Friday Hack Chat: Eagle One Year Later

December 14, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 103 Comments

Way back in June of 2016, Autodesk acquired Cadsoft, and with it EagleCAD, the popular PCB design software. There were plans for some features that should have been in Eagle two decades ago, and right now Autodesk is rolling out an impressive list of features that include UX improvements, integration with MCAD and Fusion360, and push and shove routing.

Six months into the new age of Eagle, Autodesk announced they would be changing their licensing models to a subscription service. Where you could pay less than $100 once and hold onto version 6.0 forever, now you’re required to pay $15 every month for your copy of Eagle. Yes, there’s still a free, educational version, but this change to a subscription model caused much consternation in the community when announced.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about Eagle, one year in. Our guest for this Hack Chat is Matt Berggren, director of Autodesk Circuits, hardware engineer, and technologist that has been working on bringing electronic design to everyone. We’ll be asking Matt all about Eagle, with questions including:

What new features are in the latest edition of Eagle?
What’s on the Eagle wishlist?
What technical challenges arise when designing new features?
Where can a beginner find resources for designing PCBs in Eagle?

Join the chat to hear about new features in Eagle, how things are holding up for Eagle under new ownership, and how exactly the new subscription model for Eagle is going. We’re looking for questions from the community, so if you have a question for Matt or the rest of the Eagle team, put it on the Hack Chat event page.

If you’re wondering about how Altium and KiCad are holding up, or have any questions about these PCB design tools, don’t worry: we’re going to have Hack Chats with these engineers in the new year.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down on noon, PST, Friday, December 15th. Time Zones got you down? Here’s a handy count down timer!

Click that speech bubble to the left, 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: Contributing To Open Source Development

December 6, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Open Source is how the world runs. Somewhere, deep inside the box of thinking sand you’re sitting at right now, there’s code you can look at, modify, compile, and run for yourself. At every point along the path between your router and the horrific WordPress server that’s sending you this webpage, there are open source bits transmitting bytes. The world as we know it wouldn’t exist without Open Source software.

That said, how does someone contribute to Open Source? Maintainers do like to build their own little kingdoms, so how does anyone break into developing Open Source hardware and software?

Our guest for this Hack Chat will be Robert Wolff, technical writer, and Open Source evangelist who has a history of working in and around STE*M-based educational programs. Right now, Robert is the community manager for 96Boards at Linaro. 96Boards is a hardware specification to make the latest ARM-based processors available at a reasonable cost. This open specification defines a standard board layout for SoC-agnostic platforms that can be used by any application, device, and kernel by system software developers.

The questions we’ll be looking at during this Hack chat is how to contribute to Open Source projects, how to do that using 96Boards, the technical challenges involved in documenting an Open system, the difficulty in designing a processor-agnostic system, and general questions about the 96Boards community, ecosystem, and resources.

As always, we’re going to be taking questions from the hackaday.io community, so if you have a question, drop it on the Hack Chat event page.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. These Hack Chats usually happen at Noon, Pacific time, on Friday. This week, everything is going down on Noon, PST, Friday, December 8th. Don’t have any idea what time that is on your meridian? Here’s a handy countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the left, 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: Reverse Engineering The Digital Compact Cassette

November 29, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking about reverse engineering the Digital Compact Cassette. Why should we care about an obsolete format that was only on the market for four years? Because if a copy of the Spin Doctor’s Pocket Full of Kryptonite costs $50 USD on the used market, it has to be good.

In the early 1990s, several different digital magnetic tape formats came onto the scene. The MiniDisc was magneto-optical, yes, but back in the day it was amazing for recording bootlegs. DAT also appeared in the early 90s, and it was a godsend for recording studios. There was another format introduced in 1992, the Digital Compact Cassette. It was backward compatible with standard audio cassettes, an important feature, because no one would want to replace their entire cassette-based music collection with a new-fangled digital format. That would be just lunacy.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Jac Goudsmit], prolific creator on Hackaday.io, with projects ranging from the L-Star Software Defined 6502 Computer to a GPS Controlled FischerTechnik Clock. [Jac] grew up on a PET 2001, and in the years since he’s worked on projects ranging from motion control systems for lithography equipment, pick and place machines, and even at a Radio Shack. In this Hack Chat, he’ll be discussing the history of the Digital Compact Cassette, the behind the scenes on how stereo PCM is recorded to tape, and other topics like the difference between CS/EE careers in the Netherlands and the USA.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Our Hack Chats usually happen on Fridays at Noon, so buckle up because this is going down Friday, December 1, at 12:00 PST. What time is that where you live? Who cares! Here’s a time zone converter!

Click that speech bubble to the left, 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: High Speed Data Acquisition

November 15, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about High-Speed Data Acquisition. If you’ve ever needed to shove voltages, currents, logic signals, temperature, pressure, or sound into a computer, you’ve used a DAQ. If you’ve ever needed to acquire a signal at a very high speed, you’ve probably paid a lot of money for that piece of equipment.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Kumar Abhishek], engineering student, Hackaday Prize finalist, and creator of the very, very cool Beaglelogic, a logic analyzer for the BeagleBone. The interesting bit about the Beaglelogic is its utilization of the Programmable Real-Time Units (PRUs) found in every BeagleBone.

