Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Zürich On Thursday

September 23, 2015 by Sophi Kravitz 2 Comments

Join us for a Meetup Thursday the 24th of September in Zürich, Switzerland. We’re co-hosting a meetup with FabLab Zürich and we are excited to see you!

Doors open at 18:00 on Thursday, 24 September. We’ll have some food and drink, project show and tell, and time to hang out and get to know each other. This is a free event but please RSVP to let us know you’re coming.

Bring the project you are working on to show off, everyone loves to see projects regardless of what stage they’re in. Many times, showing your project and talking about it pushes your project forward; “oh hey, I have an extra RN42 BT module you can have” or “I already wrote a driver for that chip and it’s on github”. Showing your project to others can also inspire someone else to make their own project based on your awesome idea. I’ve been motivated many times to start a project because of what I saw someone else make.

Germany Too!

This Zurich meetup isn’t the only chance to connect with Hackaday in Europe. Next week, we’ll be in Berlin! We’re co-hosting a Berlin Meetup with Vintage Computer Festival organizers in the evening after Berlin Maker Faire and the Vintage Computing Festival. VCF have planned food and drink, a live band or two… chip tunes! It will be on October 3rd, and [Elliot], [Sophi] and [Bilke] will all be there.

Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Washington DC

September 3, 2015 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Join us for a Meetup on Saturday, September 12th near Washington DC. The Hackaday Crew is headed out to the DC area a week from Saturday and we want to hang out with you. We’ll be hosting a meetup at Nova Labs hackerspace in Reston, Virgina which is on the Northwest side of DC.

We’ll get things rolling at 6pm on Saturday, September 12. The event includes a few lightning talks, some food and drink, and a lot of socializing. This is free to all but you do need to RSVP to let us know you’re coming. We want you to bring a hack to show off. We love to see what people are working on no matter the level of complexity or stage of completion.

This all started when [Anool Mahidharia] mentioned that he’d be at Nova Labs on September 11-13 to lead a KiCAD PCB design workshop. This 2.5 day boot-camp starts with installing the Open Source EDA software on your laptop and ends when you have a completed PCB design ready to be submitted to a board fab. There is a charge for the workshop and attendance is limited so if you’re interested in it you should sign up now. Our events page is a good collection of information on both events as well as directions to get to Nova Labs.

The workshop is being organized by our friend [Bob Coggeshall] who we first met (and interviewed about his work on the Linux ‘sudo’ command) back in 2014 at Bay Area Maker Faire. Since then, [Brian Benchoff] swung by and visited [Bob] to talk about his company Small Batch Assembly and to tour Nova Labs. He will be conducting his own surface mount soldering workshop, will speak about Design For Manufacturing, and will show his Pick and Place machine during the weekend.

It will be fun to visit with [Bob] and to meet everyone who can make it to the Saturday evening meetup. So far [Mike Szczys], [Brian Benchoff], and [Sophi Kravitz] are all planning to be there. [Anool Mahidharia] will of course be there since he’s leading the workshop. The following weekend [Anool] and [Brian] will both be headed to Philadelphia for the 2015 Open Hardware Summit for which Hackaday is a proud sponsor. [Matt Berggren] and [Amber Cunningham] will both be at OSH as well, talking all things Tindie.

Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Shenzhen

May 27, 2015 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

That’s right, we’re headed to the epicenter of electronics manufacturing next month: Shenzhen, China. We have a ton planned and this is the quick and dirty overview to get you thinking. If you are in the area (or are itching to travel) join us for a week of hardware hacker culture. Highlights for our tour include:

Meet Up on June 18th – (RSVP details coming soon)
Zero to Product PCB Workshop on June 19th – RSVP Now
Hackaday Talks presented at Maker Faire Shenzhen on June 19th and June 21st
Hackaday Booth at MFSZ on June 20-21

Zero to Product Workshop at MakerCamp Shenzhen

MakerCamp brings 30 talented Makers, Hackers, Designers, and Engineers together for a few days to build a makerspace inside of a shipping container.

We won’t be part of that build team (registration is open until 6/1 if you want to be). We will be supporting the event as part of the workshops that help celebrate the completion of the space. A mobile hackerspace full of interesting tools is one thing. But the sharing of knowledge, experience, and skill is what truly makes a hackerspace work.

Our Zero to Product workshop created by [Matt Berggren] has been generating a ton of buzz and will be offered at Shenzhen MakerCamp.

RSVP for the Workshop

The workshop runs from 10am to 6pm on Friday, June 19th on the grounds of Maker Faire: Shenzhen. The event covers PCB design and at the end you will have laid out a development board for use with the ESP8266 WiFi module.

We were totally sold out for the workshop in LA a few weeks ago this is another chance to join in. If Shenzhen is a bit too far for you to travel, we are also planning the next installment in San Francisco on June 13th.

Hackaday Shenzhen Meetup

If you just want to hang out, so do we! On the night of Thursday, June 18th we’ll be rolling into an area bar for a tasty beverage and a night of interesting conversation. As always, we want to see the hardware you’ve been working on. We do recommend bringing things that fit easily in your pocket or backpack since we’re meeting up to spend some time with other Hackaday community members in the area.

We don’t have the location nailed down for this one. Check this post again as we’ll be adding it here. And if you have a bar to suggest to us please leave a comment below.

The picture above is from just a few weeks ago. We had a huge turnout for the BAMF meetup. There was a ton of hardware on hand which makes for really easy conversation as you meet other hackers for the first time.

Talks by [Mike] and [Sophi] plus Booth at Maker Faire Shenzhen

[Mike] is giving a talk on Friday, June 19th about the power of Open Design to move education forward. [Sophi] will be presenting her talk on Sunday, June 21st about making stuff that matters and working on research equipment used to investigate the world around us such as solar, medicine and disease.

