Hack Chat

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Friday Hack Chat: PCB Manufacturing

August 2, 2017 by 4 Comments

There’s a world of difference between building one of something and building multiples of something. The effort that goes into manufacturing does not scale linearly, and manufacturing is a skill in itself. This Friday, we’re going to be talking all about PCB manufacturing and assembly over on Hackaday.io

On deck for this Hack Chat will be [Jonathan Hirschman], the brains behind PCB:NG, a turnkey electronics manufacturing startup based around NYC. Jonathan is a self-taught hardware guy, proficient in PCB layout, 3D CAD, and manufacturing tech. PCB:NG is, essentially, taking oldskool manufacturing and making it into more of a digital process. PCB:NG makes it easy for anyone to get their designs manufactured, and to do it in the most cost-effective manner.

What is this Hack Chat going to be about? We’re going to talk about how to get started in PCB creation. What is the the best tool for the job? What is the best tool that doesn’t cost as much as a car? What are the pros and cons of each tool, and what should you know about RF before designing a board that blinks a LED?

This isn’t a Hack Chat that’s just about PCBs, though. We’re also going to be talking about manufacturing. Specifically, design for manufacturing, how to panelize boards, what happens when you forget fiducials, how to keep your designs cheap to manufacture, what happens when you put SMD components on both sides of a board.

We’re taking questions from everyone, so feel free to add something to the question sheet for the discussion.

We’re Looking For Hack Chat Hosts!

If PCB manufacturing and design isn’t your thing — or even if it is — we’re on the lookout for Hack Chat hosts. If you have some expertise in an area, give us a ring. We’ve already had a few chats with Raspberry Pi engineers, one of the brilliant people behind the ESP32, a talk on ASIC design for mixed signal oscilloscopes, and high-end audio amplifiers. We’re taking all callers, and if you have something you’d like to share with the community, send us an email. I would like to mention that it’s Burner season, and a few chats with the artists on the playa would be great, especially if they can tell us how to move the fuselage of a 747 a few hundred miles.

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 4th. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? 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: Crowd Supply

July 26, 2017 by 8 Comments

Crowdfunding is a mixed bag, at best. On one hand, you have fantastically successful products like Pebble, Oculus, and the Kano personal computer that managed to take in money, turn out a product, and become a successful company. (If even just for a while, the Pebble was great.) On the other hand, you have obvious scams like a color-picking pen that are run by a literal Nigerian scammer.

Crowd Supply is different. Unlike other crowdfunding platforms, to get on Crowd Supply you’ll need a working prototype. Where other platforms can measure their success by how many campaigns were successfully funded, and how many of those campaigns successfully delivered rewards to backers, I’m not aware of any Crowd Supply campaigns that have ever failed completely.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’ll be talking with [Josh Lifton], CEO of Crowd Supply. Topics will include determining if there’s a market for your product, the ins and outs of fulfillment, to shipping your product. We’re taking questions from the community, and there’s a question sheet we’ll be reading from.

Josh has a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and holds a BA in physics and mathematics from Swarthmore College. Prior to Crowd Supply, Josh worked in a variety of technology settings, from instrumenting thousands of audience members with custom wearable computers for a Cirque du Soleil performance to, most recently, serving as head of engineering at Puppet Labs.

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, July 28th. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? 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: Making Electronics For Education

July 19, 2017 by 5 Comments

For this week’s Hack Chat on Hackaday.io, we’ll be talking with AnnMarie Thomas about making electronics for education. There’s a huge intersection between electronics and education, and whether you’re designing robots for a FIRST team or designing a geometry curriculum around 3D-printed objects, there’s a lot electronics can teach students.

AnnMarie Thomas is an associate professor at the School of Engineering and the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas. She’s the founder of the Playful Learning Lab, and along with her students she’s created Squishy Circuits. AnnMarie is the author of Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation. Basically, if you’re looking for someone who knows how to make an educational product, you can’t do any better.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’ll be talking about how to define how technology and education can intersect. There are ways to define a concept, build and sell an educational product, and how to find a market for a product. If you’ve ever wanted to know what goes into getting students to dive into electronics, this is the Hack Chat you have to sit in on.

Oh, AnnMarie is also a judge for this year’s Hackaday Prize. Neat.

Also on deck for this week’s Hack Chat will be Tindie. Tindie is Supplyframe’s (Hackaday’s parent company) answer to the question, ‘where should I sell my hardware product’. Think of it as ‘Etsy for electronics’, but with less furniture made out of pallet wood, but paradoxically more products that require a California prop 65 warning. Isn’t electronics fun?

