A sequence of pictures with arrows between each other. This picture shows a Wokwi (Fritzing-like) diagram with logic gates, going to a chip shot, going to a panel of chipsGA footprint on a KiCad PCB render with DIP switches and LEDs around the breakout. Under the sequence, it says: "Tiny Tapeout! Demystifying microchip design and manufacture"

Design Your Own Chip With TinyTapeout

October 23, 2022 by Arya Voronova 45 Comments

When hackers found and developed ways to order PCBs on the cheap, it revolutionized the way we create. Accessible 3D printing brought us entire new areas to create things. [Matt Venn] is one of the people at the forefront of hackers designing our own silicon, and we’ve covered plenty of his research over the years. His latest effort to involve the hacker community, TinyTapeout, makes chip design accessible to newcomers – the bar is as low as arranging logic gates on a web browser page.

Six chip shots shown, with various densities of gates being used - some use a little, and some use a the entire area given. — Just six of the designs submitted, with varying complexity

For this, [Matt] worked with people like [Uri Shaked] of Wokwi fame, [Sylvain “tnt” Munaut], [jix], and a few others. Together, they created all the tooling necessary, and most importantly, a pipeline where your logic gate-based design in Wokwi gets compiled into a block ready to be put into silicon, with even simulations and compile-time verification for common mistakes. As a result, the design process is remarkably straightforward, to the point where a 9-year-old kid can do it. If you wanted, you could submit your Verilog, too!

The first round of TinyTapeout had a deadline in the first days of September and brought 152 entries together – just in time for an Efabless shuttle submission. All of these designs were put on a single instance of a chip, that will be fabbed in quantity, tested, soldered onto breakouts, and mailed out to individual participants. In this way, everyone will be getting everyone’s design, but thanks to the on-chip muxing hardware, they’re able to switch between designs using on-breakout DIP switches.

More after the break…

Continue reading “Design Your Own Chip With TinyTapeout” →

An exploded diagram of the spot welder. Shown are the capacitor bank, trigger, 12 V relay, DC power input, power out, step up converter, voltmeter, industrial SCR module, and capacitor bank.

Hackaday Prize 2022: A Not-So-Smart Spot Welder

October 17, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 5 Comments

DIY spot welders often use high-powered components that can be a bit frightening, given the potential for dangerous malfunctions. [Wojciech “Adalbert” J.] designed his capacitive discharge spot welder to be safe, easy to build, and forego the microcontroller.

Many projects work great with just a single Li-ion cell, but when you need more power, you’ve got to start connecting more cells together into a battery. [Wojciech]’s spot welder is designed to be just powerful enough to weld nickel tabs onto a cell without any overkill. The capacitor bank uses nineteen Nichicon UBY 7500uF/35V capacitors, all wired in parallel using solder wick saturated with solder. They sit atop on a perfboard with metallicized holes to carry the high current.

[Wojciech] has detailed every step of building the welder, including changes to the off-the-shelf relay board and adding a potentiometer to the step-up converter board. The level of detail makes this seem like a good starting place if you’re hoping to hop into the world of DIY spot welders. Safe is always a relative term when dealing with high powered devices, so be careful if you do attempt this build!

DIY spot welders have graced these digital pages many times, including this one built with safety in mind, and this other one that was decidedly not.

front and back of the Jolly Wrencher SAO

Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy

October 11, 2022 by Arya Voronova 17 Comments

If you plan to attend Supercon or some other hacker conference, know that you’re going to get a badge with a SAO (Simple Add-On) connector, a 4-pin or 6-pin connector that you can plug an addon board onto. There’s myriads of SAOs to choose from, and if you ever felt like your choice paralysis wasn’t intense enough, now you have the option of getting a Jolly Wrencher SAO board!

This board gives you an SMD prototyping space, with 1.27mm (0.05″ pitch) pads, suitable for many passive components, ICs and even modules like the ESP32 WROOM. Those pads are diagonally interspersed with ground-fill-connected pads – if you want to bodge something on the spot, you don’t need to pull separate GND wires. Given the Supercon badge specifics, the SAO-standard SDA and SCL pins have RX and TX labels as well. For bonus points, the eyes are transparent, with LED footprints behind them – it’s my first time designing a PCB where the LED shines through the FR4, and I hope that the aesthetics work out!

This design is open with gerber files available for download, so if you thought of making a quick PCB order, I’m giving you one more .zip file to add to it. Otherwise, it’s possible that you will find a Wrencher board lying around at Supercon! Now, I’d like to tell you how KiCad 6 made it super easy to design this PCB – after all, there’s never enough SAOs, and it’s quite likely you’ll want to design your own special SAO, too.

