Open Hardware Summit

18 Articles

Hackaday’s Open Hardware Summit Experience

October 12, 2017 by 6 Comments

Last week was the Open Hardware Summit in Denver Colorado. This yearly gathering brings together the people and businesses that hold Open Hardware as an ideal to encourage, grow, and live by. There was a night-before party, the summit itself which is a day full of talks, and this year a tour of a couple very familiar open hardware companies in the area.

I thought this year’s conference was quite delightful and am happy to share with you some of the highlights.

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Hackaday Links: October 8, 2017

October 8, 2017 by 40 Comments

On the top of the popcorn pile for this weekend is an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit that was offered without comment or commentary. [Lady Ada] is holding some sort of fancy incorporation papers for Radio Shack. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought these at the Radio Shack auction a month or so ago. The speculation is that Adafruit just bought Radio Shack, or at least the trademarks and other legal ephemera. Either one is cool, but holy crap please bring back the retro 80s branding.

A Rubik’s Cube is a fantastic mechanical puzzle, and if you’ve never taken one apart, oh boy are you in for a treat. Here’s an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube with not enough detail as to how each square is getting powered. Here’s an open challenge for anyone: build an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube, and Open Source the design.

Last weekend, the front fell off the engine of an Air France A380 flying over Greenland. As with all aircraft incidents, someone has to find the missing bits. It only took a week to find a mangled cowling on an ice sheet. This is incredibly impressive; if you want a comparison to another accident, it took three months to find the fan disk for UA 232 in an Iowa cornfield.

Poorly thought out Kickstarters don’t grab our attention like they used to, but this is an exception. The Aire is a mashup of one of those voice-activated home assistants (Alexa, whatever the Google one is named…) and a drone. The drone half of the build is marginally interesting as a ducted fan coaxial thingy, and building your own home assistant isn’t that hard with the right mics and a Raspberry Pi. The idea is actually solid — manufacturing is another story, though. It appears no one thought about how annoying it would be to have a helicopter following them around their house, or if the mics would actually be able to hear anyone over beating props. Here’s the kicker: this project was successfully funded. People want to buy this. A fool and his or her money…

Processing is cool, although we’re old skool and still reppin’ Max/MSP. It looks like the first annual Processing Community Day is coming up soon. The Processing Community Day will be at the MIT Media Lab on October 21st, with talks from the headliners of the Processing community.

Maker Faire NYC was two weekends ago, the TCT show in Birmingham was last week, and Open Hardware Summit was in Denver this weekend. Poor [Prusa] was at all of them, racking up the miles. He did, however, get to ride [James from XRobots.co.uk]’s electric longboard. There’s some great videos from [James] right here and here.

Speaking of Open Hardware Summit, there was a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot this Friday. The highlight? The biggest botfarm in the states, and probably the second largest in the world. That’s 155 printers, all in their own enclosures, in a room that’s kept at 80° F. They’re printing ABS. Control of the printers is through a BeagleBone running Octoprint. These ‘Bones and Octoprint only control one printer each, and there is no software layer ‘above’ the Octoprint instances for managing multiple printers simultaneously. That probably means the software to manage a botfarm doesn’t exist. There have been attempts, though, but nothing in production. A glove thrown down?

Open Hardware Summit This Thursday

October 4, 2017 by 9 Comments

This Thursday, Hackaday and Tindie are going to be rolling into Denver to attend the 2017 Open Hardware Summit.

What’s the big draw for the Open Hardware Summit? The attendees, of course. These are the people who make all the cool bits and bobs in Open Hardware. [Prusa] will be there, Seeed will be there, OSH Park and OSH Stencils will be there (yeah, they’re different companies), BeagleBoard will be there, and Great Scott Gadgets will be there. This is the place you want to be if you want to meet the heroes of Open Hardware.

