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1256 Articles

The SEC Has A Thing For Crowdfunding

May 25, 2016 by 31 Comments

Kickstarter is not a store. Indiegogo is not a store. No matter what crowdfunding platform you’re on, you’re not in a store. This is an undeniable truth, and no matter how angry you are about not being able to bring a cooler with a blender to the beach this summer, you did not buy this cool cooler, you were merely giving someone money to develop this cooler.

This reality may seem strange for the most vocal Internet commenters out there, leading them to the conclusion their pledge for a crowdfunding campaign was an investment. Surely there must be some guarantee in a single pledge, and if it’s not exchanging money for some consumer goods, it is exchanging money for a stake in a company. If that were true, backers of the Oculus Rift would have received several thousand dollars each, instead of a $600 VR headset.

Crowdfunding is not a store, and according to Kickstarter and Indiegogo, it is not an investment, either. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rules for “crowdfunded investing”, “Regulation Crowdfunding”, or “Title III Crowdfunding” kicked into gear. Is this the beginning of slack-jawed gawkers throwing their life savings into a pit of despair filled with idiotic consumer products that violate the laws of physics?

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Symmetry For Beginners – The Rubik’s Cube

May 24, 2016 by 13 Comments

Symmetry is everywhere in our natural world. Just take a look at your hands, a butterfly, or a sunflower.  It’s easy to pass off the idea of symmetry and symmetric structures as a simple quirk of existence, and to pay it little mind. If this is your view, I can assure you it will no longer be by the end of this series. If we force ourselves to look beyond the grade school applications of symmetry, we find a world rich in connections via many different types of symmetric identities. One of the most interesting is Gauge Symmetry, which lies at the heart of Quantum Electrodynamics, or QED (we’ll get into this a bit later in the series). Several branches of higher level mathematics study symmetry in detail, allowing a host of sciences, from physics to chemistry,  to view difficult problems and theories from a different perspective.

The subject matter of the ideas explored in symmetry is complicated, and not well known outside of academia and the theoretical sciences. It is the goal of this series of articles to simplify some of the concepts that underpin the study of symmetry, so that the average hacker can gain a basic (and I mean basic) understanding of this fascinating body of knowledge, and put it to use in future projects.  We’ll start things off by taking a look at a machine that has crossed the Hackaday server many times – those nifty Rubik’s Cube solvers. Just how do those things work anyway?

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Why I Go Through So Many Arduinos

May 23, 2016 by 117 Comments

I make things for people that can’t be bought off a shelf, and in the past several years I have gone through a lot of Arduinos. More and more, they are simply the right tool for both the job and the client. This wasn’t always the case; what changed?

My clients today still include startups and other small businesses, but more and more they’re artists, hobbyists venturing into entrepreneurship, or people who make one-offs like the interactive displays you find in museums or science centers. The type of people I work for has changed, and because of this, the right tool for their job is almost always an Arduino.

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It’s Time For Direct Metal 3D-Printing

May 19, 2016 by 75 Comments

It’s tough times for 3D-printing. Stratasys got burned on Makerbot, trustful backers got burned on the Peachy Printer meltdown, I burned my finger on a brand new hotend just yesterday, and that’s only the more recent events. In recent years more than a few startups embarked on the challenge of developing a piece of 3D printing technology that would make a difference. More colors, more materials, more reliable, bigger, faster, cheaper, easier to use. There was even a metal 3D printing startup, MatterFab, which pulled off a functional prototype of a low-cost metal-powder-laser-melting 3D printer, securing $13M in funding, and disappearing silently, poof.

This is just the children’s corner of the mall, and the grown-ups have really just begun pulling out their titanium credit cards. General Electric is on track to introduce 3D printed, FAA-approved fuel nozzles into its aircraft jet engines, Airbus is heading for 3D-printed, lightweight components and interior, and SpaceX has already sent rockets with 3D printed Main Oxidizer Valves (MOV) into orbit, aiming to make the SuperDraco the first fully 3D printed rocket engine. Direct metal 3D printing is transitioning from the experimental research phase to production, and it’s interesting to see how and why large industries, well, disrupt themselves.

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The Art And Science Of Bending Sheet Metal

May 18, 2016 by 50 Comments

A motor mount. A sturdy enclosure. A 43.7° bracket. The average hack requires at least one angled metal part, and the best tool to make one is still the good ol’ press brake. Bending parts requires a few extra thoughts in the design and layout of the flat patterns, so if you want to know about bend allowances, bend deduction and how to bend accurate parts even without a press, read on.

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Beyond WD-40: Lubes For The Home Shop

May 17, 2016 by 134 Comments

If your shop is anything like mine, you’ve got a large selection of colorful cans claiming to contain the best and absolutely only lubricant you’ll ever need. I’ve been sucked in by the marketing more times than I care to admit, hoping that the next product will really set itself apart from the others and magically unstick all the stuck stuff in my mechanical life. It never happens, though, and in the end I generally find myself reaching for the familiar blue and yellow can of WD-40 for just about every job.

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Working With Mains Voltage: The Electrifying Conclusion!

May 16, 2016 by 28 Comments

This is the second in a two-part series looking at safety when experimenting with mains-voltage electronic equipment, including the voltages you might find derived from a mains supply but not extending to multi-kilovolt EHT except in passing. In the first part we looked at the safety aspects of your bench, protecting yourself from the mains supply, ensuring your tools and instruments are adequate for the voltages in hand, and finally with your mental approach to a piece of high-voltage equipment.

The mental part is the hard part, because that involves knowing a lot about the inner life of the mains-voltage design. So in this second article on mains voltages, we’ll look into where the higher voltages live inside consumer electronics.

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