Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Juicero: A Lesson On When To Engineer Less

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Ben Einstein, a product designer and founder at Bolt, a hardware-based VC, recently got his hands on a Juicero press. This desktop juice press that only works with proprietary pouches filled with chopped fruits and vegetables is currently bandied in the tech press as evidence Silicon Valley has gone mad, there is no future in building hardware, and the Internet of Things is a pox on civilization. Hey, at least they got the last one right.

This iFixit-style tear down digs into the Juicero mixer in all its gory details. It’s beautiful, it’s a marvel of technology, and given the …read more

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Old Part Day: Voltage Controlled Filters

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For thirty years, the classic synths of the late 70s and early 80s could not be reproduced. Part of the reason for this is market forces — the synth heads of the 80s didn’t want last year’s gear. The other part for the impossibility to build new versions of these synths was the lack of parts. Synths such as the Prophet 5, Fairlight CMI, and Korg Mono/Poly relied on voltage controlled filter ICs — the SSM2044 — that you can’t buy new anymore. If you can source a used one, be prepared to pay $30. New old stock costs about …read more

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Error: LP0 On 🔥

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You don’t need fancy ICs and DACs to build a sound card for a PC. As [serdef]’s build over on hackaday.io shows, all you really need is a bunch of resistors. [serdef] built a clone of a sound card released for PC in the 80s, but with a few improvements. This mess of resistors features the best 8-bit sound you can get with a low-pass filter, volume divider, and a handy DB-25 connector.

The design of this LPT0 sound card is pretty much the same as when it was introduced to the world as the Covox Speech Thing. This ‘sound …read more

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Error: LP0 On 🔥

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You don’t need fancy ICs and DACs to build a sound card for a PC. As [serdef]’s build over on hackaday.io shows, all you really need is a bunch of resistors. [serdef] built a clone of a sound card released for PC in the 80s, but with a few improvements. This mess of resistors features the best 8-bit sound you can get with a low-pass filter, volume divider, and a handy DB-25 connector.

The design of this LPT0 sound card is pretty much the same as when it was introduced to the world as the Covox Speech Thing. This ‘sound …read more

Continue reading Error: LP0 On 🔥→

Around the Globe on World Create Day

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Last weekend was great for science and technology. While thousands of people took to the streets to protest anti-intellectualism, a few members of the Hackaday community dug their heels in, turned on the soldering iron, and actually did something about it. This was World Create Day, a community effort to come together and build something that matters. What did these people build? So much awesome stuff.

The Nest I/O in Karachi, Pakistan

The folks at The Nest I/O hackerspace in Karachi, Pakistan had a rather large meetup for World Create Day featuring the finest in laser cut, googly-eyed fighting robots. …read more

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Hackaday Links: April 23, 2017

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‘Member StarCraft? Ooooh, I ‘member StarCraft. The original game and the Brood War expansion are now free. A new patch fixes most of the problems of getting a 20-year-old game working and vastly improves playing over LAN (‘member when you could play video games over a LAN?) And you thought you were going to have free time this week.

About a year ago, [Mark Chepurny] built a dust boot for his Shapeoko CNC router. The SuckIt (not the best possible name, by the way) is an easy, simple way to add dust collection to an X-Carve or Shapeoko 2. The …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Memes

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Snap, Inc., the company behind Snapchat, is branding itself as a hardware company. What hardware does Snap make? Spectacles, or a camera attached to a pair of sunglasses. Snap, Inc. has a market value of around $30 Billion USD.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [William Glover] is building a device that’s easily worth $100 Billion. It’s called SnappCat, and it’s a machine learning, AI, augmented reality, buzzword-laden camera that adds memes to pictures of cats. Better get in on the Series A now because this is 🔥🔥🔥.

Here’s the use case for SnappCat. Place a small device containing a camera …read more

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This Hacker Fit An Entire RetroPie In An Altoids Tin

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A mew months ago, [wermy] built the mintyPi, a Raspberry Pi-based gaming console that fits inside an Altoids tin. It’s amazing — there’s a composite LCD, an audio DAC, and a chopped up Nintendo controller all connected to a Raspberry Pi for vintage gaming goodness on the road. Now, there’s a new mintyPi. The mintyPi 2.0 vastly improves over the earlier generation of this groundbreaking mint-based gaming console with a better screen, better buttons, customized 3D printed bezels, and better audio. Truly, we live in a Golden Age.

Version two of mintyPi uses 3D printed parts and includes a real …read more

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This Hacker Fit An Entire RetroPie In An Altoids Tin

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A mew months ago, [wermy] built the mintyPi, a Raspberry Pi-based gaming console that fits inside an Altoids tin. It’s amazing — there’s a composite LCD, an audio DAC, and a chopped up Nintendo controller all connected to a Raspberry Pi for vintage gaming goodness on the road. Now, there’s a new mintyPi. The mintyPi 2.0 vastly improves over the earlier generation of this groundbreaking mint-based gaming console with a better screen, better buttons, customized 3D printed bezels, and better audio. Truly, we live in a Golden Age.

Version two of mintyPi uses 3D printed parts and includes a real …read more

Continue reading This Hacker Fit An Entire RetroPie In An Altoids Tin→

The Raspberry Pi As An IR To WiFi Bridge

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[Jason] has a Sonos home sound system, with a bunch of speakers connected via WiFi. [Jason] also has a universal remote designed and manufactured in a universe where WiFi doesn’t exist. The Sonos can not be controlled via infrared. There’s an obvious problem here, but luckily tiny Linux computers with WiFi cost $10, and IR receivers cost $2. The result is an IR to WiFi bridge to control all those ‘smart’ home audio solutions.

The only thing [Jason] needed to control his Sonos from a universal remote is an IR receiver and a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The circuit is …read more

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