Displays We Love Hacking: SPI And I2C

December 21, 2023 by Arya Voronova 18 Comments

I’ve talked about HD44780 displays before – they’ve been a mainstay of microcontroller projects for literal decades. In the modern hobbyist world, there’s an elephant in the room – the sheer variety of I2C and SPI displays you can buy. They’re all so different, some are LCD and some are OLED, some have a touchscreen layer and some don’t, some come on breakouts and some are a bare panel. No matter which one you pick, there are things you deserve to know.

These displays are exceptionally microcontroller-friendly, they require hardly any GPIOs, or none extra if you already use I2C. They’re also unbelievably cheap, and so tiny that you can comfortably add one even if you’re hurting for space. Sure, they require more RAM and a more sophisticated software library than HD44780, but with modern microcontrollers, this is no problem at all. As a result, you will see them in almost every project under the sun.

What do you need for those? What are the requirements to operate one? What kind of tricks can you use with them? Let’s go through the main aspects.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling The Tea

December 20, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

Editor’s Note: We’re excited to announce that Hackaday is the new home of FLOSS Weekly, a long-running podcast about free, libre, and open-source software! The TWiT network hosted the podcast for an incredible seventeen years, but due to some changes on their end, they recently had to wind things down. They were gracious enough to let us pick up the torch, with Jonathan Bennett now taking over hosting duties.

Tune in every Wednesday for a new episode, featuring interviews with developers and project leaders, coverage of the free/libre software you use everyday (maybe without even knowing it), and the latest Open Source news.

This week Jonathan Bennett and Simon Phipps talk with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. The conversation starts off with asking Neal how he went from working on a minor project 11 years ago, to being the lead of KDE on Fedora. How does a company properly sponsor Open Source development? Neal speaks from his experience at Red Hat and other places, to give some really interesting answers.

The crew move on to what happened at Red Hat with CentOS, and why just maybe it was a good thing. Is the age of a company a good indicator of how they will treat Open Source? Is CentOS Stream the best thing to happen to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? What was it like to be at Red Hat during that time? How does a company manage the tension between sales and engineering? We cover this and more!

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Animated gif of large 1950s computer spitting out a sheet of paper.

Retrotechtacular: 1960s Doc Calls Computers The Universal Machine

December 20, 2023 by Drew Littrell 5 Comments

It’s weird to think that an abacus would have still been used sixty years ago, or so posits the documentary series The Computer and the Mind of Man. This six part series originally aired on San Francisco local television station KQED in 1962, a time where few people outside of academia had even stood next to such a device.

Episode 3 titled “The Universal Machine” was dedicated to teaching the public how a computer can enhance every type of business provided humans can sufficiently describe it in coded logic. Though mainly filtered through IBM’s perspective as the company was responsible for funding the set of films; learning how experts of the time contextualized the computer’s potential was illuminating.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With All The LEGO

December 20, 2023 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

It seems like mechanical keyboard enthusiasts are more spoiled for choice with each passing day. But as broad as the open source pool has become, there’s still no perfect keyboard for everyone. So, as people innovate toward their own personal endgame peripherals and make them open source, the pool just grows and grows.

This beautiful addition to the glittering pool — [Bo Yao]’s Carpenter Tau keyboard — is meant to provide an elegant option at a particular intersection where no keyboards currently exist — the holy trinity of open source, programmable, and tri-mode connectivity: wired, Bluetooth, and 2.4 GHz.

Come for the lovely wooden everything, and stay for the in-depth logs as [Bo Yao] introduces the project and its roots, reviews various options for the controller, discusses the manufacture of the wooden parts, and creates the schematic for the 61-key version. Don’t want to build one yourself? It’ll be on Crowd Supply soon enough.

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Australia Bans Engineered Stone, Workers Elsewhere Demand The Same

December 19, 2023 by Lewin Day 199 Comments

Engineered stone, also known as artificial stone or composite stone, has become a popular material in the construction and design industries due to its aesthetic appeal and durability. It’s become the go-to solution for benchtops in particular, with modern kitchens and bathrooms heavily featuring engineered stone in this way.

However, this seemingly innocuous material harbors a dark side, posing significant health risks to workers involved in its manufacturing and installation. The hazards associated with engineered stone have gone unnoticed for some time, but the toll is adding up, and calls for action grow louder. Let’s examine why engineered stone is so harmful, and explore the measures being taken across the world to curtail or even ban its use.

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Ask Hackaday: What Do You Do When You Can’t Solder?

December 18, 2023 by Lewin Day 93 Comments

Ah, soldering. It’s great for sticking surface mount parts to a PCB, and it’s really great for holding component legs in a plated through-hole. It also does a pretty great job of holding two spliced wires together.

With that said, it can be a bit of a fussy process. There are all manner of YouTube videos and image tutorials on the “properest” way to achieve this job. Maybe it’s the classic Lineman’s Splice, maybe it’s some NASA-approved method, or maybe it’s one of those ridiculous ones where you braid all the copper strands together, solder it all up, and then realize you’ve forgotten to put the heat shrink on first.

Sure, soldering’s all well and good. But what about some of the other ways to join a pair of wires?

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The Superconference Badge Hack Chat

December 18, 2023 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, December 20 at noon Pacific for the Superconference Badge Hack Chat with Elliot Williams and Voja Antonic!

There’s a lot to get excited about when October rolls around and you know Supercon is right around the corner. Catching up with old friends, making new ones, hanging out in the alley, catching the talks, and of course the food. But at the top of everyone’s list has to be The Badge. Finding out what cool bit of technology is going to be built into the badge and figuring out exactly how you’re going to hack it once you get your greedy mitts on it — now that’s excitement!

The 2023 Supercon badge was quite a hit, at least judging by all the cool hacks that people came up with. But what exactly went into getting this badge into everyone’s hands? A lot of work, that’s what, along with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And while there was plenty of work to go around and a lot of shoulders to the wheel, a lot of the work fell to Elliot and Voja. They’re going to be hopping into the last Hack Chat of the year to talk all about this amazing badge, from concept to conference, and all the hellish steps in between.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 20 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.