Hackaday Links: April 3, 2016

April Fool’s Day was last Friday, and the Internet was garbage for a day. Our April Fool’s prank was amazing, and in a single day garnered more views than the Raspberry Pi 3 launch announcement from a month prior. There just might be a market here for Apple. Here’s a short roundup of some of the best electronics April Fool’s posts:

This, surprisingly, was not an April Fool’s post. [Dave Jones] has been looking to upgrade his workspace for a few years now. He’s finally found a place. It’s the old Altium office in Sydney. [Dave] worked at Altium before spinning up the EEVblog, so this really is his old stomping grounds. It’s 4000 square meters (43,000 square feet), and exactly 3950 square meters larger than his current lab. What is he going to do with all that space? He’s looking for suggestions, but I would suggest an awesome model train layout. A [Dave Haynie]-style tour would also be acceptable.

Yesterday was the unofficial geekhack / deskthority / r/mechanicalkeyboards SoCal Mechanical Keyboard meetup at Datamancer in Montclair, CA. I was there, got a Control key to replace the Caps Lock key on my Novatouch, and took a lot of pictures.

It’s a presidential election year in the US, and that means millions of people are going to make America great again by polluting their front yard with campaign signs. These campaign signs are usually made out of coroplast, a material that looks like corrugated cardboard, but is made out of dead dinosaurs instead of dead trees. Coroplast is a very interesting material, and [uminded] tipped us off to some guy that makes mini speedboats in this rather uncommon material.

There are some things you just shouldn’t do. Combining octocopters with chainsaws, for example. You shouldn’t do it, but someone will anyway, and YouTube exists. Here’s an octocopter with a chainsaw.

Foxconn is buying Sharp. Sharp has a rather large portfolio of LEDs and optoelectronics, but this deal is mostly for Sharp’s large contract manufacturing business.