Making A Solder Paste Stencil From What You Have On Hand

November 1, 2023 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Sometimes there are moments when an engineer has to use whatever materials they have to hand in order to complete the job on time. Such a situation arose at the RevSpace hacker space in Den Haag, Netherlands, as they were the assembly venue for a conference badge.

Their problem was that the badge PCB had no solder paste stencil, and the solution was to laser cut one out of an unexpected material. The backing paper for self-adhesive vinyl sheet has properties not unlike those desired of a stencil, so they tried laser-cutting one from that material. The result was a robust stencil that outperformed the Mylar they had previously used, enabled the manufacture of 350 boards.

They think that the polymer layer on top of the paper may be silicone, and found that the laser didn’t unduly melt the edges of the cut. We’re not sure we’d feed random unknown plastics into our cutter, we’re guessing they have good quality ventilation. It’s mounted into a plywood jig in much the same way as a conventional stencil might be.

The badges were destined for WICCON, a Dutch conference from an organisation for women in cybersecurity. Sadly we’ve not seen a completed one so we’re not sure what it does, however we’re pleased to hear they were completed before the event. That’s a hurdle all badge designers will know well.

Long term readers may remember, that RevSpace have something of a history when it comes to assembling badges.

A woman with a black vest and pink shirt with curly hair stands behind a podium in front of a projected presentation. She is speaking and has her hands moving in a vague guesture.

Supercon 2022: Carrie Sundra Discusses Manufacturing On A Shoestring Budget

October 31, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 2 Comments

Making hardware is hard. This is doubly true when you’re developing a niche hardware device that might have a total production run in the hundreds of units instead of something mass market. [Carrie Sundra] has been through the process several times, and has bestowed her wisdom on how not to screw it up.

The internet is strewn with the remains of unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns for tantalizing devices that seemed so simple when they showed of the prototype. How does one get something from the workbench into the world without losing their life savings and reputation?

[Sundra] walks us through her process for product development that has seen several products successfully launch without an army of pitchfork-wielding fiber crafters line up at her door. One of the first concepts she stresses is that you should design your products around the mantra, “Once it leaves your shop IT SHOULD NEVER COME BACK.” If you design for user-serviceability from the beginning, you can eliminate most warranty returns and probably make it easier to manufacture your widget to boot. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Carrie Sundra Discusses Manufacturing On A Shoestring Budget” →

Render of the shell pictured standing on the pavement, with shell parts printed in white and button parts printed in orange

Packing For Supercon? Here’s A Printable Case For Your Badge

October 29, 2023 by Arya Voronova 2 Comments

Hackaday Supercon 2023 is a week away, and if you’re still thinking about the equipment you need to take with you, here’s something you’ll want to print – a case for the Supercon 2023 badge that you will find inside of your goodie bag. This year’s Supercon badge is a gorgeous analog playground board we call Vectorscope, powered by an RP2040, MicroPython, and a ton of love for all of the creativity that we’ve seen you bunch express through the wonders of analog electronics. There’s a round LCD screen, SMD buttons galore, as well as some pokey through-hole headers, and if you’ve carried a badge around, you know that all of these can be a bit touchy! You’re in luck, though – just in time, [T.B. Trzepacz] brings us a 3D-printed shell.

Over on Hackaday Discord, we’ve been watching this shell go through multiple iterations throughout the past few days – the initial design pics appeared almost as soon as we published the PCB files for the badge! Yesterday, [T.B. Trzepacz] dropped by the Design Lab where we’ve been putting finishing touches on the badges, and armed with the real-world PCBs, made the final tweaks to the design – then gave us the go-ahead to spread the word.

This shell is practical but elegant and does a mighty fine job protecting both the badge and the wearer. Nothing is hidden away, from the buttons to the expansion headers, and the lanyard holes keep it wearable. At this time, grab the Basic 2 files – these should work for SLA and FDM printers alike, and they’re tolerant enough even for FDM printers below average. Pick your favourite color scheme, or go for one of the transparent SLA resins, and when you arrive at the Supercon, you’ll have a case you can rely on.

Want to give this case your own spin? Perhaps a Pip-Boy aesthetic or a Vectrex console vibe? Should you want to modify anything, the Fusion360 sources are right there, open-source as they ought to be. It’s been a pleasure watching this case design grow, and in case you’re looking to hire a skilled engineer in Berlin, [T.B. Trzepacz] is looking for work!

2023 Hackaday Supercon: Cory Doctorow Signs On As Keynote Speaker

October 25, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

As if you weren’t already excited enough about the speakers and events that will be part of this year’s Hackaday Supercon, today we can finally reveal that journalist, activist, author, technologist, and all around geek Cory Doctorow will be presenting the keynote address on Saturday morning.

Cory has always been an outspoken supporter of digital freedom, from helping develop OpenCola in 2001 as a way to explain the concepts behind free and open source software, to his more recent work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s made his novels available for purchase directly from his personal website in DRM-free file formats, and he’s even developed a habit of releasing some of them for free under the Creative Commons license. The hacker ethos is strong with this one.

Over the last year, he’s been particularly vocal about what he calls Enshittification — the inevitable decay of any online service where the users are, whether they realize it or not, the product. It’s a concept that’s perfectly exemplified by the ongoing slow-motion implosion of Twitter, and Reddit’s increasingly hostile treatment of its community. Cory explains that one of the signposts on this particular journey is when user-created tools, such as web scrapers or bots, are banned by the powers that be. Reverse engineering, especially when it can uncover a way out of the Walled Garden, is strictly forbidden.

