Learning Through Play Hack Chat With Greg Zumwalt

March 11, 2019 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Learning Through Play Hack Chat!

You may think you’ve never heard of Greg Zumwalt, but if you’ve spent any time on Instructables or Thingiverse, chances are pretty good you’ve seen some of his work. After a long career that ranged from avionics design and programming to video game development, Greg retired and found himself with the time to pursue pet projects that had always been on the back burner, including his intricate 3D-printed automata. His motto is “I fail when I decide to stop learning,” and from the number of projects he turns out and the different methods he incorporates, he has no intention of failing.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

Lifelong learning through play;
Toy-building as a means to skillset growth;
Sources of inspiration and getting new ideas; and
What sorts of projects Greg has in the pipeline.

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Learning Through Play Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 13, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

From Software To Tindie Hack Chat With Brian Lough

March 4, 2019 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the From Software to Tindie Hack Chat!

Brian Lough has followed a roundabout but probably not unusual route to the hardware hacking scene. Educated in Electronic and Computer Engineering, Brian is a software developer by trade who became enamored of Arduino development when the ESP8266 hit the market. He realized the microcontrollers such as these offered incredible capabilities on the cheap, and the bug bit him.

Since then, Brian has fully embraced the hardware hacking way, going so far as to live stream complete builds in a sort of collaborative “hack-along” with his viewers. He’s also turned a few of his builds into legitimate products, selling them on his Tindie store and even going so far as to automate testing before shipping to catch errors and improve quality.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

How software hacking leads to hardware hacking;
The creative process and how live streaming helps or hinders it;
The implications of going from project to product; and
What sorts of new projects might we see soon?

Continue reading “From Software To Tindie Hack Chat With Brian Lough” →

All Things Enigma Hack Chat

February 25, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the All Things Enigma Hack Chat!

This week’s Hack Chat is a bit of a departure for us because our host, Simon Jansen, has tackled so many interesting projects that it’s hard to settle on one topic. Simon is a multidisciplinary hacker whose interests run the gamut from building an ammo-can Apple ][ to a literal steampunk Rickroller. How about a Bender Brewer? Or a MAME in a TARDIS? Or perhaps making an old phone play music to restore a car by? Oh, and remember that awesome ASCII animation of Star Wars: Episode IV? That was Simon.

So, a little hard to choose a topic, but we asked Simon to talk a bit about his recent Enigma watches. He has managed to put an electronic emulation of the Enigma cypher machine from World War II into both a wristwatch and, more recently, a pocket watch. They’re both gorgeous builds that required a raft of skills to complete. We’ll start there and see where the conversation takes us!

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

Where the fascination with Enigma came from;
Tools, techniques, and shop setup;
Melding multiple, disparate skill sets; and
What sorts of new projects might we see soon?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the All Things Enigma Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 27, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

High-Altitude Ballooning Hack Chat

February 4, 2019 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the high-altitude ballooning Hack Chat!

The Cope brothers are our hosts this week. Jeremy, a computer engineer, and Jason, a mechanical engineer, have recently caught the high-altitude ballooning (HAB) bug. In their initial flights they’ve racked up some successes and pushed the edge of space with interesting and varied missions. Their first flight just barely missed the 100,000 foot (30,000 meter) mark and carried a simple payload package of cameras and GPS instruments and allowed them to reach their goal of photographing the Earth’s curvature.

Flight 2 had a similar payload but managed to blow through the 100K foot altitude, capturing stunning video of the weather balloon breaking. Their most recent flight carried a more complex payload package, consisting of the usual camera and GPS but also a flight data recorder of their own devising, as well as a pair of particle detectors to measure the change in flux of subatomic particles with increasing altitude. That flight “only” reached 62,000 ft (19,000 meters) but managed to hitch a ride on the jet stream that nearly took the package out to sea.

The Cope brothers will be joining the Hack Chat to talk about the exciting field of DIY high-altitude ballooning and the challenges of getting a package halfway to space (depending on how that’s defined). Please join us as we discuss:

The basics of flight – balloons, rigging, payload protection, tracking, and recovery;
Getting started on the cheap;
Making a flight into a mission with interesting and innovative ideas for payload instrumentation;
Will hobbyist HABs ever break the Kármán Line? and
What’s in store for this year’s Global Space balloon Challenge?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the High-Altitude Ballooning Hack Chat event page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 6, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Open Source Synthesizers Hack Chat

January 21, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Matt Bradshaw is a musician, maker, and programmer with a degree in physics and a love for making new musical instruments. You may remember his PolyMod modular digital synthesizer from the 2018 Hackaday Prize, where it made the semifinals of the Musical Instrument Challenge. PolyMod is a customizable, modular synthesizer that uses digital rather than analog circuitry. That seemingly simple change results in a powerful ability to create polyphonic patches, something that traditional analog modular synths have a hard time with.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, in which we’ll cover:

The hardware behind the PolyMod, and the design decisions that led Matt to an all-digital synth
The pros and cons of making music digitally
Where the PolyMod has gone since winning the Musical Instrument Challenge semifinals

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Open Source Synthesizers Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 23, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. And don’t forget to check out the Modular Synth Discussion, a very active chat that digs into the guts of all sorts of modular synthesizers.

Friday Hack Chat: All About Crypto

November 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

What is crypto? Crypto means ‘hidden’, and it’s meant ‘hidden’ since before the Greek alphabet was written, but don’t let that stop you from arguing. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about cryptography, a medium of exchange for secrets. If you need confidentiality, integrity, or authenticity, you need cryptography.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be none other than Nick Sayer. Nick is a frequent attendee of the Hackaday meetups and he’s been building gadgets and gizmos and selling them on Tindie for years now. He’s given talks on design for manufacturing. This year, he designed and developed the Orthrus, an appliance that creates a cryptographically secured USB volume from two microSD cards. Basically, it’s like the Captain Planet team, only instead of rings, you need all the SD cards, and instead of Captain Planet, you summon your data.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to sit down with and talk about all things cryptography, including understanding what you need, what you don’t, and picking the correct tools. Items of interest will include:

When cryptography is needed
Cryptography tools
The best practices for cryptography

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Cryptography Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Friday, November 16th, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Friday Hack Chat: Air Hacking

October 24, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

The field of soft robotics sure seems a lot less mature than your standard servo motor and metal framed robot arms. Maybe that’s because building a robot to flex is harder, and maybe it’s because the best methods of constructing soft robotics have only been around for a decade or so. Maybe, though, it’s because it’s hard to control air.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing Air Hacking with [Amitabh Shrivastava]. [Amitabh] is a grad student at ITP, NYU studying creative technology, where he makes interactive art, tools for research, and experiments with various materials. Lately he has been developing Programmable-Air, a pneumatic controller for soft robotics. We’ve seen his work at ThiMaker Faire, and it’s an awesome project in this year’s Hackaday Prize.

In this chat we will be talking about DIY soft robotics. Soft robotics is a growing field with a lot of low hanging fruits within grasp of the hobbyist maker. In addition to sharing experience and resources about building your own soft robots, we will talk about actuation! Tune in to see how you can use pneumatics in your next project.

During this week’s Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing:

Pneumatics
Programmable Air
Soft Robotics
Methods of adding pneumatics to your project

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Air Hacking Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Friday, October 26th, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.