pcb

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These Wire Strippers Are Made From PCBs

April 13, 2019 by 12 Comments

The rise in cheap PCB fabrication has made old-school prototyping methods such as wire wrapping somewhat passé, but it still has its place. And if you’re going to wire wrap, you’re going to want a quick and easy way to strip that fine Kynar-insulated wire. So why not use PCB material to make this handy wire-wrapping wire stripper?

The tool that [danielrp] built is pretty simple – just a pair of razor blades held together so as to form a narrow slot to cut insulation while leaving the conductor untouched. The body of the tool is formed of two PCBs, between which the blades are sandwiched. [danielrp] designed the outline of the PCBs in DraftSight, then exported a DXF into EAGLE to make the Gerbers. The fabricated boards needed a little post-processing, including tapping the holes on one side to accept the screws that hold the tool together. We were surprised that FR4 took the threads at all, but it seems to work for this low-torque application. The disposable snap-type blades were sandwiched between the PCBs and the gap between them adjusted for nick-free stripping. The video below shows the design and build process.

We always appreciate homemade tools, and the fact that you can get a stack of PCBs for almost nothing makes us wonder what else we could use them for. We recently saw them used in a unique word clock, and even turned into a folding circuit sculpture.

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Hackaday Links: April 7, 2019

April 7, 2019 by 5 Comments

It’s April, which means all the people responsible for doubling the number of badges at DEF CON are hard at work getting their prototypes ready and trying to fund the entire thing. The first one out of the gate is Da Bomb, by [netik] and his crew. This is the same team that brought you the Ides of DEF CON badge, a blinky wearable multiplayer game that’s SPQR AF. Da Bomb is now a Kickstarter campaign to get the funding for the run of 500, and you’re getting a wearable badge filled with puzzles, Easter eggs, and a radio-based sea battle game that obviously can’t be called Battleship, because the navy doesn’t have battleships anymore.

Speaking of badges and various badge paraphernalia, there’s a new standard for add-ons this year. The Shitty Add-On V.1.69bis standard adds two pins and a very secure shrouded connector that solves all the problems of last year’s standard. [AND!XOR] just released a Shitty Brooch that powers all Shitty Add-Ons with a CR2032 battery. All the files are up on the Gits, so have fun.

You can 3D print anything if you don’t mind dealing with supports. But how to remove supports? For that [CCecil] has a great tip: use Chap stick. This is a print that used supports and it’s perfectly clean, right off the bed. By inserting a suspend (M600) command at the z-height of the top of the interface layer, then adding Chap stick on the top layer, everything comes off clean. Neat.

Speaking of 3D printing, here’s a project for anyone with the patience to do some serious modeling. It’s a pocket Soviet record player, although I think it’s more properly called a gramophone. It’s crank powered, so there’s a spring in there somewhere, and it’s entirely acoustic with zero electronics. Yes, you’re going to need a needle, but I’d be very interested in seeing somebody remake this using modern tools and construction materials.

Make Your Own MIDI Controller With An Arduino

April 6, 2019 by 10 Comments

Engineers create something out of nothing, and no where is this more apparent than in the creation of customized computer hardware. To make a simple MIDI controller, you need knowledge of firmware design and computer architecture, you need knowledge of mechanical design, and you need to know electronic design. And then you need the actual working knowledge and experience to wield a tool, be it a hammer, laser cutter, or an IDE. [Mega Das] brought together all of these skill to build a MIDI controller. Sure, it’s for bleeps and bloops coming out of a speaker, but take a step back and realize just how awesome it is that any one person could imagine, then implement such a device.

The electronics for this build include a printed circuit board that serves to break out the connections on an Arduino nano to a dozen arcade push buttons, four slide pots, two rotary pots, and a handful of screw terminals to connect everything together. Mechanically, this is a laser-cut box engraved with some fancy graphics and sized perfectly to put everything inside.

Yes, we’ve seen a lot of MIDI controllers built around the Arduino over the years, but this one is in a class by itself. This is taking off-the-shelf parts and customizing them to exactly what you want, and a prodigious example of what is possible with DIY hardware creation. You can check out the build video below.

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LEDs Shine Through PCB On This Tiny Word Clock

March 27, 2019 by 22 Comments

Everyone seems to love word clocks. Maybe it’s the mystery of a blank surface lighting up to piece together the time in fuzzy format, or maybe it hearkens back to those “find-a-word” puzzles that idled away many an hour. Whatever it is, we see a lot of word clock builds, but there’s something especially about this diminutive PCB word clock that we find irresistible.

