2021 Remoticon Shirt

Last Call For Hackaday Remoticon Shirts

November 8, 2021 by 3 Comments

Hackaday conferences have a long history of excellent T-shirt designs and this year’s Remoticon is no different. If you want one of your own, you need get on that before Friday. The only way to score on is to buy one of the T-Shirt + General Admission tickets by November 11th — it gets you into all of the conference events just like the free ticket, but also scores you a shirt. (Shipping within the US is free, international delivery costs an additional $10.) What you see above is the actual test print, modeled by Aleksandar Bradic who designed this and all of the shirt from past Hackaday conferences.

Of course the most important thing is that you don’t miss Remoticon, and there is a free ticket which will remain available through the end of the conference, but you can help us with the logistics by getting one now.

The full list of speakers and the schedule is now available on the conference website. We’re delighted to have Elecia White, Keith Thorne, and Jeremy Fielding present keynote talks, and 16 additional speakers on a range of hardware-related topics. (This is notable: we originally planned for a single day of talks but were blow away by all the proposals and doubled the speaking slots!)

You can’t quite rub elbows with all your friends from afar, but you can certainly spend time together in the conference Discord, during the Hacker Trivia (form teams if you like!), at the Bring-a-Hack inside Gather Town, and at the afterparty which will include a live set from DJ Jackalope.

Everyone Who Bought a Shirt, Read This!

If you bought a shirt and have already claimed it using the code we emailed to you, thank you, you are all set.

If you already bought a shirt but haven’t claimed it, check your email. You need to respond to the Google form we sent you. If you bought a T-shirt ticket and didn’t get an email from us, let us know. All shirts need to be claimed by November 15th! Gogogo!

If you plan to order your shirt right now, here’s what will happen. Buy your ticket following the link at the top of this article. We will email you a poll question about domestic or international shipping because we have to use two different ordering interfaces for these — logistics are hard. We will then email you a redemption code and link where you can choose your size and shipping address.

We Appreciate The Patience All of You Have Shown

Thank you to everyone for your amazing patience through this process. We wanted to replicate the experience of walking into Supercon and getting a shirt at the check-in table. Shipping logistics made that a bit harder, but everyone involved has been super awesome about it and that feels really good. See you at Remoticon a week from Friday!

big LED flashlight

Own The Night With This Ludicrously Bright DIY Flashlight

November 8, 2021 by 27 Comments

If you’re a flashlight person, you know that there’s little you would do to get the brightest, most powerful, most ridiculous flashlight possible. You might even decide to build yourself a ludicrously powerful flashlight, like [Maciej Nowak] did.

If you choose the DIY route, be warned that it’s probably not going to be a simple process, at least if you follow [Maciej]’s lead. His flashlight is machined out of aluminum rounds, all turned down on the lathe to form the head of the flashlight. The head is made from three parts, each of which acts as a heat sink for the five 20-Watt CREE XHP70 LED modules. The LEDs are mounted with care to thermal considerations, and wired in series to DC-DC converter that provides the necessary 30 V using a battery pack made from four 21700 Li-ion cells. The electronics, which also includes a BMS for charging the battery and a MOSFET switching module, form a tidy package that fits into the aluminum handle.

The video below shows that the flashlight is remarkably bright, with a nice, even field with no hotspots. Given the 45-minute useful life and the three-hour recharge time, it might have been nice to make it so anywhere from one to five of the LEDs could be turned on at once. Some interesting effects might be had from switching the LEDs on sequentially, too.

Given the proclivities of our community, it’s no surprise that this is hardly the first powerful flashlight we’ve seen. This one broke the 100-Watt barrier with a single COB LED, while this ammo-can version sports an even higher light output. Neither of them looks much like a traditional flashlight, though, which is where [Maciej]’s build has the edge.

Continue reading “Own The Night With This Ludicrously Bright DIY Flashlight” →

Linux Fu: Automatic Header File Generation

November 8, 2021 by 22 Comments

I’ve tried a lot of the “newer” languages and, somehow, I’m always happiest when I go back to C++ or even C. However, there is one thing that gets a little on my nerves when I go back: the need to have header files with a declaration and then a separate file with almost the same information duplicated. I constantly make a change and forget to update the header, and many other languages take care of that for you. So I went looking for a way to automate things. Sure, some IDEs will automatically insert declarations but I’ve never been very happy with those for a variety of reasons. I wanted something lightweight that I could use in lots of different toolsets.

I found an older tool, however, that does a pretty good job, although there are a few limitations. The tool seems to be a little obscure, so I thought I’d show you what makeheaders — part of the Fossil software configuration management system. The program dates back to 1993 when [Dwayne Richard Hipp] — the same guy that wrote SQLite — created it for his own use. It isn’t very complex — the whole thing lives in one fairly large C source file but it can scan a directory and create header files for everything. In some cases, you won’t need to make big changes to your source code, but if you are willing, there are several things you can do.

Continue reading “Linux Fu: Automatic Header File Generation” →

Heavy-Copper PCB Hack Chat

November 8, 2021 by 23 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, November 10 at noon Pacific for the Heavy Copper PCBs Hack Chat with Mark Hughes and Greg Ziraldo!

