Hackaday Links: September 10, 2017

September 10, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Hackaday is 13! We’re going through a bit of a rebellious phase. There’s hair where there wasn’t hair before. Thirteen years ago (Sept. 5, 2004), [Phil Torrone] published the first Hackaday Post. [Phil] posted a great writeup of the history of Hackaday over on the Adafruit blog — we were saved from the AOL borg because of the word ‘hack’ — and interviewed the former and current editors of your favorite DIY website. Here’s to 13 more years and to [Phil] finding a copy of the first version of the Jolly Wrencher designed in Macromedia Flash.

Hackaday is having an unconference in the UK! Tickets for next weekend’s event went fast, but don’t worry — we’re hosting a Bring A Hack the day before.

Hurricanes are an awesome force of nature. As we learned from Harvey a week ago, livestreamed footage from the eyewall of a hurricane is fascinating. [Jeff Piotrowski] seems to be the streamer of choice. If you’re looking for something to gawk at, here you go.

Another burn is over, and I still have no idea how they moved the fuselage of a 747 from Palmdale to the playa.

You know we’re doing this whole Hackaday Prize thing where we’re giving a ton of money to people for creating cool hardware, right? We’re almost done with that. The last round of The Hackaday Prize is going on right now. The theme is anything goes, or rather there is no theme. The goal of this round is to build cool stuff. This round ends on October 16th, and yes, we’ll have the results for the Assistive Technologies round out shortly.

[Prusa] makes a lot of printers, and that means he needs to make a lot of parts to make a lot of printers. Obviously, a PTFE-cutting robot is the solution to this problem

October 5th is the Open Source Hardware Summit in Denver. Hackaday and Tindie are going, and it’s going to be a blast. The location has moved in the last week — now it’s about half a mile away from the old venue. The speaker schedule is up, board nominations are open, and somewhere, someone is organizing a Lulzbot/Sparkfun booze cruise the day after the summit. I should be getting a van to add capacity to this trip, so if you’re interested leave a note in the comments.

It’s Time For Anything Goes In The Hackaday Prize

September 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

We’re challenging you to make the best whatever. It’s time for the Anything Goes round of the Hackaday Prize. This is your final chance to enter and we’re looking for just about anything! Twenty entries from Anything Goes will receive a $1,000 cash prize and a chance at the $50,000 grand prize and four other top prizes.

Over the last six months, we asked you to Design Your Concept, and then challenged you to build the Internet of Useful Things, Wheels Wings and Walkers, and Assistive Technologies that ensure a better quality of life for the disabled. All things must come to an end, though, but for the last challenge in the Hackaday Prize, we’re going wild. Is there a theme? No, just go build the best whatever you can. Our one bit of advice: the Hackaday Prize is about Building Something that Matters so do find a way for your “anything” to make the world a little bit better place.

The Anything Goes portion of the prize was introduced in last year’s Hackaday Prize. We didn’t want to exclude anyone building something awesome just because it didn’t fit a theme, so we created a challenge anyone could meet. The results last year were phenomenal, with twenty projects each winning a thousand dollars and progressing onto the final round of the Hackaday Prize. Winners last year included an Open Source Two-Stroke Diesel, a beautiful Diode Clock, and Dtto, a modular robot that went on to win the Grand Prize. Do you see a common theme between these projects? There isn’t one. The Anything Goes portion of the prize is a challenge to build the coolest thing.

This entry round is going on right now and ends October 16th. It’s the last chance for any project to make it to the final round with a potential to take home the Grand Prize of $50,000 USD.

Get those project logs in, and start making a video. Be sure you answer the final call to get in on the 2017 Hackaday Prize.

Friday Hack Chat: Elecia White Talks Embedded Systems

September 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

The Arduino ecosystem, despite the comments it receives from Real Engineers™, is actually pretty great. There’s no other tool that works with as many varieties of microcontrollers, has as many libraries, and is as easy to use as the Arduino. It’s perfect for getting a project up and running quickly, but when it comes down to getting the last cycles or kilobits out of an embedded system you’ll quickly find the little blue infinity icon just won’t cut it.

Embedded system design goes far beyond the Arduino ecosystem, and for this week’s Hack Chat, we’ll be talking about squeezing the last drops out of tiny pieces of silicon.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Elecia White], embedded software engineer at Logical Elegance, author of O’Reilly’s Making Embedded Systems, and host of the Embedded.fm podcast. In this chat, we’re going to be talking about moving beyond the Arduino ecosystem.

Topics for this week’s Hack Chat will include embedded systems ecosystems, how to match processors to projects, choosing IDEs, programmers, and other tools, and actually shipping all those whizz-bang microcontroller projects out to eager buyers. We’re opening up the floor to all questions, so if you have something to add, here’s a spreadsheet to guide the discussion.

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Hack Chats are mostly, usually at noon, Pacific time on Friday. This week is no exception and everything is going down noon, PDT, Friday, September 8th. Are time zones confusing? Not a problem; here’s a handy countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Ask Hackaday: How Small Is Your Shop?

September 6, 2017 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Electronics, metalwork, carpentry, sewing — however you express your inner hacker, you’ve got to have a place to work. Most of us start out small, assembling projects on the kitchen table, or sharing space on a computer desk. But eventually, if we’re lucky, we all move on to some kind of dedicated space. My first “shop” was a corner of the basement my Dad used for his carpentry projects. He built me what seemed at the time like a huge bench but was probably only about five feet long. Small was fine with me, though, and on that bench I plotted and planned and drew schematics and had my first real lesson in why you don’t reach for a soldering iron without looking first. My thumb still bears that scar as a reminder.