Like all fun projects, [sjm4306] found himself going through quite the design process with this one. The basic idea – using a PCB as the mask for the character array – is pretty clever. We’ve always found the laser-cut masks to be wanting, particularly in the characters with so-called counters, those enclosed spaces such as those in a capital A or Q that would be removed by a laser cutter. The character mask PCB [sjm4306] designed uses both the copper and a black solder mask to form the letters, which when lit by the array of SMD LEDs behind it glow a pleasing blue-green color against a dark background. Try as he might, though, the light from adjacent cells bled through, so he printed a stand that incorporates baffles for each LED. The clock looks great and even has some value-added modes, such as a falling characters display a la The Matrix, a Pong-like mode, and something that looks a bit like Tetris. Check out the video below for more details.

We’ve seen word clocks run afoul of the counter problem before, some that solved it by resorting to a stencil font, others that didn’t. We’re impressed by this solution, though, enough so that we hope [sjm4306] makes the PCB files available so we can build one.

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Stuck Designing Two-Layer PCBs? Give Four Layers A Try!

March 27, 2019 by 44 Comments

Many readers are certainly familiar with the process for home-etching of PCBs: it’s considered very straightforward, if a little involved, today. This was not the case in my youth, when I first acquired an interest in electronics. At that time, etching even single-sided boards was for “advanced” hobbyists. By the time I started etching my own PCBs, the advanced hobbyists were on to double-sided home-etched boards — the only type not pictured above, because I couldn’t find the one successful example I ever created. I later saw the rise of “bare bones” fabricated PCBs: professionally made fixed size boards with plated-through holes, but no soldermask or silkscreen. Eventually, this gave way to the aggregating PCB services we have now with full two-layer boards, complete with soldermask and silkscreen.

Today, the “advanced” hobbyist may be using four-layer boards, although the four-layer adoption rate is still relatively low – OSH Park produces around 90% two-layer and 10% four-layer, for instance. I think this will inevitably increase, as has been the case with all the previous technologies: the advanced eventually becomes the mainstream. Each of the previous shifts has brought easier design and construction as well as improved performance, and the same will be true as four layers becomes more commonplace.

So, let’s take a look at designing four-layer PCBs. If you’ve never considered one for any of your designs, you may be pleasantly surprised at what little extra cost is involved for all the benefits you gain. Continue reading “Stuck Designing Two-Layer PCBs? Give Four Layers A Try!” →

Imitating Art In Life With A Reverse-Engineered Tattoo

March 23, 2019 by 6 Comments

In general, tattoo artists are not electrical engineers. That’s fine; the world needs both professions. But when you need a circuit designed, you’re better off turning to an EE rather than a tattoo artist. And you certainly don’t want an EE doing your new ink. Disaster lies that way.

Surprisingly, [Missa]’s tattoo of a heart-shaped circuit turned out at least to be plausible design, even if it’s not clear what it’s supposed to do. So her friend [Jeremy Elson] took up the challenge to create a circuit that looked like the tattoo while actually doing something useful. He had to work around the results of tattoo artistic license, like sending traces off to the board’s edge and stranding surface-mount components without any traces. The artist had rendered an 8-pin DIP device, albeit somewhat proportionally challenged, so [Jeremy] went with an ATtiny85, threw on a couple of SMD resistors and a cap, and placed two LEDs for the necessary blinkenlights. Most of the SMDs are fed from traces on the back of the board that resurface through vias, and a small coin cell hidden on the back powers it. One LED blinks “Happy Birthday [Missa]” in Morse, while the other blinks prime numbers from 2 to 23 – we’ll assume this means it was [Missa]’s 23rd birthday.

There’s a surprising amount of crossover between the worlds of electronics and tattooing. We’ve featured functional temporary tattoo circuits, prison-expedient tattoo guns, and even a CNC tattoo machine.

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Create Green, Soldermasked PCBs With Fritzing

March 22, 2019 by 12 Comments

Even though you can easily order a PCB from any one of a dozen board houses and have it on your desk in a few weeks, there’s still a need for home-made circuit boards. If it’s because you have very special or strange requirements, you want to save money, or you need to suffer for your art, you can make printed circuit boards at home. You can even apply soldermask. It’s easy, and [Renzo] is here to show you how.

The beginnings of this tutorial cover well-tread territory such as building a CNC router, laying out a circuit, and cutting a piece of single-sided, copper clad board. If you stopped right there, after milling traces into a board, you would have a functioning circuit. But it wouldn’t look good; a piece of copper does not a PCB make, and you need soldermask. That’s where the real work comes in.

Applying the soldermask meant there needed to be places without soldermask, mostly the vias and through-holes. For this, [Renzo] pulled the copper pad layer out of Fritzing, printed it on a transparency sheet, and finally applied the UV-curing soldermask. This came as a kit, and right now, you can get 10 ml of green, red, blue, yellow, and black UV-curing soldermask, and a UV flashlight for ten dollars on the usual Internet shops. This soldermask was lathered on, rolled out, and exposed with the UV flashlight. After a quick wash in acetone, the result is a perfect PCB.