RPi Show And Tell Saturday And NYC Meetup On Monday

October 20, 2016 by Brian Benchoff No comments

Join Hackaday for the vanguard of cool emerging technologies next week at our meetup in New York.

Like all our meetups, we’ve gathered some of the neatest technologists to spill the beans on what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Madison Maxey, founder of Loomia and designer of soft, blinky circuits will be there. Dr. Ellen Jorgensen, co-founder and executive director of Genspace, the citizen science biotech ‘hackerspace’ in the heart of New York will be there too. Kari Love & Matthew Borgatti of Super-Releaser, most famous for their super cute pneumatic soft robots will also be there. It’s still up in the air if we’ll be racing these robots. Of course there will also be opportunities for you to present a lightning talk at the meetup.

The meetup will be at Pivotal Labs, 625 Ave of the Americas, on Monday, October 24 starting at 6:30 PM. An RSVP is required, so if you’re coming head on over to the Meetup page.

Live Video Show and Tell on Saturday

This Saturday join us online for a special show and tell all about Raspberry Pi projects from 7-8p EDT (UTC-4). Hosted by Limor Fried of Adafruit and Sophi Kravitz from Hackaday. This live show is hosted on our YouTube channel and will feature projects from our giant collection of Raspberry Pi projects on Hackaday.io and entries in the Enlightened Raspberry Pi contest.

A lot of people have already signed up for the Show and Tell but we do still have some time left for your project. Email sophi@hackaday.com to get on the list.

Pi Zero HackChat With Lady Ada

December 2, 2015 by Mike Szczys 104 Comments

This Thursday, December 3rd, join us for a Live HackChat about the Raspberry Pi Zero with special guest [Limor Fried]. You may know [Limor] as [Lady Ada], the founder of Adafruit Industries. Adafruit has been on the forefront of the Pi Zero release. The $5 single board computer was announced one week ago by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Join in the chat to discuss the Raspberry Pi Zero. Limor has done a lot of work with the board already, including hacking analog audio back into the form factor. This is a great opportunity to ask questions, talk about your own plans for the hardware, and to find collaborators for future projects.

Pi Zero HackChat starts Thursday at 5pm PST (here’s a timezone cheat sheet if you need it). Participating in this live chat is very simple. Those who are already part of the Hacker Channel can simply click on the Team Messaging button. If you’re not part of the channel, just go to the hacker Channel page, scroll to the bottom of the “TEAM” list in the left sidebar and click “Request to join this project”.

HackChat takes place in the Hacker Channel every few weeks and is a friendly place to talk about engineering and the projects you’re working on.

Judge Spotlight: Limor “Ladyada” Fried

June 24, 2014 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

We sent off a list of questions, just like every week, and [Ladyada] offered to do a video response. How awesome is that? Not only did she answer our questions, but she talked at length for several of them. We’re biased, but her explanation about Adafruit’s manufacturing processes and options for home hackers to get boards spun was a real treat.

Perhaps we should step back for a minute though. In case you don’t know [Limor Fried], aka [Ladyada], is a judge for The Hackaday Prize which will award a trip into space and hundreds of other prizes for hackers who build connected devices that use Open Design (Open Hardware and Open Source Software). She’s the founder of Adafruit Industries, an MIT double-grad, and all around an awesome engineer!

Check out the video after the break. We’ve included a list of the questions and the timestamps at which they are answered.

Continue reading “Judge Spotlight: Limor “Ladyada” Fried” →

[Ladyada’s] Thoughts On Quick-turn And Small-run PCB Houses

June 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

So you’ve mastered your PCB layout software, and it’s time to make the board. But if you don’t want to etch your own you’ve got to decided where to have it fabricated. There’s a slew of services out there, most of which you cannot afford, but the short list of those you can is still pretty long. We think this set of PCB fabrication house reviews will help you make your choice.

[Ladyada] — aka [Limor Fried] — knows what she’s talking about. She owns Adafruit Industries and has done the lion’s share of designing the many kits and items they sell. If you’re going to charge money for something it better work right, and that involves lots of prototypes. But even if you don’t need a quick turn-around or numerous testing boards the post is helpful as she also covers some of the batch producers we’re already familiar with. These include DorkBot PDX and BatchPCB to name a couple.

[via Reddit]

Wattcher, Twittering Kill A Watt Plans Posted

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

You probably saw [Phillip Torrone] and [Limor Fried]’s twittering Kill A Watt earlier this week. It was an entry in the Core77/Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We saw a little bit about how it was assembled, but now they’ve posted a full guide to assembling the hardware. Each Kill A Watt gets an XBee radio that transmits back to a receiver that logs the power usage. The difficult part when putting this design together was the XBee required 50mA when transmitting. This is well above the Kill A Watt’s internal power supply. They remedied this by adding a 10,000uF supercap to act as a rechargeable battery. The daily twittering is just a side-effect of the project. The Kill A Watts transmit every 2 seconds, so you’ll get a very accurate report of your power usage. This is a great project for renters who can’t permanently modify their power infrastructure. Each Kill A Watt can support quite a few appliances since they’re rated for 15A, ~1800W.