Floppy Interfacing Hack Chat With Adafruit

January 31, 2022 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, February 2 at noon Pacific for the Floppy Interfacing Hack Chat with Adafruit’s Limor “Ladyada” Fried and Phillip Torrone!

When a tiny fleck of plastic-covered silicon can provide enough capacity to store a fair percentage of humanity’s collected knowledge, it may seem like a waste of time to be fooling around with archaic storage technology like floppy disks. With several orders of magnitude less storage capacity than something like even the cheapest SD card or thumb drive, and access speeds that clock in somewhere between cold molasses and horse and buggy, floppy drives really don’t seem like they have any place on the modern hacker’s bench.

Or do they? Learning the ins and out of interfacing floppy drives with modern microcontrollers is at least an exercise in hardware hacking that can pay dividends in other projects. A floppy drive is, after all, a pretty complex little device, filled with electromechanical goodies that need to be controlled in a microcontroller environment. And teasing data from a stream of magnetic flux changes ends up needing some neat hacks that might just serve you well down the line.

So don’t dismiss the humble floppy drive as a source for hacking possibilities. The folks at Adafruit sure haven’t, as they’ve been working diligently to get native floppy disk support built right into CircuitPython. To walk us through how they got where they are now, Ladyada and PT will drop by the Hack Chat. Be sure to come with your burning questions on flux transitions, MFM decoding, interface timing issues, and other arcana of spinning rust drives.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 2 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Continue reading “Floppy Interfacing Hack Chat With Adafruit” →

Compliant Mechanisms Hack Chat

January 24, 2022 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, January 26 at noon Pacific for the Compliant Mechanisms Hack Chat with Amy Qian!

When it comes to putting together complex mechanisms, we tend to think in a traditional design language that includes elements like bearings, bushings, axles, pulleys — anything that makes it possible for separate rigid bodies to move against each other. That works fine in a lot of cases — our cars wouldn’t get very far without such elements — but there are simpler ways to transmit force and motion, like compliant mechanisms.

Compliant mechanisms show up in countless products, from the living hinge on a cheap plastic box to the nanoscale linkages etched into silicon inside a MEMS accelerometer. They reduce complexity by putting the elasticity of materials to work and by reducing the number of parts it takes to create an assembly. And they can help make your projects easier and cheaper to build — if you know the secrets of their design.

Amy Qian, from the Amy Makes Stuff channel on YouTube, is a mechanical engineer with an interest in compliant mechanisms, so much so that she ran a workshop about them at the 2019 Superconference. She’ll stop by the Hack Chat to share some of what she’s learned about compliant mechanisms, and to help us all build a little flexibility into our designs.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 26 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Continue reading “Compliant Mechanisms Hack Chat” →

Electromyography Hack Chat

January 17, 2022 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, January 19 at noon Pacific as we kick off the 2022 Hack Chat season with the Electromyography Hack Chat with hut!

It’s one of the simplest acts most people can perform, but just wiggling your finger is a vastly complex process under the hood. Once you consciously decide to move your digit, a cascade of electrochemical reactions courses from the brain down the spinal cord and along nerves to reach the muscles fibers of the forearm, where still more reactions occur to stimulate the muscle fibers and cause them to contract, setting that finger to wiggling.

The electrical activity going on inside you while you’re moving your muscles is actually strong enough to make it to the skin, and is detectable using electromyography, or EMG. But just because a signal exists doesn’t mean it’s trivial to make use of. Teasing a usable signal from one muscle group amidst the noise from everything else going on in a human body can be a chore, but not an insurmountable one, even for the home gamer.

To make EMG a little easier, our host for this Hack Chat, hut, has been hard at work on PsyLink, a line of prototype EMG interfaces that can be used to detect muscle movements and use them to control whatever you want. In this Hack Chat, we’ll dive into EMG in general and PsyLink in particular, and find out how to put our muscles to work for something other than wiggling our fingers.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 19 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Continue reading “Electromyography Hack Chat” →

Design For Test Hack Chat

December 13, 2021 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, December 15 at noon Pacific for the Design for Test Hack Chat with Duncan Lowder!