Many of us outgrow that first tiny space eventually, as projects (and accumulated junk) outpace the available space. Some of us go on to build workspaces to die for; personally, I feel wholly inadequate whenever I see Frank Howarth’s immense wood shop, with its high ceilings, huge windows for natural light, and what amounts to a loading dock. Whenever I see it I think The work I could do in there!

Or could I? Is bigger necessarily better when it comes to workspaces? Would more space make me a better craftsman?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Small Is Your Shop?” →

Visual Futurist Syd Mead Will Keynote At Hackaday Superconference

September 6, 2017 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

What does the future actually look like? Chances are what you see in your mind when presented with that question is heavily influence by Syd Mead. He is an industrial designer, but his body of work — which includes some of the most iconic Sci-Fi movies ever filmed — built a much more interesting job title for him: Visual Futurist.

Meet Syd Mead as he presents a keynote talk at the 2017 Hackaday Superconference this November 11 and 12 in Pasadena, California.

Philip K. Dick wondered Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but when it came time to build those sheep and the world they live in, director Ridley Scott looked to Syd Mead to determine what the future in Blade Runner actually looked like. He invented a world, one that was actually built through the practical sets and props widely used in the days before computer graphics became the norm. Syd’s work is also seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, and the iconic designs for the movie Tron. And his prolific work has continued to appear on the silver screen ever since, with Elysium and Tomorrowland as some of his more recent work.

How does one invent the future, even through decades of progress? That’s the role of hardware creators — to envision what we want and need tomorrow, not today or yesterday. Syd Mead is a hardware creator and his hardware has been built time and again to inspire all of us for where we’re going with technology. Take that ride along with Syd at the Hackaday Superconference. Get your tickets now.

[Main image credit: Blade Runner concept art by Syd Mead]

Non-standard Circuits: Jazz For Electrons

September 5, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 41 Comments

How creative are you when you make your circuit boards? Do you hunt around for different materials to use for the board? As long as it’s an insulator and can handle the heat of a soldering iron, then anything’s fair game. Or do you use a board at all? Let’s explore some options, both old favorites and some you may not have seen before, and see if we can get our creative juices flowing.

Transparent Circuit Boards

Glass circuit board with LED matrix

Glass clock circuit

Triangular part for keytar

Attempted circuit on acrylic

Let’s start with the desire to show more circuit and less board. For that we can start with [CNLohr]’s circuits on glass, usually microscope slides. What’s especially nice about his is that he provides detailed videos of the whole process, including all the failed things he tried along the way. Since he didn’t start with copper clad board, he instead glued his copper sheet to the glass using Loctite 3301. That was followed by the usual etching process, though with plenty of gotchas along the way.

In the end, he made a number of circuits, including an LED clock with the LEDs on the glass itself, and even attempted leading the community in making a glass keytar. The latter didn’t work out, but the resulting glass circuits are a work of art anyway.

What about making a transparent circuit board out of acrylic? [Frank Zhao] attempted just that by laser cutting troughs into the acrylic for the traces, and then drawing in nickel ink. But something in the ink ate into the acrylic, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the voltage drop across the nickel was too high for his circuit. Suggestions were made in the comments for how to solve these problems, but unless we missed it, we haven’t seen another attempt yet.

But we’ve only just begun. What if you wanted even more transparency?

Continue reading “Non-standard Circuits: Jazz For Electrons” →

Hackaday Links: September 3, 2017

September 3, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

The TI-83, TI-84, and TI-86 have been the standard graphing calculators in classrooms for two decades. This is the subject of an xkcd. Now, hopefully, there’s a contender for the throne. Numworks is a graphing calculator that looks like it was designed in at least 2006 (so very modern), and apparently, there’s a huge community behind it.

Juicero is shutting down. No one could have seen this one coming. The Juicero was a $700 press that turned proprietary, DRM’ed juice packs into juice and garbage. It was exquisitely engineered, but it turns out very few people want to spend thousands of dollars per year on DRM’ed juice. Oh, since the Juicero phones home, those $700 presses probably won’t work in the future.

Are you in the Bay area? Do you need test equipment? There’s a gigantic auction happening somewhere around San Jose. [Dave] tipped everyone off to this one, and this auction is pretty freakin’ spectacular. Spectrum analyzers, signal gens, a ‘mega zoom’ oscilloscope, and 4-channel, 500 MHz scopes for $50. There are a thousand lots in this auction. It’s nuts.

Everybody loves PCB art, and [Uri] has a guide for designing custom, functional electronic circuit boards. The toolchain used in this guide is Inkscape and KiCad, with blinky hearts, blinky pandas, and other blinky PCBs.

This one is a little out there even for us. Here’s how you build your own AA batteries. It’s a dozen #10 copper washers, a dozen or so #10 zinc washers, some cardboard, vinegar, salt, and some heat shrink tubing. The assembly of this battery is exactly what you would expect, and yes, it does work. Here’s the thing, though: The very crude tests suggest these batteries have a capacity of about 800-1000 mAh, which is far more than we would expect. Who has a programmable load and wants to do a few experiments? Also, these batteries are ‘rechargeable’ by taking them apart, sanding the crud off each washer, and adding new electrolyte.

[Jan] has made a name for himself stuffing synthesizers into tiny little microcontrollers. The latest project is the Infinity37, a polyphonic synth with MIDI, envelopes, and a whole bunch of cool stuff. Check out the video.

[rctestflight] is building a solar powered aircraft. It’s has a beautiful wing studded with solar panels. The latest flight was four hours, long enough to make piloting a plane through some FatSharks extremely tedious. Future developments will probably include a MPPT charging solution, and probably an autopilot.