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1389 Articles

Antti Lukats: The Past, Present, And Future Of Programmable Logic

December 19, 2015 by 14 Comments

[Antti] has gained a bit of a reputation over on Hackaday.io – he has a tremendous number of FPGA projects on hackaday.io, and they’re all open source. If you’re looking for street cred with FPGAs, [Antti] has it. His Hands-on experience with FPGAs and CPLDs stretches back to the very first chips in the 70s. We’re so happy that he’s working to share this depth of knowledge, and that includes this talk he gave a few weeks ago at the Hackaday SuperConference. Take a look and then join us after the break for an overview of the FPGA terrain, then and now.

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Immersive Theatre Via IBeacons With Dustin Freeman

December 18, 2015 by 2 Comments

Combining backgrounds in math and theater, [Dustin Freeman] works on immersive, interactive theatrical experiences. During the day [Dustin] is a Spatial Interaction Engineer at Occipital, who makes the Structure Sensor. In his spare time [Dustin] works on digital theatre projects that bring the theatre goer far past the traditional row of seats.

The concept of immersive theatre is similar to ‘escape the room’ challenges and choose your own adventure experiences, in that the participants control the outcome of the experience by making decisions from the information supplied to them. [Dustin] explains in his talk that the feeling of trying to beat the clock that exists in escape the room challenges is not helpful in Floodlight’s The Painting. Floodlight is a theatre production company and The Painting is the immersive theatre experience put together by [Joshua Marx], professor of acting at San Jose State and [Dustin Freeman] who presented this 2015 Hackaday SuperConference talk.

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A Pragmatic Guide To Motors With Jonathan Beri

December 17, 2015 by 8 Comments

[Jonathan Beri] is a Maker of all sorts, with an affinity for robots, APIs, and Open Source. By day he works on making Android & iOS SDKs easier to use and by night he can found begging a PID controller to “just work already.” Recently he contributed to, “Make: JavaScript Robotics,” printed by Maker Media (2015).

[Jonathan] covers a lot of ground during his motors talk at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference. He discusses brushed DC, stepper, servo, and brushless motors. Although just scraping the surface of each type of motor [Jonathan] touches the important details you can use to determine which type of motor is best for your project. The slide show he has put together has quite a bit of information and tips for beginners that might go overlooked when choosing a motor. For instance a list of 30 attributes that should be considered when selecting a motor. Included in that list are the 7 attributes [Jonathan] places priority on when he chooses a motor for one of his projects. We’ll delve deeper into that after the break.

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Rory Aronson On Documenting Open Source Projects

December 16, 2015 by 7 Comments

Every project starts off with an idea. Sometimes those ideas are bigger than one person, or even a small group of people. That was the position [Rory Aronson] found himself in with Farmbot, his finalist entry in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. Documentation was key for [Rory]. Farmbot first came into the world in the form of a white paper. The paper included a request for collaborators, making this an open source project from day 0. Documentation has been important throughout the Farmbot project, so it was naturally the topic of [Rory’s] talk at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference.

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Augmenting Human Vision With Polarimetric Cameras

December 15, 2015 by 30 Comments

Light is just a wave, and the wavelength of light determines its color and determines if it can cook food like microwaves, or if it can see through skin like x-rays. There’s another property of waves human’s don’t experience much: polarization, or if the light wave is going up and down, side to side, or anywhere in between.

[David Prutchi]’s project for the Hackaday Prize was like many projects – a simple, novel idea that’s easy and relatively cheap to implement. It’s a polarimetric camera meant to see what humans can’t. By seeing the world in polarized light, the DOLPi can see landmines, cancerous tissue, and air pollution using only a Raspberry Pi and a few Python scripts He gave a talk at this year’s Hackaday SuperConference about polarization cameras and the DOLPi project. After enjoying the video, join us after the break for more details.


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Danielle Applestone And The Story Of Every Othermill

December 14, 2015 by 42 Comments

Many of us may qualify as “makers,” but how about a “maker of machines?” [Danielle Applestone] tells us what kinks to look for whilst embarking on your hardware startup adventure. Co-founder of Other Machine Co, the company that makes a PCB Mill that holds tolerances as tight as a thousandth of an inch, [Danielle] holds degrees in chemistry and materials science from MIT and UT Austin. While she may tell you that the math for running a hardware company is easy, knowing what numbers to crunch and keeping track of them has been part of her key to success. So take 20, and give yourself a moment to take in [Danielle’s] tips from her Hackaday Superconference talk on beating the hurdles ahead in the land of hardware startups.

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How Y Combinator Brings Hardware Startups To Life

December 12, 2015 by 3 Comments

The world is more used to software startups than hardware startups. Luke Iseman is here to help. He is the Director of Hardware at Y Combinator and discusses some details that need to be kept in mind when starting up your own hardware company. Take a look at the talk he presented at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference and then join us after the break to cover a few key points of his discussion.

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