Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Making A PCB in Everything: Eagle, Part 1

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For the first in a series of posts describing how to make a PCB, we’re going with Eagle. Eagle CAD has been around since the days of DOS, and has received numerous updates over the years. Until KiCad started getting good a few years ago, Eagle CAD was the de facto standard PCB design software for hobbyist projects. Sparkfun uses it, Adafruit uses it, and Dangerous Prototypes uses it. The reason for Eagle’s dominance in a market where people don’t want to pay for software is the free, non-commercial and educational licenses. These free licenses give you the ability to …read more

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Creating A PCB In Everything: Introduction

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A few years ago, I wrote a few columns titled Making A Thing. These columns were a tutorial of sorts for several different 3D modeling programs. This column wasn’t meant to be a complete guide to modeling an object in OpenSCAD or SolidWorks, it was just step-by-step instructions on how to make one specific thing with one specific piece of software.

More than a few people in the Hackaday community found this column useful or at the very least an interesting pedagogical device. When starting out with any kind of productivity software, you don’t need to know how to do …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: The Internet Of Meat

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We’ve only just begun to see the proliferation of smart kitchen gadgets. Dumb crock pots with the intelligence of a bimetallic strip, are being replaced by smart sous vide controllers. The next obvious step is barbecue. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [armin] is building a smart, eight-channel BBQ controller for real barbecue, with smoke and fans, vents and metal boxes.

This BBQ controller has been in the works for years now, starting with a thread in a German barbeque forum. The original build featured an original Raspberry Pi, and could relay temperatures from inside a slab of meat to anywhere …read more

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MakerBot Releases Their 6th Generation Of 3D Printers

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Just in time for the back to school and holiday season, Makerbot has released their latest line of printers. The latest additions to the lineup include the new Makerbot Replicator+ and the Makerbot Replicator Mini+.

The release of these new printers marks MakerBot’s first major product release since the disastrous introduction of the 5th generation of MakerBots in early 2014. The 5th generation of MakerBots included the Replicator Mini, priced at $1300, the Replicator, priced at $2500, and the Replicator Z18, priced at $6500. Comparing the build volume of these printers with the rest of the 3D printer market, these …read more

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Amateur Radio Parity Act Passes US House

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Most new houses are part of homeowners associations, covenants, or have other restrictions on the deed that dictate what color you can paint your house, the front door, or what type of mailbox is acceptable. For amateur radio operators, that means neighbors have the legal means to remove radio antennas, whether they’re unobtrusive 2 meter whips or gigantic moon bounce arrays. Antennas are ugly, HOAs claim, and drive down property values. Thousands of amateur radio operators have been silenced on the airwaves, simply because neighbors don’t like ugly antennas.

Now, this is about to change. The US House recently passed …read more

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New Part Day: A Truly Secure Workstation

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There is a chain of trust in every modern computing device that starts with the code you write yourself, and extends backwards through whatever frameworks you’re using, whatever OS you’re using, whatever drivers you’re using, and ultimately whatever BIOS, UEFI, Secure Boot, or firmware you’re running. With an Intel processor, this chain of trust extends to the Intel Management Engine, a system running independent of the CPU that has access to the network, USB ports, and everything else in the computer.

Needless to say, this chain of trust is untenable. Any attempt to audit every line of code running in …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Text To Speech The Hard Way

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Studies have shown reading to children leads to improved academic performance later in life, a trait that will make them more competitive in the workforce, and ultimately happier human beings. It follows, then, that having a robot read to children will also lead to happier and more productive adults, while normalizing the cyborg uprising takeover of the AI apocalypse of 2037.

It’s a good thing the above paragraph is a complete non-sequitur and has nothing to do with this Hackaday Prize entry. The TextEye, [Markus]’ entry for the Assistive Technology portion of the Hackaday Prize, is a handheld device that …read more

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Hackaday Links: September 18, 2016

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No Star Trek until May, 2017, at which time you’ll have to pay $5/month to watch it with ads. In the meantime, this is phenomenal and was shut down by Paramount and CBS last year ostensibly because Star Trek: Discovery will be based around the same events.

Tempest in a teacup. That’s how you cleverly introduce the world’s smallest MAME cabinet. This project on Adafruit features a Pi Zero, a 96×64 pixel color OLED display, a few buttons, a tiny joystick, and a frame made out of protoboard. It’s tiny — the height of this cabinet just under two wavelengths  …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: High End Preamps

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While compact disks are seeing an uptick in popularity thanks to a convenient format that offers a lossless high-quality 44.1 KHz sample rate with 16-bit depth, some people are still riding the vinyl bandwagon of 2010. With that comes a need for the best hardware, and that means expensive cartridges and preamps designed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

For this year’s Hackaday Prize, [skrodahl] is building a really, really good preamplifier for moving coil turntable cartridges. It’s already built, it’s already tested, and the results are good: it produces between 36 and 46dB of gain, -110dB of dynamic …read more

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A New OS For Apple II Computers

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Although this sort of work is usually reserved for KansasFest and other forums for highly technical and very skilled Apple enthusiasts, [John Brooks]’s release of a new version of the ProDOS operating system is no less important. It is, without a doubt, the greatest release the Apple II platform will see for the next few years. This swan song of the Apple II platform is simply ProDOS 2.4, an update to the last version of Apple’s ProDOS, last released in 1993.

For a bit of historical context, ProDOS was not the operating system that shipped with the Apple ][ in …read more

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