When you’re working with PCBs and making single units to knock out in those Chinese fabs, going from layout to manufacturable Gerber files is just a few button presses, no matter what PCB layout tool you prefer. But, once you get into producing sets of PCBs that form a larger system, or are making multiple copies for efficient manufacturing, then you’re not going to get far without delving into the art of PCB panelization. We’ve seen a few options over the years, and here’s yet another one that’s looking quite promising — hm-panelizer by [halfmarble] is a cross platform Python GUI application, which leverages Kivy, so it should run on pretty well on most major platforms without too much hassle. The tool is early in development, so is restricted to handling only straight PCB edges, with horizontal mouse-bites for now, but we’re sure it will quickly grow more general purpose capabilities given time and support.
In an ideal world, open source tools like KiCAD would have a built-in panelizer, but for now we can dream and hm-panelizer might just be good enough for some people. For more choices on panelizing, checkout our guide to making it easy, and just to muddy the waters here’s another way to do it.
Perhaps rather unexpectedly, on the 14th of March this year the GCC mailing list received an announcement regarding the release of the first ever COBOL front-end for the GCC compiler. For the uninitiated, COBOL saw its first release in 1959, making it with 63 years one of the oldest programming language that is still in regular use. The reason for its persistence is mostly due to its focus from the beginning as a transaction-oriented, domain specific language (DSL).
Its acronym stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, which clearly references the domain it targets. Even with the current COBOL 2014 standard, it is still essentially the same primarily transaction-oriented language, while adding support for structured, procedural and object-oriented programming styles. Deriving most of its core from Admiral Grace Hopper‘s FLOW-MATIC language, it allows for efficiently describing business logic as one would encounter at financial institutions or businesses, in clear English.
Unlike the older GnuCOBOL project – which translates COBOL to C – the new GCC-COBOL front-end project does away with that intermediate step, and directly compiles COBOL source code into binary code. All of which may raise the question of why an entire man-year was invested in this effort for a language which has been declared ‘dead’ for probably at least half its 63-year existence.
Does it make sense to learn or even use COBOL today? Do we need a new COBOL compiler?
Recently, we stumbled upon a video by [iBoff], adding an M.2 NVMe port to a 2011-2013 MacBook. Apple laptops never came with proper M.2 ports, especially the A1278 – so what’s up? The trick is – desoldering a PCIe-connected Thunderbolt controller, then soldering a BGA-like interposer PCB in place of where the chip was, and pulling a cable assembly from there to the drive bay, where a custom adapter PCB awaits. That adapter even lets you expose the PCIe link as a full-sized PCIe 4x slot, in case you want to connect an external GPU instead of the NVMe SSD!
The process is well-documented in the video, serving as an instruction manual for anyone attempting to install this specific mod, but also a collection of insights and ideas for anyone interested in imitating it. The interposer board ships with solder balls reballed onto it, so that it can be installed in the same way that a BGA chip would be – but the cable assembly connector isn’t installed onto the interposer, since it has to be soldered onto the mainboard with hot air, which would then melt the connector. The PCB that replaces the optical drive makes no compromises, either, tapping into the SATA connector pins and letting you add an extra 2.5mm SATA SSD.
Adding an NVMe drive is an underappreciated way to speed up your old laptop, and since they’re all PCIe under the hood, you can really get creative with the specific way you add it. You aren’t even limited to substituting obscure parts like Thunderbolt controllers – given a laptop with a discrete GPU and a CPU-integrated one, you could get rid of the discrete GPU and replace it with an adapter for one, or maybe even two NVMe drives, and all you need is a PCB that has the same footprint as your GPU. Sadly, the PCB files for this adapter don’t seem to be open-source, but developing a replacement for your own needs would be best started from scratch, either way.
We’ve seen such an adapter made for a Raspberry Pi 4 before, solderable in place of a QFN USB 3.0 controller chip and exposing the PCIe signals onto the USB 3 connector pins. However, this one takes it up a notch! Typically, without such an adapter, we have to carefully solder a properly shielded cable if we want to get a PCIe link from a board that never intended to expose one. What’s up with PCIe and why is it cool? We’ve talked about that in depth!
When it comes to 3D printing using fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology, there are two main groups of printers: Cartesian and CoreXY, with the latter being the domain of those who wish to get the fastest prints possible, courtesy of the much more nimble tool head configuration. Having less mass in the X/Y carriage assembly means that it can also move faster, which leads to CoreXY FDM enthusiasts to experiment with carbon fiber and a recent video by [PrimeSenator] in which an X-beam milled out of aluminium tube stock that weighs even less than a comparable carbon fiber tube is demonstrated.
As the CoreXY FDM printer only moves in the Z-direction relative to the printing surface, the X/Y axes are directly controlled by belts and actuators. This means that the faster and more precise you can move the extruder head along the linear rails, the faster you can (theoretically) print. Ditching the heavier carbon fiber for these milled aluminium structures on a Voron Design CoreXY printer should mean less kinetic inertia, with the initial demonstrations showing positive results.
