Friday Hack Chat: Perfect Purple PCBs

June 21, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Every Friday, we gather ’round the hot air gun over on Hackaday.io, invite some cool people over, and get them to talk about what they do. This is the Hack Chat. It’s become a tradition, and already we’ve had a ton of awesome people walk through our doors.

This Friday, we’re going to sit down with the purveyors of perfect purple PCBs. Over the last decade or so, a lot has changed in the space of small-run PCB production. Ten years ago, PCBs were expensive, and it wouldn’t be abnormal to spend hundreds of dollars on a small run of tiny boards. Now, The DEF CON 24 badge, in a panel are cheaper than ever, giving industrious hardware creators access to professional quality manufacturing at a fraction of the price seen just a few years ago.

For the last few years, OSH Park has been a mainstay of low-volume PCB fabrication. Their website is as simple as it gets: Upload some Gerbers, an Eagle board file, or a KiCad PCB, press a few buttons, and in a week or so you’ll have a perfect purple PCB in your mailbox.

This week, we’re inviting [Drew Fustini] and [Dan Sheadel] to talk about what OSH Park does, how they became the first place that comes to mind when you need a PCB. They’ll explain why the boards are purple, environmental regulations for PCB manufacturing in the US, shared projects and tips and tricks for creating the perfect board.

What would you like to see from a PCB supplier? Would you like to see OSH Park expand further into their burgeoning Pog business? How about a sticker club? Who would win in a fight, a blue robot dog or a purple robot shark? All these questions and more will be answered; if you have a question for the OSH Park team, drop it in this spreadsheet.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This hack chat will take place at noon Pacific time on Friday, June 23rd. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about

3D Printed Jet Engine

June 21, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

In specific applications, jet engines are often the most efficient internal combustion engines available. Not just for airplanes, but for anything that needs to run on a wide variety of fuels, operate at a consistent high RPM, or run for an extended amount of time. Of course, most people don’t have an extra $4,000 lying around to buy a small hobby engine, but now there’s a 3D-printed axial compressor available from [noob_sauce].

As an aero propulsion engineer, [noob_sauce] is anything but a novice in the world of jet engines. This design is on its fourth iteration with a working model set to be tested by the end of the month. Additionally, [noob_sauce] created his own software that was necessary for the design of such a small, efficient jet engine which has all been made available on Git. So far the only part that has been completed has been the compressor stage of the engine, but it’s still a very impressive build that we don’t see too often due to the complexity and cost of axial compressor jet engines.

Of course, there are some less-complex jet engines that are available to anyone with access to a hardware store and a welder which don’t require hardly any precision at all. While they’re fun and noisy and relatively easy to build, though, they don’t have near the efficiency of a jet engine like this one. The build is impressive on its own, and also great that [noob_sauce] plans to release all the plans so that anyone can build one of these as well.

You’re The Only One Not Playing With Unity

June 21, 2017 by Will Sweatman 41 Comments

It wasn’t too long ago that one could conjecture that most hackers are not avid video game players. We spend most of our free time taking things apart, tinkering with microcontrollers and reading the latest [Jenny List] article on Hackaday.com. When we do think of video games, our neurons generally fire in the direction of emulating a console on a single board computer, such as a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone. Or even emulating the actual console processor on an FPGA. Rarely do we venture off into 3D programs meant to make modern video games. If we can’t export an .STL with it, we’re not interested. It’s just not our bag.

Oculus Rift changed this. The VR headset was originally invented for 3D video games, but quickly became a darling to hackers the world over. Virtual Reality technology is far bigger than just video games, and brings opportunity to many fields such as real estate, construction, product visualization, education, social interaction… the list goes on and on.

The Oculus team got together with the folks over at Unity in the early days to make it easy for video game makers to make content for the Rift. Unity is a game engine designed with a shallow learning curve and is available for free for non-commercial use. The Oculus Rift can be integrated into a Unity environment with the check of a setting and importing a small package, available on the Oculus site. This makes it easy for anyone interested in VR technology to get a Rift and start pumping out content.