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, July 21st. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? 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: A Design Slam Challenge

July 5, 2017 by 5 Comments

Every Friday, the Hackaday.io community gathers ’round the fireplace and discusses the challenges facing the world. This is the Hack Chat, and in previous incarnations, we’ve talked about custom silicon, Arduinos, PCB fabrication, old technologies, and hardware manufacturing.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re opening up a design challenge. We’re asking the community for help on developing a wireless position sensor. This is a Design Slam Hack Chat, and we’re looking for contributors.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Naveen Nair], technology leader for GE Fuse. We’ll be discussing position sensors during this Hack Chat. If you’ve ever used a mouse, you’re using a position sensor, but for this Hack Chat we’re designing something a little more challenging. The Fuse group is attempting to build a low-cost, wireless position sensor with hand-held ultrasonic inspection units. Why is GE interested in this technology? Our guess is inspecting jet turbines, or something like that. That doesn’t mean low-cost wireless position sensors wouldn’t have other applications, though. Just imagine what a quadcopter could do if it could sense its position with 1mm resolution.

Won’t be able to make the Hack Chat? Don’t worry, we’ll be putting a transcript up here sometime after the event.

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, July 7th. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? 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: Electronics Design And Naming A Puppy

June 14, 2017 by 40 Comments

For one reason or another, Hackaday has an extended family of ridiculously capable contributors. One of the most illustrious is [Bil Herd], Commodore refugee, electronic engineer, medic, and all-around awesome guy. He’ll be joining us over on Hackaday.io this Friday for a Hack Chat on Electronics Design.

This Friday, we’re hosting a Hack Chat with [Bil]. If you want to talk Commodore, this is the guy. If you want to talk about PLAs and programmable digital logic, this is the guy. If you want to know how to build a system from scratch in just a few months, [Bil]’s your man. [Bil] has decades of experience and his design work was produced by the millions. You’ll rarely come across someone with as much experience, and he’ll be in our Hack Chat this Friday.

[Bil] has a long career in electronics design, beginning with fixing CB radios and televisions back when fixing TVs was still a thing. Eventually, he worked his way up the engineering ladder at Commodore Business Machines where he designed the Commodore TED machines and the amazing Commodore 128.

After surviving Commodore, [Bil] has worked at a trauma center in Camden, NJ, flown with medics in the Army, and eventually came over to Hackaday where he produces videos from subjects ranging from direct digital synthesis, programmable logic, active filters, and how CMOS actually works. Basically, if it involves electronics, [Bil] knows what’s up.

Oh, as an added bonus, we get to name a puppy this week. [Bil] got a new puppy and it needs a name. Send in your suggestions!

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, June 16th. Confused about where and when ‘noon’ is? 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: 8-Bit Micros With Microchip

June 7, 2017 by 20 Comments

A few years ago, Microchip acquired Atmel for $3.56 Billion. There are plenty of manufacturers of 8-bit microcontrollers, but everyone makes 8051s, and the MSP430 isn’t as popular as it should be. Microchip’s acquisition of Atmel created what is probably the largest manufacturer of 8-bit micros, with a portfolio ranging from ATtinys smaller than a grain of rice to gigantic PICs.

This Friday, we’re hosting a Hack Chat with the Technical Marketing Engineer of 8-bitters at Microchip. If you love AVR, this is the guy to talk to. If you’re still rocking the vintage 1993 PICkit, this is the guy to talk to.

On the docket for this Hack Chat are some new PICs and some very interesting peripherals coming down the line. ADCC — A2D with computation — is on the table, along with configurable logic cells. This Hack Chat is also going to go over Microchip design tools like MP Lab Xpress.

Of course, these Hack Chats are a question and answer session for the community. We’re encouraging everyone to ask a few questions about what Microchip is doing. We’ve opened up a discussion guide for this Hack Chat. If you have a question, just add it to the list.

If you can’t make the Hack Chat, don’t worry. We’re going to have a transcript of the entire chat. That should be available here shortly after the chat concludes.

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, June 9th. Here’s a fancy time and date converter if you need timezone help.

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: Audio Systems

May 31, 2017 by 6 Comments

Join us this Friday for a Hack Chat on Audio Systems. It’s going down June 2 at noon PDT (handy time zone converter thing).

Every Friday, we gather round the campfire with the best in the business to tease out whatever secrets are stored in their mind. This is the Hack Chat, and this week, we’re going to be talking about audio systems with [Dafydd Roche]. Bring your low-distortion volume knobs and porcelain speaker cable risers, this is going to be a good one.

[Dafydd] got his start in electronics in an application for a music degree. He mentioned he’d built a few guitar pedals, which landed him a call from the electronics department at York University. They told him he was a terrible musician, but that he might excel at electronics.

Many years later he’s still going strong with audio applications with Expat Audio, manufacturers of fine preamps. [Dafydd] is also the Audio Strategic Marketing Manager at Dialog, and spends his days arguing with engineers and doing his best to solve customer problems. [Dafydd] has been on The Amp Hour, and has published articles on audio systems.

For this Hack Chat, we’re going to be running the gamut of audio, electronics, and small business. The questions on audio mythbusting are sure to entertain, and we’ll also be discussing audio signal chains and small business production. Bring your questions and put them on the 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.

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