The interesting thing about this ‘speed printing’ community is that not only the raw printing speeds, but also that in theory CoreXY FDM printers are superior in terms of precision (resolution) and efficiency (e.g. build volume). All of which makes these printers worthy of a look next time one is shopping for an FDM-style printer.
For most Hackaday readers the process of buying groceries this weekend has been a relatively painless one, however we’re guessing some of our German friends will have found their cards unexpectedly declined. The reason? A popular model of payment card terminal, the Verifone H5000, has suffered what has been described as a “software malfunction”. So exactly what has happened? The answer is as simple as it is unfortunate: a security certificate for German transaction processing stored on the device has expired.
The full story exposes the flaws in assuming that a payment terminal is an appliance rather than a computer and its associated software that needs updating like any other. The H5000 is an old terminal that ceased production back in the last decade and has reached end-of-life, however it has remained in use and perhaps more seriously, remained in the supply chain to merchants buying a terminal. With updates requiring a site visit rather than an over-the-air upgrade, it’s likely that the effects of this mess could last a while.
Around here, we’re always excited about a new actuator design. Linear actuators are particularly hard to make cheap, fast, and good, so it’s even better when something new that we can build ourselves slides onto the scene.
Researchers at U Penn’s Pikul Research Group took inspiration from the cascade of falling dominoes for an innovative take on linear motion. This article on IEEE Spectrum describes the similarity of the sequential tipping-over with the peristaltic motion of biological systems, including you, swallowing right now.
The motion propagation in falling dominoes, called a Soliton Wave, can be harnessed to push an object at the front of the wave, just like a surfer. See the videos after the break for examples of simple setups that any of us could recreate with laser-cut or 3D printed parts. Maybe you won’t be using them to help a robot swallow (a terrifying idea that the article suggests), but you might need a conveyor or a novel way to help a device crawl like a shrimp. The paper is behind a paywall on IEEE, though you readers likely see enough in the videos to get started, and we can’t wait to see where your dominoes will lead us next.
[FloweringElbow] aka [Bongo] on YouTube is certainly having a go at this, and we reckon he’s onto a winner! This epic flatbed CNC build (video, embedded below) starts with some second hand structural I-beam, with welded-on I-beam legs, DIY cast aluminium side plates and plenty of concrete to give a strong and importantly, heavy structure.
The ideal machine is as rigid as possible, and heavy, to dampen out vibrations caused by high-feed speed cutting, or the forces due to cutting harder materials, so bigger really is better. For construction of the frame, steel is pretty strong, and the mass of the structure gives it additional damping, but triangulation was needed to counteract additional twisting. He stitch-welded the pre-heated frame in inch-long sections to limit the heat transferred into the metal, minimizing the subsequent warpage. [Bongo] used hacky Vibratory stress relief (VSR) constructed from a washing machine motor and eccentric weight, clamped to the frame, with feedback from a mobile phone app to find the resonant frequencies. There are other videos on the channel devoted to that topic of such stress relief techniques.
Precise enough to cut sticky-backed vinyl at half thickness!
When it came time for adding even more mass, a priming coat was made from a mixture of bonding epoxy and sharp grit, intended for non-slip flooring. The concrete mix used Portland cement, pozzolan (Silica fume) polycarboxylate superplasticiser and 1/2″ glass fiber threads. A second mix added crushed stone for additional mass. A neat trick was to make a handheld vibratory compactor from a plate welded onto the end of old drill bit, mounted in an SDS hammer drill.
Once the frame was flipped the right way up (collapsing the overloaded hoist in the process) it was necessary to level the top surface to accept the linear rails. This was done using a super runny, self-leveling epoxy, and checked by flowing water over it. Once the epoxy surfaces were adequately flat and coplanar (and much scraping later) the linear rails were attached, after creating some epoxy shoulders for them to butt up against. End plates to attach the Y axis lead screws, were added by bolting into the frame with a grit-loaded epoxy bond in between.
The gantry design was skipped for this video (but you can see that here) and once mounted a quick test showed the machine was viable. One curious task was making their own cable-chain from ply, on the machine itself, rather than buying something expensive off-the-peg. Why not? Once the machine was working well enough to mill a flat sheet of steel to nice reflective surface, it was used to mount a DIY drag-knife to cut out shapes in some vinyl, so it has the precision. We did like seeing an XBox controller used to manually jog the machine around! So much to see in this build and other related videos, we reckon this channel is one to watch!
We’ve featured CNC builds many a time, there’s a build whatever your needs and budget, but here’s a good starting point to build a machine, just good enough to build the tools you need. If you don’t happen to have a source of structural I-beam to hand, you can do something quite capable with wood, and if you fancy a go at 3D printing a knee mill, we’ve got that covered as well.