These PRUs are basically DMA machines, shuttling bits back and forth between memory and GPIOs. This year, [Kumar] turned the Beaglelogic cape into the Beaglelogic Standalone, a device based on the Octavo Systems OSD3358 (the ‘BeagleBone On A Chip‘) that gives those Saleae logic analyzers a run for their money.

In this Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing the PRUs found in various iterations of the BeagleBoard, how the Beaglelogic performs its data acquisition, and how programming the PRUs is actually accomplished. If you have a question for [Kumar], leave a comment on the Hack Chat page

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Usually, our Hack Chats go down at noon, PDT, Friday. This one is different. Because [Kumar] is in India, we’ll be running this Hack Chat at 9:30a PST, Friday, November 17th. What time is that in India, and what time is that where you live? Who cares! Here’s a time zone converter!

Click that speech bubble to the left, 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.

We’re also looking for new Hack Chat guests! If you’ve built something cool, you’re working on an interesting project, or you’re about to introduce a really cool product, hit us up! Email our wonderful community managers, and we’ll see if we can slot you in.

Friday Hack Chat: Fundamentals Of RF

November 1, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Designing a system for communication over RF is a dark art. It’s an obscure domain filled with photonmancy, wires going every which way, and imaginary numbers. RF is reserved entirely for wizards. The guy who simplified Maxwell’s equations into the form we now use went literally insane and replaced all the furniture in his house with granite blocks. This is weird stuff, man.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking about RF. Everything from the capabilities of different bands, how bandwidth is incorporated into designs, different modulation schemes, RF concepts, I/Q, Nyquist, and other deep-dive topics that elucidate the mysteries of the universe and include all the math.

If you’ve ever wondered how bits get turned into radio waves, what all the PSKs and SSBs are all about, and how bandwidth and range of a radio system play into what frequencies are used, this is the Hack Chat for you.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is [Nick Kartsioukas]. He’s an infosec engineer, an amateur radio operator with an Extra license, hardware hacker, plays around with radio and antenna projects, SDR, and he’s an RC pilot. There’s a lot of RF swimming around [Nick], and he’s got the skills to pay the bills.

This is a community Hack Chat, and we’re taking questions from the community. If you have a question or something you’d like to discuss, add it to the sheet.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down noon, PDT, Friday, November 3rd. Do you wish every time zone was UTC? Yeah, it’s a great idea, but when you really think about it, it would be terrible. Here’s a time zone converter!

Click that speech bubble to the left, 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.

We’re also looking for new Hack Chat hosts! If you’ve built something cool, you’re working on an interesting project, or you’re about to introduce a really cool product, hit us up! Email our wonderful community managers, and we’ll see if we can slot you in.

Friday Hack Chat: DMX512 Gon’ Give It To Ya

October 25, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

DMX512 is the standard for theatrical lighting, and it’s best described as, ‘MIDI for lights’. It’s been around since the 80s, and in the decades since it’s been used, abused, and shoved into just about everything imaginable.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking all about DMX512. What is DMX512? How does it work? What can you control with DMX512? What Open Source projects use it? There’s a wealth of information out there, and a lot of very cool tricks you can pull with this ubiquitous lighting protocol.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is [Martin Searancke], owner of Dream Solutions Ltd. [Martin] was contacted early on in the development of Coca-Cola’s impressive 3D Times Square advertisement to see if Dream Solution’s LightFactory software could be used to drive this 3D screen. This software has pixel mapping and media playback capabilities and was used for the prototypes for the project. A subset of this product made it into the final installation, and is now driving a gargantuan display above Times Square in New York City.

This is a community Hack Chat, and of course we’re taking questions from the community. If you have a question you’d like to ask [Martin], add it to the discussion sheet.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Our Hack Chats usually take place at noon, Pacific time on Friday, but this week is different. [Martin] is in New Zealand, so this Hack Chat is happening at 2pm Pacific, Friday, October 27th. Is that too hard for you? Here’s a 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: Energy Harvesting

October 18, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Think about an Internet-connected device that never needs charging, never plugs into an outlet, and will never run out of power. With just a small solar cell, an Internet of Thing module can run for decades. This is the promise of energy harvesting, and it opens the doors to a lot of interesting questions.

Joining us for this week’s Hack Chat will be [John Tillema], CTO and co-founder of TWTG. They’re working on removing batteries completely from the IoT equation. They have a small device that operates on just 200 lux — the same amount of light that can be found on a desktop. That’s a device that can connect to the Internet without batteries, wall warts, or the black magic wizardry of RF harvesting. How do you design a device that will run for a century? Are caps even rated for that? Are you really going to download firmware updates several decades down the line?

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing what energy harvesting actually is, what TWTG’s ‘light energy’ technology is all about, and the capabilities of this technology. Going further, we’ll be discussing how to design a circuit for low-power usage, how to select components that will last for decades, and how to measure and test the entire system so it lives up to the promise of being always on, forever, without needing a new battery.

This is a community Hack Chat, so of course we’ll be taking questions from the community. If you have a question, add it to the discussion sheet

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will be going down noon, Pacific time on Friday, October 20th. Is it always five o’clock somewhere? Yes, so here’s a 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.