I was poking around spark fun electronics, and came across this interesting walk through showing spark fun’s solder stenciling technique. (I’d put on some gloves before handling that much lead paste) They top it off with some alternative ways of doing reflow work. My favorite has to be the target hotplate method. It’s a nice introduction if you’re interested in doing SMD work to save money and space on your projects [but not sanity. say goodbye to that] Me? I’ve used a 15 watt weller with a dremel modified small tip. It works great if you’ve got some one of those syringes of heat activated glue. Place, bake and solder.
Misc Hacks4181 Articles
Online Skill Crane
[Ethan] sent in the online skill crane. It made it to shmoocon, but now it’s online for anyone to play. The machine is interfaced to the parallel port and controlled with a C program. It lacks a bit on the tech details, but you know you want one. Playing nets you a video of the results linked via email.
Happy Halloween Extra
[Update: pumpkin carved by Team Hack-A-Day member mastershake916]
We’ve got plenty of tricks around here, and I’ve got a treat coming up – you’ll hear about it in the next podcast.
[Ronald Schaten] sent me his USB LED fader. ATMega, PWM lit LEDs, he uses it to indicate status on his pvr.
[computerguru365] sent in his cell phone car charger turned USB cable
[steve] sent in this over the top C64DTV mod.
[Everett] sent along his button activated PSP shoulder lighting.Nice tiny soldering work for that on.
[Jorge] sent in his friends latest junk art metal lathe. Not an easy thing to build – Nice!
[gijs] sent me this crazy bent Casio SK-1. We’ve had a few of these on Hackaday before.
[seniorcheez] sent in his iPod shuffle dock with integrated power and tunecast.
Wireless Card = ARM Development Platform
[Archantos] sent us this one. The mustumbler project is actually trying to use some external hardware to make a miniature wireless stumbler. [Archantos] points out that it’s could be a cheap way to get your hands on an ARM development platform. He’s right. Just a few connections gets access to the I2C bus, a GPIO expander for I2C runs the LCD and an EEPROM is there for program storage. The software is still being sorted out, but the hardware itself is functional. If they can manage to reverse engineer the Conexant chipset, they should have a very promising platform.
Thursday Mini-extra
[Russ] sent in his Great Pumpkin computer case mod. (Non-biodegradable)
[Nuke] sent in his $10 ipod dock. It makes me think of doom for some reason.
[phnx] sent in this amusing case mod.
These have been around, but they’re excellent, so deal. Evilmadscientist.com has a couple of great pumpkins.
Check out the Cylon Jackolantern and the R/C Dalek Pumpkin
[Daedalus] sent in this one – adsl via sound card. 96kbs. The sound card is interfaced
with an audio transformer to the line at each end.
And this one just came in from [Eric]. Make a magsafe connector for thinkpads! Awesome.
LED Sensor Solar Tracker
More of my EV kick coming through. A solar tracker is used rotate a solar panel to get optimum energy from the sun. This one uses LEDs as the light sensor and mosfets to drive the output to rotate on a single axis. He even reduced the duty cycle on the fets so no heatsink is needed. Mounting in a peanut butter jar keeps the circuit dry and allows the sun to shine through. (The designer sells these, but has circuits up on the site)
Electronic Door Lock
[Dheera] sent in his electronic door lock. The current version is purely microcontroller based, but I loved this crazy iteration. Seeing something like this evolve is fantastic. I really wanted a keypad door lock when I was old enough to dream of electric sheep.
