope, with a capture rate of 500 MS/s (4 channels) to 2 GS/s (1 channel). It also has a color display and even comes with a high-density (1.44 MB) floppy drive. Unfortunately this particular unit was having trouble with its fourth channel, and its NuColor display had degraded, something that’s all too common with this type of hybrid CRT/LCD (LCCS) technology.

Starting with a teardown of the unit to inspect the guts, there was no obvious damage on the PCBs, nor on the acquisition board which would explain the weird DC offset on the fourth channel. After cleaning and inspecting the capture module and putting the unit back together, the bias seen on channel four seemed to disappear. A reminder that the best problems are the ones that solve themselves. As for the NuColor display, this uses a monochrome CRT (which works fine) and an LCD with color filters. It’s the latter which seems degraded on this unit, with a repair still being planned.

We covered NuColor-based devices before, which offer super-sharp details that are hard to capture even with modern-day LCDs, never mind the ones of the 90s. Fixing these NuColor displays can be easy-ish sometimes, as [JVG] found when tearing apart a very similar Tektronix TDX-524A which required a power supply fix and the removal of goopy gel between the CRT and LCD to restore it.

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PCB Design Review: A 5V UPS With LTC4040

June 13, 2024 by Arya Voronova 23 Comments

Do you have a 5 V device you want to run 24/7, no matter whether you have electricity? Not to worry – Linear Technology has made a perfect IC for you, the LTC4040; with the perfect assortment of features, except perhaps for the hefty price tag.

[Lukilukeskywalker] has shared a PCB for us to review – a LTC4040-based stamp you can drop onto your PCB whenever you want a LTC4040 design. It’s a really nice module to see designed – things like LiFePO4 support make this IC a perfect solution for many hacker usecases. For instance, are you designing a custom Pi HAT? Drop this module to give your HAT the UPS capability for barely any PCB effort. if your Pi or any other single-board computer needs just a little bit of custom sauce, this module spices it up alright!

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