Continue reading “Jolly Wrencher SAO, And How KiCad 6 Made It Easy” →

A sliced digital file of a marker light enclosure. Background is a white and grey grid and object itself is a series of print path lines in red, orange, and green.

3D Printing Hard-To-Find Vintage Vehicle Parts

October 7, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 52 Comments

When I was growing up, my dad and I restored classic cars. Combing junkyards for the pieces we needed was a mixture of interesting and frustrating since there was always something you couldn’t find no matter how long you looked. [Emily Velasco] was frustrated by the high price of parts even when she was able to find them, so she decided to print them herself. She wrote an excellent tutorial about designing and 3D printing replica parts if you find yourself in a similar situation.

All four marker lights on [Velasco]’s 1982 Toyota pickup were on their way to plastic dust, and a full set would run her $160. Instead of shelling out a ton of cash for some tiny parts, she set out to replicate the marker lamps with her 3D printer. Using a cheap marker lamp replacement for a more popular model of pickup as a template, she was able to replace her marker lamps at a fraction of the cost of the options she found online. Continue reading “3D Printing Hard-To-Find Vintage Vehicle Parts” →

Git Your PCBs Online

October 6, 2022 by Arya Voronova 16 Comments

Last time, I’ve shown you how to create a local Git repository around your PCB project. That alone provides you with local backups, helping you never lose the changes you make to your files, and always be able to review the history of your project as it developed.

However, an even more significant part of Git’s usefulness is the ability to upload our creations to one of the various online Git repository hosting services, and keep it up to date at all times with a single shell command. I’d like to show you how to upload your project to GitHub and GitLab, in particular!

Continue reading “Git Your PCBs Online” →

Front of PCB for "SMT Garden" with glowing LEDs

Surface Mount Soldering Practice For Budding Electrical Engineers

October 4, 2022 by Abe Connelly 10 Comments

Electronics components are steadily moving away from through hole parts to using surface mount technology (SMT) exclusively. While the small size of the SMT components can be intimidating, with a little practice, soldering can come pretty naturally. To help folks get over their fear of soldering small parts, [Alpenglow Industries] have created a charming board to practice SMT soldering skills on.

[Alpenglow Industries] board, called the “SMT Garden”, combines a variety of SMT sizes ranging from 0402 to 1206 with beautiful PCB artwork to highlight the variety of LEDs on board. [Alpenglow Industries] provides detailed instructions on the various aspects of SMT soldering including what the terminology is and providing various techniques to help in soldering. The boards have practice “stalks” of surface mount component pads, so that folks can practice on columns of similarly sized SMT components to perfect their technique. The training stalks themselves aren’t functional but are there to provide practice for when folks feel comfortable soldering the LEDs, 555 timer and inverter chips to make the board functional.

[Alpenglow Industries] have provided all the KiCAD project files, gerbers and schematics available online. SMT soldering is more accessible than ever and when you can even use your phone as a microscope, it’s a good excuse to try it out, if you haven’t already.

picture showing the re-built scale with an extra blue box with electronics on the bottom of it. on the scale, there's a transparent food-grade plastic glass with measurement marks on the side.

Urine Flow Measurement Made Accessible With UroFlow

September 29, 2022 by Arya Voronova 21 Comments

If you’re dealing with a chronic illness, the ability to continuously monitor your symptoms is indispensable, helping you gain valuable insights into what makes your body tick – or, rather, mis-tick. However, for many illnesses, you need specialized equipment to monitor them, and it tends to be that you can only visit your doctor every so often. Thankfully, we hackers can figure out ways to monitor our conditions on our own. With a condition called BPH (Benign Prostate Hyperplasia), one of the ways to monitor it is taking measurements of urinary flow rate. Being able to take these measurements at home provides better insights, and, having found flow rate measurement devices to be prohibitively expensive to even rent, [Jerry Smith] set out to build his own.

This build is truly designed to be reproducible for anyone who needs such a device. Jerry has intricately documented the project and its inner workings – the 31-page document contains full build instructions, BOM for ordering, PCB description and pinout diagrams, calibration and validation instructions, and even software flowcharts; the GitHub repo has everything else you might need. We’re pleasantly surprised – this amount of documentation isn’t typically seen in hacker projects, and is even more valuable considering that this is a medical device that other hackers in need will want to reproduce.

For the hardware, [Jerry] took a small digital scale of a certain model and reused its load cell-based weighing mechanism using an HX711 amplifier, replacing the screen and adding an extra box for control electronics. With an Arduino MKR1010 as brains of the operation, the hardware’s there to log flow data, initially recorded onto the SD card, with WiFi connectivity to transfer the data to a computer for plotting; a DS3234 RTC breakout helps keep track of the time, and a custom PCB ties all of these together. All of these things are easy to put together, in no small part due to the extensive instructions provided.