Tomorrow Night: HDDG 40, Mechanical And Electronic Ephemera

June 19, 2019 by Brian Benchoff No comments

For the last several years, we’ve hosted a series of meetups for the Bay Area. This week is no different and we’re pleased to announce the fortieth Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic. It’s this Thursday, June 20th, in downtown San Francisco.

The Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic is our monthly IRL meetup, where we ask hardware developers what makes their thing tick. We’ve done dozens of these things, and for those of you in Internet-land, all the talks are available online. Even if you’re not in the Bay Area, all the talks are live streamed. Yes, you too can participate in the event, even if you’re not going to physically attend! It’s an amazing technology called ‘the Internet’ that combines real life with virtual being! It’s like [William Gibson] created some sort of virtual/hyperspace interface.

For this month’s talks, we’ll be joined by Embedded Ninja Shaun Meehan. Shaun has previously given talks that answer the question, what happens when the majority of your work blows up on the Antares space accident? You turn around and get some of your second string units on the next SpaceX launch (9 days later)! Shaun will be talking about his two 300kg robotic arms, FRED & LEFTY, and the project of replacing their 1987 era controllers. This talk includes high power electronics, FPGAs, fixed point algorithms, galvanic isolation, transistor matching, splitting transistors in half, strange position sensors, homemade 3-phase 480 in a garage, and freight LTL shipping.

The live stream for the talks will be available here. Of course, if you can make it to downtown San Francisco (a few blocks south of the Powell Muni/BART stop) we’d be happy to see you. It all goes down Thursday, July 20th, at 6:30 PM.

Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic Call For Talks

February 5, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Hackaday is known for having the best community around, and we prove this all the time. Every month, we hold meetups across the United States. This, in addition to conferences and mini-cons across the globe mean Hackaday is the premiere venue for technical talks on a wide variety of hardware creation. Everything from Design for Manufacturing, to the implementation of blinky bling is an open topic.

Now, we’re looking for the talk you can give. The Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic is a monthly gathering hosted by Supplyframe, the Overlords of Hackaday. It’s filled with the technical elite of San Francisco, usually held on the last Thursday of the month. We’re looking for a talk you can give, whether it’s about your IoT irrigation system, or that time you created something out of transistors and capacitors. We’re looking for speakers for all of 2019, and if you have a tale of the trials and tribulations of injection molding or Bluetooth pairing, we want to hear from you.

We have a sign-up form for presenters, and if you have something to present to a group of fantastic, technical people, we want to hear from you. All these talks are streamed and recorded, so if you’d like an idea of what we’re going for, just check out some of the previous talks. We have talks on how to start a decentralized space agency, wearable technology and fashion, optics and FPGAs, and System-in-Package tech. We’ve got a speaker travel stipend of up to $300, so there’s no excuse for you not to present your latest work.

There are thousands of people in the Hackaday community that have tons to contribute, and this is your chance. You are the best of the best, and we want to hear what you have to teach the rest of the community.

Electronics That Can Handle The Pressure

June 9, 2017 by Inderpreet Singh 11 Comments

Deep-sea exploration is considered as a relatively new area of research and the electronics involved has to be special in order to survive some of the deepest parts of the ocean. Pressure Tolerant Electronics is a new subject and has its own challenges as explained by [Nic Bingham] of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

[Nic Bingham] was one of the speakers at the Supplyframe office for ‘The Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic’ held April 20th 2017. His talks was based on his experience with ambient-pressure electronics and autonomous solar-diesel power plants at the Antarctic plateau. Due to high pressures at large depths, the selection of components becomes critical. Low density components such as electrolytic capacitors have either air or fluids which are susceptible to compression under water and prone to damage. Since pressure tolerance is not part of most datasheet figures, component selection becomes difficult and subject to prior testing.

There are other challenges as well as [Nic Bingham] explains that revolve around the procurement of special parts as well as spare for older components. In his whitepaper, [Nic Bingham] chalks out everything from the development process to different testing methodologies and even component selection for such applications.

A video of his talk is worth a watch along with the nice writeup by [Chris Gammell] on his first hand experience of the lecture. For those who are looking for something on a budget, the underwater glider project is a good start. Continue reading “Electronics That Can Handle The Pressure” →

Hackaday Links: May 14, 2017

May 14, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Maker Faire Bay Area is next weekend, and you know what that means: we’re having a meetup on Saturday night. If you’re in the area, it’s highly recommended you attend. It’s a blinky bring-a-hack with booze. You can’t beat it. I heard the OPShark is showing up. All hail the OPShark. You’re gonna want to RSVP if you’re going k thx.

It only took twelve years, but [ladyada] finally got herself on the cover of Make.

Nvidia has the Jetson, an extremely powerful single board computer + GPU meant for machine learning, imagifying, and robotics applications. If you want to do fancy ML stuff with low power devices, I’d highly recommend you check the Jetson out. Of course, the Jetson is only the brains of any Machine Learning robot; you also need some muscle. To that end, Nvidia released the Isaac robotic simulator. It’s a simulator for standard bits of hardware like quadcopters, hovercrafts (?), robotic arms, and yes, selfie drones. What does this mean? Standardized hardware means someone is going to produce 3rd party hardware, and that’s awesome.

This is just an observation, but fidget spinners are just now hitting the mainstream. We didn’t know what they were for a year ago, and we don’t know now.

A Hebocon is a shitty robot battle. DorkbotPDX just had their first Hebocon and the results were… just about as shitty as you would expect. Since this is a shitty robot battle, a MakerBot made an appearance. This robot, SpitterBot, was designed to blow extruded filament all over its opponent. Did the MakerBot win? Yes, SpitterBot won the ‘Poorest Quality’ award.

Supplyframe, Hackaday’s parent company, hosts monthly-ish electronic get-togethers in the San Fransisco office. The focus of these meetups is to find someone cool who built something awesome and get them to talk about it. The March meetup featured [Pete Bevelacqua] who built a Vector Network Analyzer from scratch. The video is worth a watch.

Hackaday Links: March 29, 2015

March 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Every once in a while, the Hackaday Overlords have a Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic in San Francisco. Last week was #06 featuring [Mike Estee] from Othermill and Hackaday writer [Joshua Vasquez] talking about synthesizing an SPI slave in an FPGA. Video here.

It’s no secret that [Fran] is building a DSKY – the part of the Apollo guidance computer that was on-screen in Apollo 13. It’s time for a project update, and here’s where she stands: if anyone has a source of JAN-spec Teledyne 420 or 422-series magnetic latching relays (they’re in a TO-5 package), contact [Fran]. The backplane connector has been identified; it’s a Teradyne I/O 100 series connector with a 120mil spacing. Contact [Fran] if you know where to get them.

Let’s say you want a carbon fiber quadcopter frame. What’s the most reasonable thing you can do? 3D print a CNC machine, obviously. That’s a 200mm FPV racer cut from 1mm and 3mm carbon fiber sheets, but the real story here is the CNC machine. It’s a PortalCyclone, and even the cable chains are 3D printed.

What does an AMOLED display look like up close? Pretty cool, actually. That’s 20x magnification, and it’s not a Bayer filter. Can anyone fill us in on the reason for that?

Laser cutters are tricky if you want to do grayscale or half tones. [oni305] made an Inkscape extension to generate better GCode for engraving with a laser cutter.

19″ racks have no dimensions that are actually 19″. Also 2x4s aren’t 2 inches by four inches. Somehow, a 2×4 server rack works.