Store Update: Remember This?

July 2, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

The Hack a Day store has a couple new items. It was brought to our attention that we once held a T-shirt contest, and people really wanted access to that design. Well, now you can get it. The design on the shirt will be roughly 13″x10″ and located at the hem under the right arm. Please note that this is not identical to the previously made ones that you may have noticed at CES. The design is also available as a large sticker.

We would love to see our stuff in the wild, so please upload your pictures to Flickr and put them in the Hack a Day pool.

Interview With Steven Levy About Hackers

June 28, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_jwcCseDk0]

[Dale Dougherty] interviews [Steven Levy] about the history of hacking. [Levy]’s book Hackers has been released in a 25th anniversary edition. The interview alone is fascinating and the book is a must read for any hacker. If they offered a course in hacker culture somewhere, we’re positive that this book would be the textbook. The 25th anniversary edition has been updated to include major figures from the last 25 years including [Bill Gates], [Steve Wozniak] and others that have impacted our lives drastically.

[via MakeZine]

Fusion, In My Backyard?!

June 24, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 79 Comments

Here is the 32nd amateur fusion reactor built in a basement. [Mark Suppes] is right behind [Will Jack], the (then) 17 year old [Thiago Olson], and [Mileiux] in engineering a homemade nuclear reactor. By taking two light elements and colliding them under extreme speed and pressure, a heavier element and energy are produced.

[Mark’s] goal is to lasso in investors to earn enough money to build a larger Bussard Reactor, which will hopefully produce as much energy as it consumes. Free energy at only a couple million dollars; who wouldn’t pass up this opportunity?

[Thanks Imp]

Update: Atari Pause Button

June 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

The Atari 2600 pause circuit is now available in a kit form. We saw this pause method back in February and the kit uses the same circuit. We don’t really need a kit for this, the board is very simple to throw together. But we do appreciate the detailed installation instructions (PDF) that accompany it. After all, you don’t want to kill you classic gaming rig with a botched install.

[Thanks CPUWIZ]

TI Makes A Big Bid For The Hobby Market

June 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 246 Comments

This morning Texas Instruments unveiled Launchpad, a development platform for their low-cost MSP430 line of microcontrollers. We’ve seen these chips before, most notably in the ez430 Chronos sports watch. We see this as a bid for the hobby market currently enjoyed by Arduino, PIC, AVR, and others. TI’s biggest selling point is price, but we’re going to wait to share that with you. Join us after the break to see what the package offers, then decide if the price is right.

Continue reading “TI Makes A Big Bid For The Hobby Market” →

HaD Store Update: New Stickers, Shirts, New Logo

June 7, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 46 Comments

The Hack a Day store is still going strong. We’re really enjoying the fact that when you buy a Hack a Day item, it was made by one of us. We hope we can keep this up. It makes our merchandise mean so much more, we think.

We’ve been getting tons of requests for other colors of stickers as well as other products. Other colors of stickers is easy enough, we now have black, white, both gloss and matte, light grey, and just starting today, glow in the dark. We’ll be updating the store as we run out, or buy new colors. We only have a little bit of the glow in the dark right now, so if you don’t want to have to wait for more to come in, you better place your order quick.

We have also received a steady flow of requests for T-shirts. Unfortunately, we just don’t have all of the equipment yet. So, we’ll begin taking pre-orders for t-shirts today. As soon as we have roughly 30 pre-orders, we should be able to start making the shirts. To begin with, we’ll be doing white logo on black shirts. There’s also a Custom shirt option that gets your name placed on the front of the shirt as well, though that does come at some additional cost. Maybe after he gets all the kinks worked out, [Jakob] will grace us with shirts to sell as well.

There is also a product that has been the source of a lot of discussion between the staff. A new logo, designed by [Caleb]. You can see it above. Some feel that we should adopt it as our new logo, since the old one is kind of a generic biker symbol. The new one reflects a little more what we do. [Phillip Torrone], the founder of Hack a Day and designer of the old one likes it and says ” love it … i say go for it – evolve or die :)”. What do you guys think? Even if it never becomes the site logo, it will be for sale in the store.

[update: Judging by the feedback, we’ll be sticking with our original logo. Custom designs will be available in the store though. Email me directly(caleb@hackaday.com) to discuss getting your design on there. ]

3D Printed MakerBot

June 5, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 12 Comments

[Webca] has made a 3D printed MakerBot with his MakerBot. Using five pounds of plastic, the design replaces all of the plywood used to create a regular MakerBot. This complements the existing designs for the 3D printed extruders, dinos, and other parts already on Thingiverse. An interesting mile marker in the history of 3D printing. We might make one after we make a Mendel and tons of Hack a Day Badges. We also look forward to improvements people will contribute to the design such as using less plastic or a parameterized design to make a really big (or small) MakerBot.