Hack Chat

236 Articles

Friday Hack Chat: All About LED Design

September 27, 2017 by 13 Comments

There are three great enabling technologies of the last twenty years. The first is lithium batteries that hold a lot of juice. Quadcopters wouldn’t exist without them, and the Tesla Model S wouldn’t either. The second is crazy powerful brushless motors. Here, again, quads wouldn’t exist without them, but we’re also getting smaller, torquier, and more powerful motion platforms.

The third great enabling technology in recent memory is LEDs. Remember when the PlayStation 2 came out, and everyone was amazed by the blue LED? That blue LED won a Nobel Prize. Now, we have LED light bulbs, LEDs in any color of the rainbow, powerful UV LEDs, and bazillion candela flashlights. LEDs are awesome.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about LEDs. Everything from strips to rings, discrete to waterproof, COBs, weird colors, and everything in between. If you’re looking to replace your workshop lighting with LEDs, this is the Hack Chat for you. If you’ve ever wondered about the quality of LEDs, and the price-performance ratio, this is for you. This is all about blinky bling.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Metalnat], founder of the Burbank MakerSpace, a recent resident of the Supplyframe DesignLab where he designed a VR controller, and worked on Crane, a flapping automaton that glided over the playa at this year’s Burning Man. During this Hack Chat, we’ll be talking about LEDs, including installation methods, types of LEDs, suppliers, and LED manufacturing methods.

This is a Hack Chat, so we’re taking questions from the audience. Here’s a spreadsheet we’ll be using to guide the discussion.

Here’s How To Take Part:

join-hack-chatOur 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, September 29th. Sidereal and solar getting you down? Wondering when noon is this month? Not a problem: here’s a handy countdown timer!

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: All About Drones

September 20, 2017 by 4 Comments

In the future, drones will fill the skies. The world is abuzz (ha!) with news of innovative uses of unmanned aerial vehicles. Soon, our flying robotic overlords will be used for rescue operations, surveillance, counter-insurgency missions, terrorism, agriculture, and delivering frozen dog treats directly from the local Amazon aerodrome to your backyard. The future is nuts.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about unmanned aerial vehicles. This is a huge subject, ranging from aeronautical design, the legal implications of autonomous flying machines, the true efficiency of delivering packages via drones, and the moral ambiguity of covering a city with thousands of mobile, robotic observation posts. In short, the future will be brought to us thanks to powerful brushless motors and lithium batteries.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Piotr Esden-Tempski], developer of UAV autopilot hardware for Paparazzi UAV. Paparazzi can be used for autonomous flight and control of multiple aircraft, and we’ll be talking about the types of embedded systems that can be used for these applications. [Pitor] is also the developer of the 1Bitsy ARM dev platform, the Black Magic Probe JTAG/SWD programmer/debugger and the founder of 1BitSquared.

In this Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing Open Source hardware design for UAVs, all things airborne robotics, the sensors that go into these flying robots, the stalled development (ay, another pun) of consumer and prosumer fixed-wing UAVs, ARM embedded systems, and JTAG and SWD programming and debugging. We’re also taking questions from the audience, and here’s the spreadsheet that will guide the discussion.

Here’s How To Take Part:

join-hack-chatOur 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, September 22nd. Sidereal and solar getting you down? Wondering when noon is this month? Not a problem: here’s a handy countdown timer!

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 Source Startups

September 13, 2017 by 8 Comments

If you want to found a company, you’ll find pages and pages of advice scattered around the Internet telling you exactly how to do that. What if you want to found an Open Source hardware company? That’s a bit harder — you can’t do hardware as a service, and that Open Source moniker will drive away investors.

[Zach Fredin] is one of the rare founders that are making an Open Source hardware company work. In 2015, he developed NeuroBytes, a system of electric neurons designed in such a way that if you get two hundred or so, you can replicate the brain of a flatworm. NeuroBytes was a finalist in the 2015 Hackaday Prize, the team received an NHS grant, and now these PCB neurons will be on the market late this year.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking to [Zach] about the challenges about creating a company from nothing and doing it the Open Source way. Topics for this Friday’s Hack Chat will include the experience of building an Open Source hardware company, manufacturing, building a community around a product, and business spelled with dollar signs.

This Hack Chat will be Friday, noon, PDT. If you have a question for [Zach]. here’s a spreadsheet we’ll be drawing questions from. Continue reading “Friday Hack Chat: Open Source Startups” →

Friday Hack Chat: Elecia White Talks Embedded Systems

September 7, 2017 by 1 Comment

The Arduino ecosystem, despite the comments it receives from Real Engineers™, is actually pretty great. There’s no other tool that works with as many varieties of microcontrollers, has as many libraries, and is as easy to use as the Arduino. It’s perfect for getting a project up and running quickly, but when it comes down to getting the last cycles or kilobits out of an embedded system you’ll quickly find the little blue infinity icon just won’t cut it.

