Test Drive Your New Programming Font

January 21, 2016 by 43 Comments

After hour and hours spent in front of a terminal or IDE, a user begins to build a list of infuriating little things. That one pop-up box that happens every time you press that button by mistake. The noise the software makes when the compile fails. Or the horrible reality that your code just crashed because there wasn’t enough difference between uppercase ‘O’ and a zero. In comes the programming font.

The typical way to find a programming font is to troll forums for a user with a similar problem and see if they have a workable solution. [Koen Lageveen] went out and found nearly all of the free programming fonts out there and compiled a list. He then took one more step and wrote a web app that lets you test them out. Hopefully this will help those in the very real struggle for the perfect programming font. You can try out the tool for yourself, and if you really like it [Koen] has all the code up for it on his GitHub.

[via Hacker News]

Fail Of The Week : Watt A Loss

January 21, 2016 by 27 Comments

This one is a bit dated, but the lessons are still relevant. [Zach Hoeken] posted about the challenges he faced building a CNC stepper driver. He was experimenting with Toshiba motor drivers back in 2012.

The modular motor driver boards he built were based on the THB6064AH – capable of 1/64th step, and 4.5 Amps at up to 50V. [Zach] built a test jig to run the boards through their paces. A couple of messed tracks was the least of his problems – easily fixed by cutting traces and using jumper wires to correct the errors. But the header footprints for the motor drive boards got reversed. The only way out was to solder the headers on the back side.

LESSON : Always check footprint orientation and pin numbering before sending boards to fab.

The surprising part was when someone as experienced as [Zach] messed up on Ohms Law. Based on the current he wanted the motors to run at, his sense resistors needed to be 3.2W, but he’d used SMD footprints (0805 likely) instead. Those tiny resistors couldn’t be used at all, and the 5W resistors plonked on looked like an ugly hack.

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Digital Clock + IPhone Dock

January 21, 2016 by 7 Comments

[Pinky_chi] was looking for a project to make for his girlfriend, and settled on a rather fantastic piece of woodworking — a digital clock, with an iPhone dock for her phone.

LED ClockHe built the enclosure completely out of walnut, which gives it a very refined and polished look; we’re quite impressed with his woodworking skills. The cool thing about this digital clock is that he used individual LEDs to create both the digital 7-segment displays, and a ring of LEDs around it to denote the hour.

On the back are three buttons. One to change the hour, the minute, and a temperature button. By holding down the temperature button, the display will display the current room temperature — he added this because the RTC device (a DS3231) has a built-in thermometer — so why not?

Choosing a favorite LED clock on Hackaday is like picking a favorite child — we love them all — but this Star Gate themed clock from a few years ago is great — check it out!

[via r/DIY]

Drawn In By The Siren’s Song

January 21, 2016 by 31 Comments

When I say “siren” what do you think of? Ambulances? Air raids? Sigh. I was afraid you were going to say that. We’ve got work to do.

You see, the siren played an important role in physics and mathematics about 150 years ago. Through the first half of the 1900s, this fine apparatus was trivialized, used for its pure noise-making abilities. During the World Wars, the siren became associated with air raids and bomb shelters: a far cry from its romantic origins. In this article, we’re going to take the siren back for the Muses. I want you to see the siren in a new light: as a fundamental scientific experiment, a musical instrument, and in the end, as a great DIY project — this is Hackaday after all.

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Hackaday Europe: Call For Proposals

January 21, 2016 by 38 Comments

Hackaday is coming to Europe in April. The world’s most superb conference on hardware creation starts with you. Please submit your proposal to present a talk or workshop at 2016 Hackaday | Belgrade, Hackaday’s first-ever European conference.

Put it on your calendar: Saturday, April 9th in Belgrade, Serbia. We have a lineup spanning from 10am to 2am, and we’re building on the best of the inaugural SuperConference we held last November: a single track of hardware talks which will run concurrently with a set of hands-on workshops. The surprise hit from that conference was badge hacking, which will be expanded and extended into the wee hours of the morning. While that is in progress, a party with two stages will spin up with performances by Infinite Jest, Grupa TI, and DJ sets.

Tickets go on sale the first week of February. Voja Antonic, who does amazing work with PCBs and badge designs, is building the conference badge. The cost of the admission will be just enough to cover the cost of the badge. We’re keeping the admission cost so low to help offset your travel costs. Belgrade is gorgeous in April, and getting there from other parts of Europe is very affordable. This event will sell out so get organized and make sure you and your fellow hardware hackers get tickets early.

Many of the Hackaday crew will be on hand. We’re likely to have a less-formal meetup (hangover brunch?) on Sunday. Check out the Hackaday | Belgrade planning page to discuss this and learn more about the conference as it comes together. See you in Belgrade!

Misleading Tech: Kickstarter, Bomb Sights, And Medical Rejuvinators

January 21, 2016 by 67 Comments

Every generation thinks it has unique problems and, I suppose, sometimes it is true. My great-grandfather didn’t have to pick a cell phone plan. However, a lot of things you think are modern problems go back much further than you might think. Consider Kickstarter. Sure, there have been plenty of successful products on Kickstarter. There have also been some misleading duds. I don’t mean the stupid ones like the guy who wants to make a cake or potato salad. I mean the ones that are almost certainly vaporware like the induced dream headgear or the Bluetooth tag with no batteries.

Overpromising and underdelivering is hardly a new problem. In the 30’s The McGregor Rejuvenator promised to reverse aging with magnetism, radio waves, infrared and ultraviolet light. Presumably, this didn’t work. Sometimes products do work, but they don’t live up to their marketing hype. The Segway comes to mind. Despite the hype that it would revolutionize transportation, the scooter is now a vehicle for tourists and mall cops.

One of my favorite examples of an overhyped product comes from World War II: The Norden Bomb Sight. What makes the Norden especially interesting is that even today it has a reputation for being highly accurate. However, if you look into it, the Norden–although a marvel for its day–didn’t always live up to its press.

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Giant Mersenne Prime Found

January 21, 2016 by 33 Comments

Ever hear of a Mersenne prime? These are prime numbers that are one less than a power of two. Named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century, there is a distributed computing project on the Internet to find Mersenne primes called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search). The project recently announced they have found the largest known prime.

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