Hackaday: The Gathering

January 6, 2014 by Mike Szczys 83 Comments

1/21/14 – Downtown LA
Come one, come all to a party with [Brian], me, and the Hackaday readers who live in the Los Angeles area. Tickets are free, as is the beer, food, t-shirts, stickers, and other swag which you won’t find out about unless you show up in person.

This is the first official live Hackaday meetup and is open to all ages. During the summer we talked about making Hackaday a virtual hackerspace, and this event is one part of that initiative. We’ll let you in on some stuff we’ve been planning, but in return I expect you to tell us your thoughts on how the Hackaday community can get bigger and better. We’re also using the attendance at this event to judge if we should host more live events (possibly in other cities too). So if you’re in LA get your ticket now and make sure your friends do the same!

UPDATE 3: Get your name on the waiting list… Continue reading “Hackaday: The Gathering” →

Fubarino Contest Winners

December 31, 2013 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

fubrino-contest-winners

It is with great pleasure that I announce the winners of the Fubarino Contest (alphabetical order): Brian, Daniel, Dave, Dominic, Eric, Gerben, James, Joel, Joseph, Laurens, Luis, Mats, Mike, Nathanael, Pete, Peter, Sebastian, Taciuc, Vojtěch, and Wes. They rose to the challenge and added our URL as an Easter Egg in their microcontroller project. Their hacks were chosen for their creativity, as well as completeness of presentation. Congratulations! Links to all twenty project features are after the break in reverse order in which they were originally published. To see all the entries hit up the contest tag.

We also want to take a moment to thank Microchip Technology Inc. They not only put up twenty Fubarino SD boards as prizes, they are also covering the cost of shipping to each winner. Many thanks!

We thought it was interesting that the twenty winners live in 11 different countries: Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Malaysia, Romania, South Africa, Spain, The Netherlands, UK, and the USA. Hackaday really is a global community!

If you are one of the winners please leave your acceptance speech in the comments section. This is also a great place to leave feedback — if you didn’t submit an entry we want to know why!

Continue reading “Fubarino Contest Winners” →

Software Advice For Anyone Thinking About A CNC Router

December 23, 2013 by Jeremy Cook 128 Comments

Excellent results can come from a small CNC router, but don’t forget the software!

CNC tools, whatever their flavor, can greatly enhance your “making” or DIY ability. My current tool of choice is a CNC router. Being familiar with a manual milling machine, the concept seemed similar, and the price of these is quite reasonable when compared to some other tools. As described in this post, my machine is a Zen Toolworks model, but there are certainly other options to visit like this Probotix V90 model noted recently in this post.

Although any number of CNC router models look great in videos and pictures, rest assured that even the best machines require some patience to get one running satisfactorily. Setting up the machine can be a challenge, as well as figuring out what your machine is capable of, but one thing that might slip peoples’ minds is the software involved. Read on to find out ~~all you need to know~~ the basics of what goes on behind the scenes to “magically” produce interesting parts. Continue reading “Software Advice For Anyone Thinking About A CNC Router” →

Guest Post: The Real Story Of Hacking Together The Commodore C128

December 9, 2013 by Bil Herd 148 Comments

The most popular computer ever sold to-date, the Commodore C-64, sold 27 Million units total back in the 1980’s. Little is left to show of those times, the 8-bit “retro” years when a young long-haired self-taught engineer could, through sheer chance and a fair amount of determination, sit down and design a computer from scratch using a mechanical pencil, a pile of data books, and a lot of paper.

Before Apple there was Commodore — Behind the C-128 from a 1985 Ad

My name is Bil Herd and I was that long-haired, self-educated kid who lived and dreamed electronics and, with the passion of youth, found himself designing the Commodore C-128, the last of the 8-bit computers which somehow was able to include many firsts for home computing. The team I worked with had an opportunity to slam out one last 8 bit computer, providing we accepted the fact that whatever we did had to be completed in 5 months… in time for the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

We (Commodore) could do what no other computer company of the day could easily do; we made our own Integrated Circuits (ICs) and we owned the two powerhouse ICs of the day; the 6502 microprocessor and the VIC Video Display IC. This strength would result in a powerful computer but at a cost; the custom IC’s for the C-128 would not be ready for at least 3 of the 5 months, and in the case of one IC, it would actually be tricked into working in spite of itself.

