Official Statement Regarding Counterfeit Benchoff Bucks

November 13, 2017 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

It was reported, and Hackaday has now confirmed, that counterfeit Benchoff Bucks were being circulated at this weekend’s Hackaday Superconference.

The fake bills were distinguishable by their poor printing quality and vastly smaller size than official ‘Bucks. Their appearance should help to relieve the skyrocketing value of the Benchoff Buck, whose dominance as the preferred paper currency at hardware conferences has caused deflationary forces to take hold as ‘Bucks holders hoard them.

Hackaday’s resident economists hope that the appearance of the counterfeits will begin to devalue the currency. Diminishing the strength of Benchoff Bucks has long been the goal for the portion of the Hackaday community who believe we need to move off of fiat Benchoff currency in favor of Benchoff-based cryptocurrency.

We anticipate seeing the long-rumored ICO early in 2018, likely in conjunction with other live Hackaday events. No word yet on the name of the new cryptocoins, but it is worth mentioning that the ‘Benchoff Nickel‘ has already been taken.

After an exhaustive investigation, the forger has been identified. They were given a pat on the back, a firm handshake, and charged with the responsibility of documenting the forgery effort as a Hackaday.io project. You know who you are… and we have our eye on you.

Stay tuned for reports on other shenanigans that took place at the Hackaday Superconference over the weekend. In the meantime, you can check out some of the epic talks that were live-streamed as they happened.

Making More Of Me Money

March 22, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

For the last few years, Hackaday has really been stepping up our game with marketing materials. Our t-shirts and swag are second to none, and last year we introduced the ‘Benchoff Buck’ (featured above), a bill replete with Jolly Wrencher EURions that is not yet legal currency. At least until we get a sweet compound in the desert, that is.

[Andrew Sowa] created the Benchoff Nickel. It’s a visage of yours truly emblazoned on a PCB, rendered in FR4, silkscreen, gold, and OSHPark’s royal purple. In doing so, [Andrew] has earned himself a field commission to the rank of lieutenant and can now reserve the dune buggy for a whole weekend.

The Benchoff Nickel was created in KiCad using the Bitmap2Component functionality. Planning this required a little bit of work; there are only five colors you can get on an OSH Park PCB, from white to gold to beige to purple (soldermask on top of copper) to black (soldermask with no copper). Luckily, the best picture we have of me renders very well in five colors.

The Bitmap2Component part of KiCad will only get you so far, though. It’s used mainly to put silkscreen logos on a board, and messing around with copper and mask layers is beyond its functionality. To import different layers of my face into different layers of a KiCad PCB, [Andrew] had to open up Notepad and make a few manual edits. It’s annoying, but yes, it can be done.

OSH Park’s fabs apparently use two different tones of FR4

The Benchoff Nickel can be found on Github and as a shared project on OSH Park ($22.55 for three copies). One little curiosity of the OSH Park fabrication process presented itself with [Andrew]’s second order of Benchoff Nickels. OSH Park uses at least two board houses to produce their PCBs, and one of them apparently uses a lighter shade of FR4. This resulted in a lighter skin tone for the second order of Benchoff Nickels.

This is truly tremendous work. I’ve never seen anything like this, and it’s one of the best ‘artistic’ PCBs I’ve ever held in my hands. It was a really great surprise when [Andrew] handed me one of these at the Hackaday Unconference in Chicago. I’ll be talking to [Andrew] again this week at the Midwest RepRap festival, and we’re going to try and figure out some way to do a small run of Benchoff Nickels.

Edit: OSH Park revealed why there are different tones of FR4. In short, there aren’t. The lighter shade of skintone is actually FR408, which is used on 4-layer boards.