For as useful as printed circuit boards are, they do seem a little flimsy at times. With nothing but a thin layer — or six — of metal on the board, and ultra-fine traces that have to fit between a dense forest of pads and vias, the current carrying capacity of the copper on most PCBs is somewhat limited. That’s OK in most cases, especially where logic-level and small-signal currents are concerned. But what happens when you really need to turn up the juice on a PCB?

Enter the world of heavy-copper PCBs, where the copper is sometimes as thick as the board substrate itself. Traces that are as physically chunky as these come with all sorts of challenges, from thermal and electrical considerations to potential manufacturing problems. To help us sort through all these issues, Mark and Greg will stop by the Hack Chat. They both work at quick-turn PCB assembly company Advanced Assembly, Mark as Research Director and Greg as Senior Director of Operations. They know the ins and outs of heavy-copper PCB designs, and they’ll share the wealth with us.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 10 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Adafruit AVRProg Grows UPDI Interface Support

November 8, 2021 by 11 Comments

Making a small number of things with an embedded application is pretty straightforward, you usually simply plug in a programmer or debugger dongle (such as an AVRISP2) into your board with an appropriate adaptor cable, load your code into whatever IDE tool is appropriate for the device and hit the program button. But when you scale up a bit to hundreds or thousands of units, this way of working just won’t cut it. Add in any functional or defect-oriented testing you need, and you’re going to need a custom programming rig.

Adafruit have a fair bit of experience with building embedded boards and dealing with the appropriate testing and programming, and now they’ve updated their AVR Programming library to support the latest devices which have moved to the UPDI (Unified Programming and Debug Interface) programming interface. UPDI is a single-wire bidirectional asynchronous serial interface which enables programming and debugging of embedded applications on slew of the new AVR branded devices from Microchip. An example would be the AVR128DAxx which this scribe has been tinkering with lately because it is cheap, has excellent capacitive touch support, and is available in a prototype-friendly 28-pin SOIC package, making it easy peasy to solder.

The library is intended for use with the Arduino platform, so it should run on a vast array of hardware, without any special requirements, so making a custom programming jig out of hardware lots of us have lying around is not a huge hassle.

Adafruit provide a few application examples in the project GitHub to get you going, such as this ATTiny817 example that wipes the flash memory, sets appropriate fuses and drops in a bootloader.

The UPDI code was taken from the [brandanlane’s] portaprog which is hosted on the TTGO T-Display ESP32 board from Chinese outfit LilyGo, which is also worth checking out.

A little while ago we saw how the AVR Multitool, the AVRGPP learned to speak UPDI, and since we’re on programming interfaces, its possible to get the cheap-as-chips USBasp to speak TPI as well.

Continue reading “Adafruit AVRProg Grows UPDI Interface Support” →

A close-up view of surface-mount components on a circuit board

Smaller Is Sometimes Better: Why Electronic Components Are So Tiny

November 8, 2021 by 35 Comments

Perhaps the second most famous law in electronics after Ohm’s law is Moore’s law: the number of transistors that can be made on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. Since the physical size of chips remains roughly the same, this implies that the individual transistors become smaller over time. We’ve come to expect new generations of chips with a smaller feature size to come along at a regular pace, but what exactly is the point of making things smaller? And does smaller always mean better?

Smaller Size Means Better Performance

Over the past century, electronic engineering has improved massively. In the 1920s, a state-of-the-art AM radio contained several vacuum tubes, a few enormous inductors, capacitors and resistors, several dozen meters of wire to act as an antenna, and a big bank of batteries to power the whole thing. Today, you can listen to a dozen music streaming services on a device that fits in your pocket and can do a gazillion more things. But miniaturization is not just done for ease of carrying: it is absolutely necessary to achieve the performance we’ve come to expect of our devices today. Continue reading “Smaller Is Sometimes Better: Why Electronic Components Are So Tiny” →

The Raspberry Pi CM4 Begets A Form Factor

November 8, 2021 by 34 Comments

It has become the norm for single-board computers to emerge bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Raspberry Pi, as the board from Cambridge sets the hardware standard for its many competitors. This trend has taken an interesting new turn, as a new board has emerged that doesn’t sport the familiar 40-pin connector of the Pi Model B, but the more compact from factor of the Compute Module 4. The Radxa CM3 sports a Rockchip RK3566 quad core Cortex-A55 running at 2.0 GHz, and is to be made available in a variety of memory specifications topping out at 8 GB. It is hardware compatible with the Pi CM4, and should be usable with carrier boards made for that module.

We’ve looked at the CM4 as the exciting face of the Raspberry Pi because the traditional boards have largely settled into the same-but-faster progression of models since the original B+ in 2014. The compute module offers an accessible way to spin your own take on Raspberry Pi hardware, and it seems that this new board will only serve to broaden those opportunities. Radxa are the company behind the Rock Pi series of more conventional Raspberry Pi clones, so there seems every chance that it will reach the market as promised.

Will it make sense to buy one of these as opposed to the Pi CM4? On paper it may have some hardware features to tempt developers, but like all Pi clones it will have to bridge the software gap to be a real contender. The Raspberry Pi has never been the fastest board on the market at any given time, but it has gained its position because it comes with a well-supported and properly updated operating system. For this board and others like it that will be a tough standard to match.

Curious as to what the first Raspberry Pi form factor clone was? We think it’s the SolidRun Carrier-one from 2013.

Via CNX Software.