Skills

359 Articles

Harrowing Story Of Installing Libreboot On ThinkPad

December 16, 2016 by 59 Comments

As an Apple user, I’ve become somewhat disillusioned over the past few years. Maybe it’s the spirit of Steve Jobs slowly vanishing from the company, or that Apple seems to care more about keeping up with expensive trends lately rather than setting them, or the nagging notion Apple doesn’t have my best interests as a user in mind.

Whatever it is, I was passively on the hunt for a new laptop with the pipe dream that one day I could junk my Apple for something even better. One that could run a *nix operating system of some sort, be made with quality hardware, and not concern me over privacy issues. I didn’t think that those qualities existed in a laptop at all, and that my 2012 MacBook Pro was the “lesser of evils” that I might as well keep using. But then, we published a ThinkPad think piece that had two words in it that led me on a weeks-long journey to the brand-new, eight-year-old laptop I’m currently working from. Those two words: “install libreboot”.

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A How-To In Homebrew Design, Fab, And Assembly With Structural Framing Systems

December 14, 2016 by 42 Comments

At this point, the internet is crawling with butt-kicking homebrew 3D printers made with extruded profiles, but it’s easy to underestimate the difficulty in getting there. Sure, most vendors sell a suite of interlocking connectors, but how well do these structural framing systems actually fare when put to the task of handling a build with sub-millimeter tolerances?

I’ve been playing around with these parts for about two years. What I’ve found is that, yes, precise and accurate results are possible. Nevertheless, those results came to me after I failed and–dry, rinse, repeat–failed again! Only after I understood the limits of both the materials and assembly processes was I able to deliver square, dimensionally accurate gantries that could carry a laser beam around a half-square-meter workbed. That said, I wrote a quick guide to taming these beasts. Who are they? What flavors do they come in? How do we achieve those precision results? Dear reader, read on.

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Compiling A $22 Logic Analyzer

December 13, 2016 by 26 Comments

On my way to this year’s Hackaday SuperConference I saw an article on EE Times about someone taking the $22 Lattice iCEstick and turning it into a logic analyzer complete with a Python app to display the waveforms. This jumped out as pretty cool to me given that there really isn’t a ton of RAM on the stick, basically none that isn’t contained in the FPGA itself.

[Jenny List] has also written about the this application as created by [Kevin Hubbard] of Black Mesa Labs and [Al Williams] has a great set of posts about using this same $22 evaluation board doing ground up Verilog design using open source tools. Even if you don’t end up using the stick as a logic analyzer over the long haul, it’ll be very easy to find many other projects where you can recompile to invent a new purpose for it.

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Creating A PCB In Everything: KiCad, Part 2

December 9, 2016 by 79 Comments

This is the continuation of a series where I create a PCB in every software suite imaginable. Last week, I took a look at KiCad, made the schematic representation for a component, and made a schematic for the standard reference PCB I’ve been using for these tutorials. Now it’s time to take that schematic, assign footprints to parts, and design a circuit board.

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Hack Safely: Fire Safety In The Home Shop

December 6, 2016 by 44 Comments

Within the past two months we’ve covered two separate incidents of 3D printing-related fires. One was caused by an ill-advised attempt to smooth a print with acetone heated over an open flame, while the other was investigated by fire officials and found to have been caused by overuse of hairspray to stick prints to the printer bed. The former was potentially lethal but ended with no more than a good scare and a winning clip for “Hacking’s Funniest Home Videos”; the latter tragically claimed the life of a 17-year old lad with a lot of promise.

In light of these incidents, we here at Hackaday thought it would be a good idea to review some of the basics of fire safety as they relate to the home shop. Nowhere was this need made clearer than in the comments section on the post covering the fatal fire. There was fierce debate about the cause of the fire and the potential negative effect it might have on the 3D-printing community, with comments ranging from measured and thoughtful to appallingly callous. But it was a comment by a user named [Scuffles] that sealed the deal:

“My moment of reflection is that it’s well past time I invest in a fire extinguisher for my workstation. Cause right now my fire plan pretty much consists of shouting obscenities at the blaze and hoping it goes out on its own.”

Let’s try to come up with a better plan for [Scuffles] and for everyone else. We’ll cover the basics: avoidance, detection, control, and escape.

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Controlling Your Instruments From A Computer: Doing Something Useful

November 29, 2016 by 6 Comments

Do you know how to harvest data from your bench tools, like plotting bandwidth from your oscilloscope with a computer? It’s actually pretty easy. Many bench tools make this easy using a standard protocol with USB to make the connection.

In the previous installment of this article we talked about the National Instruments VISA (Virtual Instrument Software Archetecture) standard for communicating with your instruments from a computer, and introduced its Python wrapper with a simple demonstration using a Raspberry Pi. We’ll now build on that modest start by describing a more useful application for a Raspberry Pi and a digital oscilloscope; we’ll plot the bandwidth of an RF filter. We’ll assume that you’ve read the previous installment and have both Python and the required libraries on your machine. In our case the computer is a Raspberry Pi and the instrument is a Rigol DS1054z, but similar techniques could be employed with other computers and instruments.

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Iron Tips: Soldering Headphones And Enamel Wire

November 22, 2016 by 80 Comments

We’ve all had that treasured pair of headphones fail us. One moment we’re jamming out to our favorite song, then, betrayal. The right ear goes out. No wait. It’s back. No, damn, it’s gone. It works for a while and then no jiggling of the wire will bring it back. So we think to ourselves, we’ve soldered before. This is nothing. We’ll just splice the wire together.

So we open it up only to be faced with the worst imaginable configuration: little strands of copper enamel wire intertwined with nylon for some reason. How does a mortal solder this? First you try to untwine the nylon from the strands. It kind of works, but now the strands are all mangled and weird. Huh. Okay. well, you kind of twist them together and give a go at soldering. No dice. Next comes sandpaper, torches, and all sorts of work-a-rounds. None of them seem to work. The best you manage is sound in one ear. It’s time to give up.

Soldering this stuff is actually pretty easy. It just takes a bit of knowledge about how assembly line workers do it. Let’s take a look.

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