If your project is at the breadboard phase, or even if you’ve moved to a PCB prototype, it’s pretty easy to know if it works. It either does what it’s supposed to do, or it doesn’t, and a few informal tests will probably tell you all you need to know. But once you scale up to production, the testing picture becomes quite different. How do you know you’re not shipping out a problem? And how do you make sure your testing process doesn’t become a bottleneck?

Answering questions like these can be difficult, which is why we’ve invited Duncan Lowder to come talk with us. He was a test lead at places like Glowforge and Sphero before founding FixturFab, where he’s working on ways to make hardware testing as easy as possible, no matter what scale you’re working at. We’ll learn all about how to make our designs easy to test right from the get-go and take the pain out of that bed of nails.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Spatial AI And CV Hack Chat

November 29, 2021 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, December 1 at noon Pacific for the Spatial AI and CV Hack Chat with Erik Kokalj!

A lot of what we take for granted these days existed only in the realm of science fiction not all that long ago. And perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the field of machine vision. The little bounding box that pops up around everyone’s face when you go to take a picture with your cell phone is a perfect example; it seems so trivial now, but just think about what’s involved in putting that little yellow box on the screen, and how it would not have been plausible just 20 years ago.

Perhaps even more exciting than the development of computer vision systems is their accessibility to anyone, as well as their move into the third dimension. No longer confined to flat images, spatial AI and CV systems seek to extract information from the position of objects relative to others in the scene. It’s a huge leap forward in making machines see like we see and make decisions based on that information.

To help us along the road to incorporating spatial AI into our projects, Erik Kokalj will stop by the Hack Chat. Erik does technical documentation and support at Luxonis, a company working on the edge of spatial AI and computer vision. Join us as we explore the depths of spatial AI.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, December 1st at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Heavy-Copper PCB Hack Chat

November 8, 2021 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, November 10 at noon Pacific for the Heavy Copper PCBs Hack Chat with Mark Hughes and Greg Ziraldo!

For as useful as printed circuit boards are, they do seem a little flimsy at times. With nothing but a thin layer — or six — of metal on the board, and ultra-fine traces that have to fit between a dense forest of pads and vias, the current carrying capacity of the copper on most PCBs is somewhat limited. That’s OK in most cases, especially where logic-level and small-signal currents are concerned. But what happens when you really need to turn up the juice on a PCB?

Enter the world of heavy-copper PCBs, where the copper is sometimes as thick as the board substrate itself. Traces that are as physically chunky as these come with all sorts of challenges, from thermal and electrical considerations to potential manufacturing problems. To help us sort through all these issues, Mark and Greg will stop by the Hack Chat. They both work at quick-turn PCB assembly company Advanced Assembly, Mark as Research Director and Greg as Senior Director of Operations. They know the ins and outs of heavy-copper PCB designs, and they’ll share the wealth with us.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 10 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Retro Memory Hack Chat

November 1, 2021 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, November 3 at noon Pacific for the Retro Memory Hack Chat with Andy Geppert!

With how cheap and easy-to-integrate modern memory chips have become, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that it wasn’t too long ago that memory was the limiting factor in most computer designs. Before the advent of silicon memory, engineers had to make do with all sorts of weird and wonderful technologies just to provide a few precious bytes of memory. Things like intricate webs of wires spangled with ferrite cores, strange acoustic delay lines, and even magnetic bubbles were all tried at one time or another. They worked, at least well enough to get us to the Moon, but none would prove viable in the face of advancements in silicon memory.

That doesn’t mean that retro memory technology doesn’t have a place anymore. Some hobbyists, like Andy Geppert, are keeping the retro memory flame alive. His Core 64 project puts a core memory module in the palm of your hand, and even lets you “draw” directly to memory with a magnet. Andy learned a few tricks along the way to that accomplishment, and wants us all to appreciate the anachronistic charm of retro memory technologies. Stop by the Hack Chat to talk about your memories of memory, or to just learn what it used to take to store a little bit of data.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 3 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.