Friday Hack Chat: Perfect Purple PCBs

Every Friday, we gather ’round the hot air gun over on Hackaday.io, invite some cool people over, and get them to talk about what they do. This is the Hack Chat. It’s become a tradition, and already we’ve had a ton of awesome people walk through our doors.

This Friday, we’re going to sit down with the purveyors of perfect purple PCBs. Over the last decade or so, a lot has changed in the space of small-run PCB production. Ten years ago, PCBs were expensive, and it wouldn’t be abnormal to spend hundreds of dollars on a small run of tiny boards. Now, The DEF CON 24 badge, in a panel are cheaper than ever, giving industrious hardware creators access to professional quality manufacturing at a fraction of the price seen just a few years ago.

For the last few years, OSH Park has been a mainstay of low-volume PCB fabrication. Their website is as simple as it gets: Upload some Gerbers, an Eagle board file, or a KiCad PCB, press a few buttons, and in a week or so you’ll have a perfect purple PCB in your mailbox.

This week, we’re inviting [Drew Fustini] and [Dan Sheadel] to talk about what OSH Park does, how they became the first place that comes to mind when you need a PCB. They’ll explain why the boards are purple, environmental regulations for PCB manufacturing in the US, shared projects and tips and tricks for creating the perfect board.

What would you like to see from a PCB supplier? Would you like to see OSH Park expand further into their burgeoning Pog business? How about a sticker club? Who would win in a fight, a blue robot dog or a purple robot shark? All these questions and more will be answered; if you have a question for the OSH Park team, drop it in this spreadsheet.

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 23rd. 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

Look What Showed Up For Bring-A-Hack At OSH Park

Hackaday was in Portland last weekend for the Open Hardware Summit. I did a brief recap earlier this week but this post has been on my mind the entire time. The night before the summit, OSH Park (the Purveyors of Perfect Purple PCBs which we all know and love) hosted a Bring-A-Hack at their headquarters. [Laen] knows how to throw a party — with a catered spread and open bar which all enjoyed. The place was packed with awesome hackers, and everyone had something amazing to show off.

In fact, there were far too many people showing off hardware for me to capture all in one evening. But join me after the jump for six or seven examples that really stuck out.

Continue reading “Look What Showed Up For Bring-A-Hack At OSH Park”

Hackaday In Portland This Week For Open Hardware Summit

We’ve been trying fit in a tour of the Pacific Northwest for a couple of years now. This week is a perfect excuse. Hackaday is proud to sponsor the Open Hardware Summit which will be held in Portland this Friday!

Hackaday believes in the free and open sharing of information and ideas. Open Hardware has far-reaching benefits that help to educate and inspire current and future generations of hardware developers. Open Hardware also works toward making difficult and important advancements in the state of the art available to people who have the skills and interest to incorporate them in their own work.

This is why we built Hackaday.io, the world’s largest repository of Open Hardware. It’s also why we support the Open Hardware Summit, which brings together the Open Hardware community to discuss what it means to be Open Source Hardware and how to encourage the incorporation of those ideals into new products and projects.

Tindie and Supplyframe are also sponsoring the OHS. Tindie is, of course, the best place to find bleeding edge hardware sold by the designers themselves. Tindie supports Open Hardware licenses and seeks to provide the best marketplace for products and their creators. Supplyframe creates cutting edge tools for engineers to build better. This year they launched the Supplyframe Design Lab which is packed with high-end rapid prototyping tools and staffed by a resident engineer; the lab unlocks the ability to turn great ideas into prototypes that can be followed all the way through to production and product. The goal is to unite all the things necessary to make great open hardware happen.

Bring a Hack at OSH Park

There will be a ton of Hackaday, Tindie, and Supplyframe staff at Open Hardware Summit, make sure you stop by our tables, say hello, and grab some swag. But of course we want to see the hardware hacks that you’ve been working on. There are a couple of different opportunities to track down [Brian Benchoff] and [Mike Szczys] who will be on the lookout for hacks to cover in our articles.

On Thursday night we’ll be at OSH Park Headquarters for their Bring A Hack party. There will also be a hardware hangout on Friday to close the day long Summit. We want to see what you’ve been building so don’t be shy!

OSH Park Reintroduces Pogs

Remember Pogs? They’re back, in OSH Park form!

Some of you might be too young to remember, but the 90s were weird. If you need an example of this, you need only look at pogs. This was a schoolyard game using small cardboard discs and metal or plastic ‘slammers’. To play, stack the cardboard pogs, throw a slammer at the stack, and collect all the pogs that land face up. Of course, each cardboard pog was printed with full-color glossy pop culture images and were as collectible as comic books and baseball cards. The Bart Simpson ‘Public Enemy #1’ pog is highly prized. You could trade a pack of dunkaroos for three holofoils. I’m still looking for Animaniacs #27; my set is otherwise complete.