Luckily, there’s a way out. Cory will be delivering his talk An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse, not only to those who will be physically attending Supercon, but to the entire Hackaday community via our live YouTube stream of the event. It’s a presentation that’s critically important to an audience such as ours — while nearly anyone with an Internet connection can appreciate the problem he’s describing, hackers and makers are in a unique position to actually do something about it. Following the principles Cory will detail in his talk, we can build services and networks that actually respect their users rather than treating them like the enemy.

It Won’t Be Long Now

By the time this post hits the front page of Hackaday, there will be slightly more than a week to go before several hundred of our best friends descend on the city of Pasadena for Supercon. We recently unveiled the Vectorscope badge, dropped two posts listing off all of this year’s presenters, and offered up a list of fascinating workshops. The stage is now officially set for what we consider, as humbly as possible, to be the greatest gathering of hardware hackers, builders, engineers, and enthusiasts in the world. Check out the schedule and plan your Supercon ahead of time.

Tickets for the 2023 Hackaday Supercon are, perhaps unsurprisingly, completely sold out. But you can still add your name to the wait list on Eventbrite, which will put you in the running to grab any returned tickets should somebody have to back out at the last minute. Failing that, there’s always 2024.

Featured Image: Copyright Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO), www.jucophoto.com/, CC BY-SA 2.0

The Eternal Dilemma

October 21, 2023 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

It’s two weeks until Supercon! We can almost smell the solder from here. If you’re coming, and especially if it’s your first time, you’re soon to be faced with the eternal dilemma of hacker cons, only at Supercon it’s maybe a trilemma or even a quadralemma: hang out with folks, work on the badge, go to talks, or show off all the cool stuff you’ve been working on the past year?

Why not all four? That’s exactly why we start off with a chill-out day on Friday, when we don’t have much formally planned. Sure, there’s a party Friday night, and maybe a badge talk or some workshops, but honestly you’ll have most of the day free. Ease into it. Have a look at the badge and start brainstorming. Meet some new people and start up a team. Or just bathe in the tremendous geekery of it all. This is also a great time to show off a small project that you brought along. Having the widget that you poured brain, sweat, and tears into sitting on the table next to you is the perfect hacker icebreaker.

On Saturday and Sunday, there will definitely be talks that you’ll want to attend, so scope that out ahead of time and plan those in. But don’t feel like you have to go to all of them, either. Most of the talks will be online, either right away or eventually, so you won’t miss out forever. But since our speakers are putting their own work out there, if you’re interested in the subject, having questions or insight about their talk is a surefire way to strike up a good conversation later on, and that’s something you can’t do online. So plan in a few talks, too.

You’ll find that the time flies by, but don’t feel like you have to do it all either. Ask others what the coolest thing they’ve seen is. Sample as much as you can, but it’s not Pokemon – you can’t catch it all.

See you in two weeks!

(PS: The art is recycled from a Supercon long, long ago. I thought it was too nice to never see it again.)

2023 Hackaday Supercon: The Rest Of The Talks

October 19, 2023 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

The 2023 Hackaday Superconference is only two weeks away, and we’re happy to announce the second half of the slate. As always, this is a great mix of well-known Hackaday faces, and folks we haven’t yet met. Whether they’re fixing up the Apollo Guidance Computer, building their own airplanes, trapping rubidium atoms, or teaching robots to sail, this is another super interesting round of talks.

Tickets are sold out, the badges are almost done, and we’re in the home stretch! We can smell the tacos from here. If you’re joining us, we hope you’re excited. If you’re not able to, we’ll stream as much as we can.

All that remains is the mystery of the keynote speaker. Stay tuned! Continue reading “2023 Hackaday Supercon: The Rest Of The Talks” →

2023 Hackaday Supercon Badge: Welcome To The Vectorscope

October 18, 2023 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

This year, the Supercon badge goes analog! (Or at least fakes it pretty convincingly.) Taking inspiration from the phosphor scopes of yesteryear, the 2023 Vectorscope badge is part analog audio playground, part art project, and all about prototyping. Who doesn’t like the warm glow and lovely green fade of an old Tektronix tube scope? That’s what we’re after.

Conceptually, the badge is two separate devices in one. Most obvious is the vectorscope, which takes in voltages in the 0 V – 3 V range and plots them out in X-Y mode in glorious fake-phosphor effect on the lovely round IPS screen. We’ve also tied an audio amplifier to the Y input that plays whatever waveform you’re watching.

But you don’t have to bring your own waveforms with you – the other half of the badge is an arbitrary programmable waveform generator that drives two channels. Off the bat, it’s configurable with the front panel controls, so you’re obviously invited to make Lissajous figures and store them in the program memories.

Combining the two halves lets you draw in voltages and time, but not until you connect them together, naturally. You see, this isn’t an analog simulation – it’s the programmable equivalent of the real deal, courtesy of the AK4619 ADC/DAC. Voltages go out on one set of pins and come back in on the other.

And you get to play around with these voltages in through-hole space too, because we’ve included a very generous prototyping board for your analog explorations. Does this instantly suggest a curve tracer to you? Be our guest! Other forms of analog video-mangling? We want to see what you come up with. Make an audio filter and watch it work on the screen in front of your very eyes.

Of course we’re not leaving you code monkeys out in the cold. MicroPython puts the “programming” in the programmable waveform generator. If you’re not content with the four stock waveforms, you’re invited to write your own. And this is where it gets artsy.

You can upload your own repetitive waveforms to the onboard direct digital synth routine, but why stop there? We’ve left most of the processing power of the underlying RP2040 untouched, for you to use. And four buttons on the front panel let you store and play back your code, so you have space to stash your demos, and a sweet joystick with a custom keycap gives you control.

Continue reading “2023 Hackaday Supercon Badge: Welcome To The Vectorscope” →