Friday Hack Chat: All About The Hackaday Prize

June 13, 2018 by Brian Benchoff No comments

Right now we’re neck deep in the Hackaday Prize. What’s the Hackaday Prize? It’s the Academy Awards of hardware creation, or at least that’s what we’re calling it until we get a cease and desist from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Already we’ve seen over eight hundred entries in the Hackaday Prize, and there are still months to go. We’re already through the Open Hardware Design Challenge, and twenty fantastic projects from that are moving onto the final round. Yesterday, we announced the winners of the Robotics Module challenge, and again we were blown away. These are the greatest bits of hardware anywhere, and we couldn’t have imagined anything more awesome.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about The Hackaday Prize. This is your chance to be a hardware hero and finally get some recognition for what you’ve been working on. Right now, we’re in the Power Harvesting Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize, and we want to see what you can come up with that will get energy from solar, thermal, wind, or random electromagnetic energy. This is your time to shine, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Of course, you might have a few questions on what it takes to make a successful Hackaday Prize entry. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to sit down with [Stephen Tranovich], the person coordinating this year’s Prize, to see what makes a successful entry. This is your chance to find out what it takes to become the next great hardware hacker, and it’s all going down this Friday in the Hack Chat.

Some of the things we’ll be talking about in this week’s Hack Chat:

What makes a winning entry?
How can you get publicity for your project?
Want to bounce your project ideas off the community?
What’s the story behind the seed funding confusion from this year?

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

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: Hacking The Wild

June 6, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

It’s nearly summer, and that means we’re right at the start of conference season, at least for the tech and netsec crowd. Conferences, if you’re not aware, are a conspiracy for the hotel-industrial complex and a terrible way to spend thousands of dollars on a crappy hotel room and twenty-five dollar hamburgers.

[Andrew Quitmeyer] is working on an experimental academic conference that might just put an end to the horrors of conference season. He’s creating his own conference called Dinacon, and it’s going to be cheaper to attend, even though it’s on a tropical island in the Pacific.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking with [Andrew] about Dinacon, a free, two-month-long conference with over 140 attendees from every continent except Antarctica. [Andrew]’s research is in ‘digital naturalism’ at the National University of Singapore and blends biological fieldwork with DIY crafting. The focus of this conference will be workshops where participants build technology in the wild meant to interact with nature.

Not only is the intersection of DIY electronics interesting to the Hackaday community, this is also an interesting conference from a logistical standpoint. The conference philosophy spells it out pretty clearly, with the main takeaway being that [Andrew] is self-funding this conference himself. It’s only going to take about $10,000 USD to host this conference (!), and there are even a few travel stipends to go around. This is also a two-month-long conference. I assure you, after dealing with Supercons, Hackaday meetups, and all the other events Hackaday puts on, this is exceptionally interesting. It’s unheard of, even.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be discussing:

What is digital Naturalism?
What does DIY electronics look like in the forest?
What did you learn from Hacking The Wild?
What kind of things do people make at Dinacon?
What is the biggest bug that ever got into one of your electronics experiments?

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: Logic Noise

May 30, 2018 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

If you like your synthesizers glitchy, squawky, or simply quick-and-dirty, you won’t want to miss this week’s Hack Chat with Hackaday’s own [Elliot Williams], because he’ll be brain-dumping everything he knows about making music with 4000-series CMOS logic chips. Break out your breadboards!

Continue reading “Friday Hack Chat: Logic Noise” →

Friday Hack Chat: Making Programming Easier

May 23, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 54 Comments

There is a long history of graphical programming languages. Some people don’t like to code, and for them, graphical programming languages replace semicolons and brackets with easy-to-understand boxes and wires.

This Friday, we’re going to be talking about graphical programming languages with [Boian Mitov]. He’s a software developer, founder of Mitov Software, and the creator of Visuino, a graphical programming language for the embedded domain. He specialized in video, audio, DSP, DAQ, industrial automation, communications, computer vision, artificial intelligence, as well as parallel and distributed computing. [Boian] is the author of the OpenWire open source technology, the IGDI+ open source library, the VideoLab, SignalLab, AudioLab, PlotLab, InstrumentLab, VisionLab, IntelligenceLab, AnimationLab, LogicLab, CommunicationLab, and ControlLab libraries, OpenWire Studio, Visuino, and author of the “VCL for Visual C++” technology.

