Supercon 2022: Sophy Wong Is Making An Impact With Artistic Wearables

January 25, 2023 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Prolific designer and maker Sophy Wong is always looking toward the future, and that goes for everything from the costume pieces she makes to the idea of making itself. In her excellent and highly-visual Supercon talk, Sophy explores both, and gives the viewer a window on her evolved-and-evolving design philosophy.

You likely know Sophy as That Maker Who 3D Prints On Fabric, a label she is quick to dismiss, pointing animatedly toward the seminal work of one David Shorey, who also happened to be at Supercon 2022. As Sophy explains, the process begins by modeling disconnected bodies to be printed, then printing the first layer and pausing the print. At this point, a piece of nylon mesh is inserted, and the print is resumed. The result is that the mesh is trapped between the first and second layers, and the bodies are now connected by a common thread. Carefully remove the sandwich from the print bed and you have a highly-flexible, mesmerizing piece of material that almost acts like chain maille.

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Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge Begins Today

January 24, 2023 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

How low can you go? The 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge is about doing the most with the least juice – bang for the power-budget buck, if you get our drift. And with three $150 gift certificates from Digi-Key on the line, you’ll be able to keep your projects going forever. The Challenge runs until March 21st, but with low-power, the devil is often in the details, so get started today!

More and more projects need to run on their own power, and more often than not, that means getting by without access to a wall plug. This contest is to encourage your designs that run on solar, small batteries, and generally energy harvested from wherever you can get it. But the power generation mechanism is taking the back seat here – we want to see what you can do with a few good electrons. Surprise us with your maximum minimalism!

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Ask Hackaday: Do Kids Need 3D Printers?

January 23, 2023 by Al Williams 72 Comments

Mattel holds a fond place in most people’s hearts as they made many of the toys we played with as kids. You might remember the Thingmaker, which was essentially an Easy Bake Oven with some goop and molds that let you make rubbery creatures. But back in 2016, Mattel had an aborted attempt to bring 3D printing to kids under the Thingmaker label. You can see a promo video of the device below. You might not have seen one in real life, though. The product was delayed and eventually canceled. Even so, we frequently see press releases for “kids printers” and we’ve been wondering, should this be a thing? Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Do Kids Need 3D Printers?” →

Vintage Electronics Hack Chat

January 23, 2023 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, January 25 at noon Pacific for the Vintage Electronics Hack Chat with Keri Szafir!

The world of the hardware hacker is filled with smells. The forbidden but enticing waft of solder smoke, the acrid bite of the Magic Blue Smoke, the heady aroma of freshly greased gears, the unmistakable smell of hot metal — they all tell a story, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But the smell inside a piece of vintage electronics? Now that’s a complicated story indeed. It might be the wax of the old capacitors, the resinous scent of well-baked resistors, the enameled wire in transformers, or just the smell of the hot glass of the vacuum tubes. Whatever it is, once you smell it, you’ll never forget it

For some of us, that first whiff starts a lifelong passion for vintage gear. Keri Szafir knows quite well what it’s like to be bitten by the vintage bug, so much so that she goes by “The Vacuum Tube Witch” over on her YouTube channel. Her projects include repairs and restorations of vintage amps and radios, and even new builds with old tubes. She’ll stop by the Hack Chat to talk about vintage electronics, tube ~~hoarding~~ collecting, and even her new interest in retro display technologies. Where there’s a tube, there’s a way!

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Hackaday Links: January 22, 2023

January 22, 2023 by Dan Maloney 48 Comments

The media got their collective knickers in a twist this week with the news that Wyoming is banning the sale of electric vehicles in the state. Headlines like that certainly raise eyebrows, which is the intention, of course, but even a quick glance at the proposed legislation might have revealed that the “ban” was nothing more than a non-binding resolution, making this little more than a political stunt. The bill, which would only “encourage” the phase-out of EV sales in the state by 2035, is essentially meaningless, especially since it died in committee before ever coming close to a vote. But it does present a somewhat lengthy list of the authors’ beefs with EVs, which mainly focus on the importance of the fossil fuel industry in Wyoming. It’s all pretty boneheaded, but then again, outright bans on ICE vehicle sales by some arbitrary and unrealistically soon deadline don’t seem too smart either. Couldn’t people just decide what car works best for them?

Speaking of which, a man in neighboring Colorado might have some buyer’s regret when he learned that it would take five days to fully charge his brand-new electric Hummer at home. Granted, he bought the biggest battery pack possible — 250 kWh — and is using a standard 120-volt wall outlet and the stock Hummer charging dongle, which adds one mile (1.6 km) to the vehicle’s range every hour. The owner doesn’t actually seem all that surprised by the results, nor does he seem particularly upset by it; he appears to know enough about the realities of EVs to recognize the need for a Level 2 charger. That entails extra expense, of course, both to procure the charger and to run the 240-volt circuit needed to power it, not to mention paying for the electricity. It’s a problem that will only get worse as more chargers are added to our creaky grid; we’re not sure what the solution is, but we’re pretty sure it’ll be found closer to the engineering end of the spectrum than the political end.

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Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat

January 20, 2023 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

As a Hackaday reader, it’s safe to assume you’ve got a better than average understanding of electricity. There’s also an excellent chance you’re familiar with machining, and may even have a lathe or old mill in the workshop. But combining the two, and actually machining a piece of metal with electricity, isn’t something that many home gamers can boast first-hand experience with.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an interest. To help answer the burning (or at least, sparking) questions from the community, CEO and founder of Voxel Innovations Daniel Herrington stopped by this week’s Hack Chat to talk about the cutting edge of both electric discharge machining (EDM) and the closely related field of electrochemical machining (ECM). While his company uses the technology to produce components at incredible scales, Daniel got his start tinkering in the garage like so many of us, enabling him to provide both a professional and hobbyist prospective on the technologies.

Naturally, the first big question to be addressed was the difference between EDM and ECM. Put simply, electric discharge machining uses high-voltage to literally blast away material from the workpiece. The resulting finish is generally rough, and progress through the material tends to be slow, but it’s relatively simple to implement.

In contrast electrochemical machining could be thought of as a sort of reverse electroplating process, as the material being removed from the workpiece is dissolved and transferred to the cathode — though in practice the flow of pressurized electrolyte keeps it from actually plating the negatively charged tool. ECM is a faster process than EDM and allows for an exceptionally smooth surface finish, but is considerably more challenging from a technical perspective. Continue reading “Machining With Electricity Explored In The Hack Chat” →

Hackaday Podcast 202: CNC Monks, Acrobot, Bootleg Merch, And The Rise And Fall Of Megahex

January 20, 2023 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos stood around and marveled at machinery in its many forms, from a stone-cutting CNC to an acrobatic robot to an AI-controlled Twitch v-tuber. But before all of that, we took a look at the winners of our FPV Vehicle Contest, poured one out for Google Stadia, and Elliot managed to stump Kristina once again with this week’s What’s That Sound. Will you fare better?

Later, we drooled over an open-source smart watch, argued screen printing versus stenciling when it comes to bootleg Hackaday merch, and got into the finer points of punycodes.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

And/or download it and listen offline.