Tool Hacks

2963 Articles

Easier PCB Vias With Drill Trick And Conductive Ink

November 23, 2015 by 35 Comments

If you’ve ever made double-sided PCBs without professional equipment, you had to deal with connecting one side of the board to the other. You have a few obvious choices: 1) Rely on component leads to connect both sides (and solder both sides); 2) Create vias and solder wire to both sides of the board; or 3) Use through hole rivets. [Diyouware] had a different idea: use conductive ink. After a few false starts, they found a technique that seemed to work well.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of people trying conductive ink with varying degrees of success. The biggest problem, usually, is that the ink wants to run out of the hole. [Diyouware] has an interesting solution for this problem: Don’t drill the hole all the way thorough.

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GNU Radio Drives Oscilloscope

November 22, 2015 by 6 Comments

These days we are spoiled with a lot of cheap test equipment. However, you can do a lot of measurements with nothing more than an oscilloscope. Add something like a signal generator and you can do even more. One classic technique for frequency measurement, for example, is using a scope to display a Lissajous pattern. [Franz Schaefer] has a video showing how to generate these useful curves with GNU Radio.

As we pointed out earlier, GNU Radio doesn’t have to be about radio–it is really just a Python-based signal processing laboratory. [Franz] uses GNU Radio Companion to create blocks which in turn create the patterns on an old analog scope.

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Review: Voltera V-One PCB Printer

November 20, 2015 by 72 Comments

Back in Feburary, I was one of the first people to throw some cash at the Voltera V-One circuit board printer on Kickstarter. With an anticipated delivery date of Q4 2015, I sat back and waited. This week, my V-One arrived!

I’ll preface this article by pointing out that I do know the folks at Voltera as we went to university together. That being said, I did put down my own cash for the device, so I’ve bought the right to be critical. I also have no relationship with their company. In this article, we’ll go through unboxing and printing, then get into a review of the V-One based on what we’ve seen so far.

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Crowdsourcing Reference Designs From Github

November 19, 2015 by 24 Comments

A ton of open source hardware projects make their way onto Github, and Eagle is one of the most popular tools for these designs. [TomKeddie] came up with the idea of searching Github for Eagle files containing specific parts at Hacker Camp Shenzhen, and a method of scraping useful ones.

The folks over at Dangerous Prototypes used this to build the Github Hardware Search tool. Simply enter a part number, like “ATmega328P”, and you’ll receive a list of the designs using that part. You can then study the design and use it as a reference for your own project. You can also snag library files for the parts.

Of course, there are some limitations to this. The most obvious one is the lack of quality control. There’s no guarantee that the design you find works, or has even been built. Also, it only works for Eagle 6+ files, since prior versions were not XML. You can read more about the design of the tool over on Dangerous Prototypes.

Measuring Capacitors Over Their Working Voltage

November 14, 2015 by 30 Comments

Ceramic capacitors are small, they don’t leak, they’re convenient, but they are downright strange. Certain types of caps will lose their capacitance depending on the voltage they’re operating at. If you’re using ceramic caps for filters, DC to DC power supplies, bypass caps, or anything where you need an exact capacitance in a circuit, this can be a problem.

[Mathieu] has come up with a tool that’s able to measure the capacitance of a cap over its entire working range. He’s calling it the OpenCVMeter, and although the name might be slightly confusing, the functionality is not. This little box will measure the capacitance of a part over a voltage range from 1.3 to 15.5V.

By attaching the SMD tweezers or test clips to a capacitor, the OpenCVMeter ramps up the voltage and measures the capacitance of the part through the test cycle. This data is then dumped to a Chrome app – a surprisingly popular platform for test equipment apps – and a determination of the cap’s ability will to work in a circuit is displayed on the screen

If you’ve ever tooled around with antique electronic equipment, you’ll know the first thing to go bad in any piece of equipment are caps. Either caps had extremely loose manufacturing tolerances back in the day or the values really were that critical, but a dodgy cap can bring down everything from tube amps to computers. It’s a very neat tool, and something that doesn’t really exist in a single dedicated device.

Friction Welding… Wood?

November 8, 2015 by 62 Comments

You’d think writing for Hackaday means we probably don’t get surprised very often by projects… but then we see something we never thought was possible — in this case, the linear friction welding of wood to join it.

Friction welding (also known as stir welding), is the process of taking two pieces of material (typically metal, or plastic), and vibrating one of them super fast while pushing against a stationary piece of the same material — the resulting friction causes a massive heat buildup that can then literally weld the two pieces of material together.

It’s an easy way to bond plastic parts together using a dremel and some 3D printing filament, and while doing it with metal is significantly harder, it is possible to do at home as well.

But according to the video after the break — it’s actually possible to do this with wood.

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Casting Turbines For A World Speed Record Motorcycle

November 8, 2015 by 24 Comments

[Anders] is going to beat the land speed record for a turbine-powered motorcycle. It’s a project he’s been working on for years now, and just this week, he put the finishing touches on the latest part of the build. He successfully cast the compressor for a gas turbine engine that’s twice as powerful as the one he has now.

This compressor piece was first 3D printed, and this print was used as a positive for a sand – or more specifically petrobond – mold. The material used in the casting is aluminum, fluxed and degassed, and with a relatively simple process, [Anders] came away with a very nice looking cast that only needs a little bit of milling, lathing, and welding to complete the part.

In the interests of accuracy, and just to make sure there’s no confusion, this ‘jet’ engine is actually a gas turbine, of which there are many configurations and uses. The proper nomenclature for this engine is a ‘turboshaft’ because the power is directed to a shaft which drives something else. This is not a new build; we’ve been covering [Anders]’ build for the better part of two years now, and although [Anders] intends to break the world record at the Bonneville salt flats eventually, he won’t be beating the ultimate land speed record – that title goes to a car – and he won’t be beating the speed record for all motorcycles. Instead, [Anders] plans to break the record for experimental propulsion motorcycles, or motorcycles powered by electric motors, steam, jet engines, or in this case, ‘turboshafts’.

It should also be noted that [Anders] frequently does not wear hearing or eye protection when testing his gas turbine engine. That is an exceedingly bad idea, and something that should not be attempted by anyone.

As an additional note for safety, in the video below of [Anders] pouring aluminum into his mold, the ground looks wet. This is terrifically dangerous, and steam explosions can kill and maim even innocent bystanders. This is not something that should be attempted by anyone, but we do thank [Anders] for sharing his project with us.

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