Come to the Faire to hear our talks, but make sure you swing by the Hackaday booth as well. We’ll be bringing some of our most favorite projects to exhibit but we can’t resist the opportunity to do something interactive. Stop by and build an oscillator, wire up a sequencer, and create your own rudimentary music based on [Elliot Williams’] series Logic Noise.

Tag Along with Hacker Camp Shenzhen?

One of the adventures we’ve always wanted to take part in is Hacker Camp Shenzhen which is run by Hackaday alumnus and Hackaday Prize Judge [Ian Lesnet]. The week-long camp leverages [Ian’s] knowledge of the area, manufacturers, markets, and people to provide tours and workshops for those interested in manufacturing. It just so happens that HackerCamp lines up the same week as all of the Hackaday events. We can’t take part in the entire thing, but are hoping that we have a free day to meet up (and possibly tag along) with the HackerCamp crew.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Adafruit And The Arduinos At Maker Faire

May 18, 2015 by Elliot Williams 67 Comments

The apparent lull on the Arduino front the last few weeks was just the calm before the storm that is the Bay Area Maker Faire (BAMF). Both companies claiming the Arduino name were there over the weekend, with news and new products in tow. Ironically, you could see from one booth straight over to the other. Small world.

Perhaps the biggest news from Arduino LLC is that hacker-friendly Adafruit is now going to be making officially-licensed boards in the US. Competing with this news, Arduino SRL brought its new boards, including the Yun Mini and ARM-powered Arduino M0. And [Massimo Banzi] and Arduino LLC seem to be taking an end-run around the Arduino SRL trademark by announcing the “Genuino” brand for European production. For all the details, read on!

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Hackaday Links: May 10, 2015

May 10, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

Here’s a cool crowdfunding campaign that somehow escaped the Hackaday Tip Line. It’s a remote control SpaceShipOne and White Knight. SpaceShipOne is a ducted fan that has the high-drag feathering mechanism, while White Knight is a glider. Very cool, and something we haven’t really seen in the scratchbuilding world.

[Sink] has a Makerbot Digitizer – the Makerbot 3D scanner – and a lot of time on his hands. He printed something, scanned it, printed that scan… you get the picture. It’s a project called Transcription Error.

Keurig has admitted they were wrong to force DRM on consumers for their pod coffee cups.

The Apple ][, The Commodore 64, and the Spectrum. The three kings. Apple will never license their name for retro computer hardware, and there will never be another computer sold under the Commodore label. The Spectrum, though… The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega is a direct-to-TV console in the vein of [Jeri Ellisworth]’s C64 joystick doohickey.

Infinity mirrors are simple enough to make; they’re just one mirror, some LEDs, and another piece of glass. How about a 3D infinity mirror? They look really, really cool.

Here’s the six-day notice for some cool events: Hamvention in Dayton, OH. [Greg Charvat] will be there, and [Robert] is offering cold drinks to anyone who mentions Hackaday. If anyone feels like scavenging for me, here’s a thread I created on the Vintage Computer Forum. Bay Area Maker Faire is next weekend. Most of the rest of the Hackaday crew will be there because we have a meetup on Saturday night

Atmel And Arduino Announce Wi-Fi Shield 101 At World Maker Faire

September 30, 2014 by Adam Fabio 25 Comments

Atmel and Arduino teamed up at World Maker Faire to introduce the Wi-Fi shield 101. [Gary] from Atmel gave us the lowdown on this new shield and its components. The shield is a rather spartan affair, carrying only devices of note: an Atmel WINC1500 WiFi module, and an ATECC108 crypto chip.

The WINC1500 is a nifty little WiFi module in its own right. WINC handles IEEE 802.11 b/g/n at up to 72 Mbps. 72Mbps may not sound like much by today’s standards, but it’s plenty fast for most embedded applications. WINC handles all the heavy lifting of the wireless connection. Connectivity is through SPI, UART or I2C, though on the Arduino shield it will be running in SPI mode.

The ATECC108 is a member of Atmel’s “CryptoAuthentication” family. It comes packaged in an 8-pin SOIC, and is compatible with serial I2C EEPROM specifications. Internally the similarities to serial EEPROMs end. The ‘108 has a 256-bit SHA engine in hardware, as well as a Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) level random number generator. Atmel sees this chip as being at the core of secure embedded systems. We think it’s pretty darn good, so long as we don’t hear about it at the next DEFCON.

The Wi-Fi shield 101 and associated libraries should be out in January 2015. We can’t wait to see all the new projects (and new ways to blink an LED) the shield will enable.

Sandy Poems Drawn By A Robot Named Skryf

October 15, 2015 by James Hobson 14 Comments

If you were lucky at the 2015 World Maker Faire you may have stumbled upon strange writings of poetry on the ground — written in sand. While at first confusing, if you followed the poetry along you also caught a glimpse of Skryf, a draw bot by [Gijs van Bon].

The creator was asked to perform poems for a festival about transition and letting go. Naturally, building a robot to write poetry in sand was the downright obvious answer to the question.

I was asked to perform 40 poems during a 10 day festival, and the poems were about transition and letting go. And then I thought the obvious thing to do as an artist is to make a machine that writes those poems with sand. I started writing them, and when the third poem was written, the first one was completely gone, and it was such a beautiful thing.

The robot uses a laptop for input, which is connected to the bicycle carriage. One servo controls the left-to-right movement, and another releases the sand. Forward and back is controlled by the main drive train, which must have been fun to account for (they aren’t servos!)

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