Continue reading “Guest Post: The Real Story Of Hacking Together The Commodore C128” →

Developed On Hackaday: Let’s Build Some Hardware!

December 6, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 142 Comments

We’re pretty sure that most of you already know that a few months ago Hackaday was bought by SupplyFrame, who therefore became our new evil overlords. We do hope you’ve noticed that they’re actually quite nice, and in their divine goodness they recently gave the go-ahead on this series called Developed on Hackaday.

A new project will be made by the Hackaday staff & community and will hopefully be brought to the consumer market. For those who don’t have the time/experience to get involved in this adventure, we want to show and document what it takes to bring an idea to the marketable product stage. For the others, we would like to involve you in the design/development process as much as possible. Obviously, this project will be open source hardware/software. This time around, the hardware will mainly be developed by yours truly. You may already know me from the whistled platform (currently sold on Tindie) or from all the different projects described on my website, which makes this new adventure far from being my first rodeo.

What’s in it for the contributors? During all the steps of this project, we’ll offer many rewards as well as hand-soldered first prototypes of the device so you can start playing/testing it. Nothing is set in stone so every suggestion is welcome. Should we make a Kickstarter-like campaign to manufacture the final product, we’ll only do so once our prototype is final, our partners are chosen and all details of the production process are set and confirmed. In that case, we will just need to gather the required funds to make the device a reality. What are we going to build? Keep reading to find out.

Continue reading “Developed On Hackaday: Let’s Build Some Hardware!” →

New Contest: Win One Of 20 Microchip Fubarino SD Boards

December 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 63 Comments

We had a blast with the Trinket Contest in October and November and can’t wait to see what you can come up with for this month’s competition. Microchip Technology is one of our advertisers and they offered us 20 Fubarino SD boards to give away as prizes. The challenge for you is to add our URL as an Easter Egg in your own microcontroller project. Rise to the top of our seemingly arbitrary system for picking winners and one will be delivered to your door for your future hacking pleasure.

Obviously we mean http://hackaday.com when we say URL, but what constitutes an Easter Egg? We figure it’s anything that is not apparently obvious in a piece of hardware. We built a quick example to get you thinking. Shown off in the clip after the break is a clock that displays our web address every day at 1:37pm. What did we pick that time? Because our clock displays in 24-hour time format and 13:37 is leet. See the code we used in our repo.

We thought of a few others, like making an embedded gaming that uses the Konami Code to reveal the Easter Egg, or a man-in-the-middle device that attaches to your keyboard and redirects your feeble attempts to load Facebook by closing the tab and opening Hackaday. The sky’s the limit with how creative these things can be!

Follow these rules to submit your qualifying entry:

You must somehow hide http://hackaday.com in your microcontroller project (embedded Linux doesn’t count unless you do some type of bare-metal programming)
Preference will be given to projects that are both clever and well documented. Notice we made a video, and posted code and an explanation of our project.
Write an email that has “[Fubarino]” in the title, includes the information on your documented entry, and lists your name and mailing address. Your name and mailing address will be used for shipping only and NOT for anything else. Emails should be sent to: contests@hackaday.com
Entries must be received before 12:00am Pacific time on 12/19/2013.
Employees and their families of Hackaday, SupplyFrame, and Microchip Technology are not eligible to win.

What are you waiting for? Dust off those chips and get hacking!

Continue reading “New Contest: Win One Of 20 Microchip Fubarino SD Boards” →

If You Own A Camera You Need To Try Light Graffiti

November 22, 2013 by Jeremy Cook 24 Comments

Do you have a camera that’s capable of controlling how long of an exposure it takes? With this and any small light source, you can make a really awesome illuminated image like the one featured above. Combine this with the hacking skills that you’ve hopefully learned from reading Hackaday, and the visual possibilities are endless.

Let’s look at the background of this entertaining light hacking technique, and how you can make images like this yourself!

Continue reading “If You Own A Camera You Need To Try Light Graffiti” →