Of special interest at the Open Hardware Summit this year will be the state of certification talk. Last year, a certification process for Open Hardware was started. If you’re not aware, this is a nearly intractable problem. Copyright covers design files, not implementation, and design patents only cover ornamental fluff on the stuff that actually makes things go. Creating a certification for Open Hardware is exponentially harder than arguing over an Open Source license, and we’re excited to see how the first year of the Open Hardware Certification went.

If you’re going and hanging around in Denver until Friday, there’s a road trip being planned by Sparkfun to visit the awesome companies along the Front Range. The itinerary includes a trip to Sparkfun, lunch at a brewery, and a trip to Lulzbot. Basically, Sparkfun rented a bus. The deadline to RSVP passed long ago, but I’m renting a van for the Hackaday and Tindie crew, and I’m sure there’s going to be some overflow. After the event on Thursday, there will be a Women Who Hack Dinner and Drinks. Hackaday’s evil overlords are graciously providing the drinks and appetizer there.

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Hackaday Links: October 1, 2017

October 1, 2017 by 37 Comments

Remember when you first saw a USB port in a standard wall outlet? It was a really great idea at the time, but how’s that 500mA charge holding up now? Fresh from a random press release, here’s a USB 3.0 wall outlet, with USB A and C ports. 5A @ 5V. Future proof for at least several years, I guess.

This is what you call ‘pucker factor’. An Air France A380 traveling from CDG to LAX suffered an uncontained engine failure somewhere over Greenland. Everyone on board is fine, except for the fact they had to spend the night in Goose Bay, Canada. Want the best Twitter/YouTube account of being a passenger? Here you go. Want to know why it landed in Goose Bay? This video is about ETOPS which really doesn’t apply in this instance but it’s a sufficient introduction to diverting airplanes after engine failures.

There are mysterious pylons going up alongside bridges and tunnels in NYC (auto-playing video). No one knows what they are, and the transportation board for New York is hiding behind a cloud of secrecy. We do know there are ‘fiber optics necessary for Homeland Security items’ inside, so place your bets. It’s facial recognition, or at the very least license plate readers. You know, exactly what New York and dozens of other cities have been doing for years.

Did somebody lose a balloon? A Raspberry Pi high-altitude balloon was found on the beach in south-west Denmark.

[Peter] is building an ultralight in his basement. We’ve covered the first part of the build, and we’ve been keeping tabs on him with semi-weekly updates. Now he’s fiberglassed the fuselage and started construction of the wings. Updates of note this week: he’s found a shop with an 8-foot CNC hot wire cutter for the wings. That really cuts down on the build time and it’s actually pretty cheap. One interesting part of this build is a ‘landing gear ejection system’, or a spring thing that allows the landing gear to fall away with the tug of a wire. Why would anyone want a landing gear ejection system? In case he needs to land in a soybean field. A flat bottom means a smoother and more survivable landing. If anyone is still concerned about [Peter]’s safety, this is a put up or shut up situation. Pitch in ten bucks for a parachute if you’re so concerned.

Hoverbike Kalashnikov! What? It’s a guy’s name. No big deal.

Open Hardware Summit is this week in Denver. What will be the highlights of the event? Well, last year, OSHWA announced the creation of an Open Hardware license. This is an all-encompassing license for Open Source Hardware that’s trying to solve some very, very hard problems. Copyright doesn’t work with hardware (except for boat hulls) like it does with software, and this Open Hardware license is the best we’ve got going for us. We’re going to get an update on how well this license is propagating. Also on deck for Summit attendees is a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot. Want to see the world’s second largest 3D printer bot farm? It’ll be awesome.

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Hackaday Links: September 10, 2017

September 10, 2017 by 4 Comments

Hackaday is 13! We’re going through a bit of a rebellious phase. There’s hair where there wasn’t hair before. Thirteen years ago (Sept. 5, 2004), [Phil Torrone] published the first Hackaday Post. [Phil] posted a great writeup of the history of Hackaday over on the Adafruit blog — we were saved from the AOL borg because of the word ‘hack’ — and interviewed the former and current editors of your favorite DIY website. Here’s to 13 more years and to [Phil] finding a copy of the first version of the Jolly Wrencher designed in Macromedia Flash.