Hackers have taken things a step further and have written scripts that allow Unity to communicate with an Arduino. VR is fun. But VR plus physical reality is just down right exciting! In this article, we’re going to walk you through setting up your Oculus Rift and Unity game engine to communicate with the outside world via an Arduino.

Continue reading “You’re The Only One Not Playing With Unity” →

VIM Normalization

June 21, 2017 by Al Williams 92 Comments

Linux users–including the ones at the Hackaday underground bunker–tend to fall into two groups: those that use vi and those that use emacs. We aren’t going to open that debate up again, but we couldn’t help but notice a new item on GitHub that potentially negates one of the biggest complaints non-vi users have, at least for vim which is the most common variant of vi in use on most modern systems. The vim keybinding makes vim behave like a “normal” editor (and to forestall flames, that’s a quote from the project page).

Normally vi starts out in a command mode that it calls normal mode. Pressing a key will execute an editing command, unlike most other modern editors which just insert characters into the open file. For example, pressing x will delete a character. This surprises most people who aren’t familiar with vi. In all fairness, there are other older editors that work this way, but they usually were not screen-oriented.

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Long Range Wireless Internet

June 20, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 46 Comments

While most of you reading this have broadband in your home, there are still vast areas with little access to the Internet. Ham radio operator [emmynet] found himself in just such a situation recently, and needed to get a wireless connection over 1 km from his home. WiFi wouldn’t get the job done, so he turned to a 433 MHz serial link instead. (Alternate link)

[emmynet] used an inexpensive telemetry kit that operates in a frequency that travels long distances much more easily than WiFi can travel. The key here isn’t in the hardware, however, but in the software. He went old-school, implemending peer-to-peer TCP/IP connection using SLIP — serial line Internet protocol. All of the commands to set up the link are available on his project page. With higher gain antennas than came with the telemetry kit, a range much greater than 1 km could be achieved as well.

[Editor’s note: This is how we all got Internet, over phone lines, back in the early Nineties. Also, you kids get off my lawn! But also, seriously, SLIP is a good tool to have in your toolbox, especially for low-power devices where WiFi would burn up your batteries.]

While it didn’t suit [emmynet]’s needs, it is possible to achieve extremely long range with WiFi itself. However this generally requires directional antennas with very high gain and might not be as reliable as a lower-frequency connection. On the other hand, a WiFi link will (in theory) get a greater throughput, so it all depends on what your needs are. Also, be aware that using these frequencies outside of their intended use might require an amateur radio license.

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Kill The Exhaust, Not Your Lungs With The Fume Coffin

June 20, 2017 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

As if slinging around 40 watts of potentially tattoo-removing or retina-singeing laser beams wasn’t anxiety-inducing enough, now comes a new, scary acronym – LCAGs, or “laser-generated airborne contaminants.” With something that scary floating around your shop, it might be a good idea to build a souped-up laser cutter exhaust fan to save your lungs.

We jest, but taking care of yourself is the responsible way to have a long and fruitful hacking career, and while [patternmusic]’s “Fume Coffin” might seem like overkill, can you go too far to protect your lungs? Plywood and acrylic, the most common materials that come across a laser cutter’s bed, both release quite a witch’s brew of toxins when vaporized by a laser beam. The Fume Coffin clears the air in your shop by venting it to the outdoors after giving it a good scrubbing through an activated charcoal pre-filter and a HEPA polishing element. Both filters are commercially available so replacements won’t be an issue, and the entire thing is housed in a wooden box that gives the device its name.

Since it’s ejecting 200 cubic feet per minute, you’ll have to provide at least that much make-up air, but other than that the Fume Coffin should be a welcome addition to the shop. We’ve seen a few other attempts to handle LCAGs effectively before, including a DIY charcoal and automotive air filter design.