Embedded system design goes far beyond the Arduino ecosystem, and for this week’s Hack Chat, we’ll be talking about squeezing the last drops out of tiny pieces of silicon.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Elecia White], embedded software engineer at Logical Elegance, author of O’Reilly’s Making Embedded Systems, and host of the Embedded.fm podcast.  In this chat, we’re going to be talking about moving beyond the Arduino ecosystem.

Topics for this week’s Hack Chat will include embedded systems ecosystems, how to match processors to projects, choosing IDEs, programmers, and other tools, and actually shipping all those whizz-bang microcontroller projects out to eager buyers. We’re opening up the floor to all questions, so if you have something to add, here’s a spreadsheet to guide the discussion.

Here’s How To Take Part:

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Hack Chats are mostly, usually at noon, Pacific time on Friday. This week is no exception and everything is going down noon, PDT, Friday, September 8th. Are time zones confusing? Not a problem; here’s a handy countdown timer!

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: JavaScript On Microcontrollers

August 23, 2017 by 15 Comments

Microcontrollers today are much more powerful and much more capable than the 8051s from back in the day. Now, they have awesome peripherals and USB device interfaces. It’s about time a slightly more modern language was used to program these little chips.

During this Friday’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about JavaScript on microcontrollers. [Gordon Williams] will be joining us to talk about Espruino. This is a tiny JavaScript interpreter that runs on the little embedded chips, has a debug interface, and allows you to program your board on any platform without any external programming hardware.

[Gordon] is the key developer of Espruino, and so far he’s launched a full-sized Espruino, and a pico Espruino on Kickstarter, both with amazing success. The software stack has been extremely popular as well — it’s been ported to the ESP8266 and dozens of other microcontrollers that will soon be in the Internet of Things.

During the Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing interpreted languages on microcontrollers, interpreter design and optimization, with a special emphasis on creating devices with Espruino and putting Espruino boards on the Internet with WiFi, Bluetooth, and other crazy radios. As always, we have a spreadsheet open to everyone if you’d like to ask a question.

Here’s How To Take Part:

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. Hack Chats are mostly, usually, and this week noon, Pacific time on Friday. Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

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: Graphical Programming Languages With Boian Mitov

August 16, 2017 by 34 Comments

There is a long history of Visual or Graphical Programming Languages, and most of them make more sense than the name of Microsoft’s Visual Basic, C#, and Visual Studio IDE. 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. Everything from the Arduino to Teensy, ESP8266, ESP32, the chipKIT, and Maple Mini are supported with this IDE. It’s a simple drag-and-drop way of programming microcontrollers that Scratches an itch (see what I did there?) for an easy way to introduce non-programmers to the embedded world and also provides a faster way to build custom applications.

When it comes to graphical programming languages, we can’t find a better Hack Chat guest than [Boian]. He’s the author of the OpenWire dataflow processing technology — another graphical programming language –, the IGDI+ library, VideoLab, SignalLab, AudioLab, PlotLab, InstrumentLab, and author of VCL for Visual C++. He’s a regular contributor to Blaise Pascal Magazine, too.

During this Hack Chat, we’ll be discussing what makes Visual Programming worth it, how and why it works, when it doesn’t and how to develop a graphical programming language. Visuino will be of special interest, And I’m sure someone will work in a, ‘what’s happening with Max/MSP under Ableton’ question. If you have a question for [Boian], here’s a question sheet to guide the discussion.

Here’s How To Take Part:

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will take place at noon Pacific time on Friday, August 11th. Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

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: Crypto Challenge

August 9, 2017 by 2 Comments

It’s the middle of August, and that means all the hackers are back from DEF CON, safe in their hoodies, with memories of smoke-filled casinos, interesting talks, and, most importantly, crypto challenges.

This year was an ‘off’ year for DEF CON. There was an official badge, but it wasn’t electronic (which no one expected), and there was no crypto challenge (which no one saw coming). Nevertheless, there was already a vibrant community of badge builders, and the crypto nerds of DEF CON were satisfied by PCB locks from the Crypto and Privacy village, Benders, and Darknet phone dials this year.

How were these crypto challenges constructed? That’s the subject of this week’s Hack Chat. This Friday, we’re going to be sitting down with a member of DEF CON’s Crypto and Privacy village on how these curious codes are constructed, how a winner is determined, and the techniques used to solve these challenges.

This week, we’ll be talking about how crypto challenges actually work, how to put crypto in firmware, on laser-engraved acrylic plates, and in silkscreen on a PCB. We’ll be talking about how crypto challenges are created, and how you solve them. Special attention will be paid to testing a crypto challenge; that is, how do you make sure it’s solvable when you already know how to solve it?

Although this Hack Chat is only going to last an hour, there’s no possible way we could cover all the tips, tricks, and techniques of creating a crypto challenge in that time. If you’d like some further reading, [L0sT] showed up at our 10th anniversary party to tell us he created the puzzles for DEF CON over the last few years.

Here’s How To Take Part:

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will take place at noon Pacific time on Friday, August 11th. Don’t know when the Earth’s sun will be directly overhead? Here’s a time and date converter!

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

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