Hackaday is having an unconference in the UK! Tickets for next weekend’s event went fast, but don’t worry — we’re hosting a Bring A Hack the day before.

Hurricanes are an awesome force of nature. As we learned from Harvey a week ago, livestreamed footage from the eyewall of a hurricane is fascinating. [Jeff Piotrowski] seems to be the streamer of choice. If you’re looking for something to gawk at, here you go.

Another burn is over, and I still have no idea how they moved the fuselage of a 747 from Palmdale to the playa.

You know we’re doing this whole Hackaday Prize thing where we’re giving a ton of money to people for creating cool hardware, right? We’re almost done with that. The last round of The Hackaday Prize is going on right now. The theme is anything goes, or rather there is no theme. The goal of this round is to build cool stuff. This round ends on October 16th, and yes, we’ll have the results for the Assistive Technologies round out shortly.

[Prusa] makes a lot of printers, and that means he needs to make a lot of parts to make a lot of printers. Obviously, a PTFE-cutting robot is the solution to this problem

October 5th is the Open Source Hardware Summit in Denver. Hackaday and Tindie are going, and it’s going to be a blast.  The location has moved in the last week — now it’s about half a mile away from the old venue. The speaker schedule is up, board nominations are open, and somewhere, someone is organizing a Lulzbot/Sparkfun booze cruise the day after the summit. I should be getting a van to add capacity to this trip, so if you’re interested leave a note in the comments.

Hackaday Links: March 5, 2017

March 5, 2017 by 8 Comments

Statistically, more celebrities died in 2016 than would be expected. 2017 is turning out to be a little better, but we did recently lose the great [Bill Paxton]. Game over, man. Game over. A few years ago, [Benheck] built his own pinball machine. It’s Bill Paxton Pinball. A great build, and worth revisiting, just like another viewing of Aliens and Apollo 13.

Some of the most popular 3D-printable objects are [flowalistik]’s low-poly Pokemon series. They’re great models, even though he missed the most obvious Pokemon. Of [flowalistik]’s low-poly Pokemon models, the Bulbasaur is a crowd favorite. Because this model is constructed from flat planes joined at an angle, it’s possible to make a huge low-poly Bulbasaur on a laser cutter or a CNC router. Go home Bulbasaur, you’re drunk. We are eagerly awaiting details on how this grass and poison-type tank was made.

For the last few months, [Matthew Cremona] has been building a huge bandsaw mill in his backyard. It’s built for cutting logs into lumber, and this thing is massive. He’s been posting build log videos for the last few months, but this week he’s finally gotten to where we want him to be: he’s cutting gigantic logs. In the coming weeks, he’s going to be cutting a maple crotch that’s 60 inches (1.5 meters) across.

It’s still a bit early, but here are the details for the 2017 Open Hardware Summit. It’s October 5th in Downtown Denver. If you want to speak at OHS, here you go. If you want to sponsor OHS, here you go. Tickets are over on Eventbrite.

What happens when you give away a new Raspberry Pi Zero W to the fifth caller? This. In other news, Adafruit somehow acquired a real New York City payphone. I’ve heard they were replacing these with WiFi hotspots, which means there are a ton of payphones in a warehouse somewhere? Can anyone hook us up?

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Hackaday Links: October 16, 2016

October 16, 2016 by 35 Comments

You need only look at the weekly user account leak from a popular web service or platform to know there’s a problem with security. Reusing passwords is the dumbest thing you can do right now, and the Mooltipass Mini is the answer to that problem. The Mooltipass originally began as a Developed on Hackaday series, and we log frequent sightings of the Multipass (maxi?) at security cons. The Mini is smaller, has exactly the same capability, and is completely unrepairable. It’s very cool, and if your email password is the same as your banking account passwords, you kind of need this yesterday.

Last weekend was the Open Hardware Summit in Portland. All the talks were worth watching, but editing the talks down into something sensible takes time. In lieu of this, OSHPark has gone through the livestream and timestamped everything

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