OSH Park0x07For the past few years, OSH Park, purveyors of perfect purple PCBs, put purple stickers into purple padded envelopes in each order. These stickers weren’t really anything special – just a rectangle with one rounded off corner, a gear, and the OSH Park URL. A few months ago, [Laen] at OSH Park ditched these plain purple stickers for something that taps into the same sentiment as the Apollo 13 pogs distributed through Hardee’s kids meals that included a modular Saturn V-shaped pog case and an aluminum slammer embossed on the obverse side with the Apollo 13 mission patch.

OSH Park’s newest stickers are numbered, limited edition, and feature unique artwork for each sticker in the series. They’re also hexagons, allowing anyone to tessellate their love for OSH Park all across their laptop. These are the OSHexagons, OSH Park’s newest stickers. Right now, [Laen] is drawing up and releasing about one design per month, with seven stickers out so far. Holding fast to OSH Park’s ideal of open standards, the OSHexagons utilize the Open Sticker Standard (yes, there is a standard for everything), making these stickers a regular hexagon that can be inscribed in a circle two inches in diameter.

The rare 0x03 OSHexagon from @sync_channel
The rare 0x03 OSHexagon from @sync_channel

While most of these stickers have runs in the thousands, OSH Park pulled a page from the history of pog and introduced a very speciallimited edition OSHexagon. Only 500 of the beautiful purple and gold 0x03 stickers were produced, making these collectors items equal in stature to the famous zinc alloy Austin 3:16 pog slammer.

As far as marketing goes, giving away a sticker with every order is pretty standard. The Hackaday Store includes a die-cut Jolly Wrencher with every order, but we order thousands of these every few months for events and shows. OSHexagon 0x03’s limited production turns it into an object to be cherished – coveted, even – that is easily digested by the gaping maw of fringe electronics trade journals and blogs. It’s a tour de force of marketing not seen since the 90s.

What’s next for OSH Park? If we’re following 90s trends and fads, you would think Beanie Babies would be next. Luckily, they already have that covered.

$50k In Play: Thirty Projects Will Win Custom PCBs This Week

This week we’re giving away $1500 in OSH Park codes to thirty different projects. Submit your project to the 2015 Hackaday Prize now!

$50,000 over the next 17 weeks!

official-submission-flagFor each of the last four weeks we’ve awarded prize packages to three projects just for submitting ideas. Now it’s time to crank up the rewards. Over the next 17 weeks we will give away $50,000 in prizes. We’re kicking off the week by giving $50 OSH Park codes to 30 different projects.

Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. This year’s prizes total half a million dollars, with a trip into space for the Grand Prize winner and $100,000 for the Best Product prize. Sitting this one out would be a huge mistake!

You need to post your project on Hackaday.io and officially submit it to the 2015 Hackaday Prize, which means clicking the “Submit-To” button on the left sidebar of your entry (shown below). You can confirm that you’re in the running by looking for the 2015 Hackaday Prize logo on your project gallery picture. Here you can see [castvee8] has submitted the Binary fuel tank, do you think it’s ready for a custom PCB?

Make it OfficialTo give yourself the best chance at winning, publish a new project log this week that outlines the PCB work your want to do for the entry. We’ll be looking for those as we judge the prizes that are most ready to begin (or advance) their hardware build.

OSH Park offers double-layer boards for $5 per square-inch and you get 3 copies of the board with shipping included. This $50 prize will land you quite a bit of board space. Get started now, you need to have your projects submitted by the morning of Wednesday, April 29th.


The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

HaDuino: Open Your Beer Using Arduino

Frankly we’re tired of Arduino having a bad name here at Hackaday. So [Brian Benchoff] came up with a way to make it useful to a wider audience. His creation, which we call the HaDuino, lets you use the Arduino clone to open a tasty bottle of beer.

Continue reading “HaDuino: Open Your Beer Using Arduino”

Fail Of The Week: Smoking Pulse Sensor And BLE Disappointment

fotw-ble-and-pulse-sensor

We think [Thomas Brittain] is onto something. We often post to our personal blogs so that we have a reference to how we did something. But he also keeps a long post that documents his abandoned projects. It ends up serving as a quick start if he ever decides to pick up the torch once again. Lucky for us he’s included his failures in the write up. This Fail of the Week features the top two posts on his Incomplete Works page. The first is an attempt to make his own pulse sensor. The second is a miserable experience with a cheap Bluetooth Low Energy module.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Smoking Pulse Sensor And BLE Disappointment”