For this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about ways to make programming microcontrollers easier. The focus of this discussion is Visuino, a graphical programming environment. Visuino allows anyone to program an Arduino, Teensy, or an ESP simply by connecting wires and choosing some logic. Think of it as a step above the programming environment that came with the Lego Mindstorms, Scratch, or whatever else MIT was coming out with in the early ‘aughts.

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: Open Hardware For Science

May 9, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

Scientific equipment is expensive. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a lab. Simply the cost of machines, like data acquisition units or even a simple load cell, can cost hundreds of dollars. This makes research cost prohibitive, and that’s the case even if you do spend a dozen hours a week writing grant proposals. Citizen science is right out, because the cost of the tools to do science is so high.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about Open Hardware for science. This is the chat that’s all about Open Source equipment, hardware modular electronics, and Open designs to make the tools that make science.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is [Dr. Alexxai Kravitz]. He has a PhD in Neuroscience from UPenn and completed a postdoc at the Gladstone Institutes in San Fransisco. [Lex]’s research focuses on understanding the reward circuitry in the brain, and his publications use a variety of experiments to examine this, including behavioral testing, in vivo electrophysiology, and optogenetics.

For this Hack Chat, we’re going to about how Open Source has made more science possible. Of note, we’ll be discussing:

What Open Source science equipment is being used today
The initiatives behind Open Source Hardware for science applications
Scientific application that could benefit from Open Hardware

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: Control Schemes For Robotics

April 25, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

The Hackaday Prize is in full swing if you haven’t heard. It’s the Academy Awards of Open hardware, and the chance for you — yes, you — to create the next great piece of hardware and a better future for everyone. Right now, we’re in the Robotics Module Challenge portion of the prize. This is your chance to build a module that could be used in robotics projects across the world! Show off your mechatronic skills and build a robotics module that’s transferable to other builds!

Not coincidentally, for this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking all about Robotics Modules. We’re taking a deep dive into actuation and control schemes for robotics, and you’re invited to take part. Everyone wants affordable robotics, and stepper and servo motors are no longer the domain of high-budget industrial robots. Everyone can build a robot, but how do you do that? That’s what we’re going to find out this Friday in the Hack Chat!

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is [Ryan Walker]. He holds a diploma in Mechatronics and Robotics from BCIT. He’s worked on everything from prosthetics to industrial automation, and his current hobbies include designing and building control algorithms that drive electronics and enable cheap hardware to excel! If you want to learn about robotics, this is the Hack Chat for you.

In this chat, we’ll be talking about:

Control schemes
How to actuate your projects
Wheels, tweels, and ways to make your project move
Automating robotics

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: Circuit Board Art

April 18, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

We are now in a golden age of printed circuit boards. It wasn’t too long ago that making your own circuit boards either involved a lot of money, or slightly less money and using some proprietary garbage PCB layout tool. Now, every board house speaks Gerber, and you can get a ten-pack of PCBs from China for five bucks. This incredible cost reduction means people are making art with printed circuit boards. We’ve seen portraits, landscapes, and memes. This is truly the beginning of a new artistic medium rendered in fiberglass and soldermask.

Check out this blinky bit of art nouveau. There is a facebook group for PCB paintings, and some of the Badgelife crew are relying on woodcut and linoleum engraving techniques to create works of art in copper and fiberglass.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about PCB artwork. Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Andrew Sowa], an electrical engineer, a vocal advocate of KiCad, and the guy who made more of me money. The Benchoff Nickel was created by simply taking some of the fantastic illustrations from Hackaday’s own [Joe Kim] and applying KiCad’s Bitmap2Component tool. Since the creation of the nickel, [Andrew] has been working on extending his technique to cross-hatching, backlighting, and halftones.

In this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about PCB artwork, including the very beginnings of PCB art where engineers hid a few easter eggs in the PCBs of Xboxen and other consumer electronics. Topics covered will be bitmap to SVG conversion (in Inkscape and Illustrator), KiCad footprint creation, and the more technical side of things with the limitations of PCB fabrication and the slightly different shades of beige FR4 comes in.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, April 20th. How can there be time zones when the Earth has four days simultaneously for each rotation? You erroneously measure time from one corner. Here’s a clock counting down the time until the Hack Chat starts.

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.