Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

The Value of Cardboard In Product Design

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A while ago, [Eric Strebel] created a backpack hanger. The result was great — by just bolting this backpack hanger to the wall, he kept his backpack off the floor and out of the way. There was even a place for him to set his phone to charge. [Eric] is thinking about turning this idea into a product, and just posted a video on his process of making a cardboard mockup.

Since this is a study in industrial design, any mockup will need to keep in mind how the finished article will be constructed. In this case, [Eric] is going …read more

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The Mighty D Battery Becomes A USB Powerbank

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[Jan] is one of those people who’s always playing around with synthesizers, and in this day and age, that means a lot of USB cables supplying power. If you want to make a synth setup portable, your best option is looking at USB powerbanks with their fancy lithium cells. These will work just fine, but remember: you can buy D cells just about anywhere, and they actually hold a ridiculous amount of energy. They’re cheap albeit one-use and disposable, so why not build a USB power bank out of a massive pair of batteries?

The build started off, naturally, with …read more

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Sprite_TM’s Magic Paintbrush

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When it comes to hackers we love, there’s no better example than Jeroen Domburg, a.k.a. Sprite_TM. Sprite’s now working for Espressif, makers of the fantastic ESP8266 and ESP32, where he created a miniature Game Boy and turned this PocketSprite into a real product. He’s installed Linux on a hard drive, and created a Matrix of virtualized Tamagotchis. In short, if you’re looking for someone who’s building the coolest, most technical thing of sometimes questionable utility, you need look no further than Sprite_tm.

Sprite was back at this year’s Superconference, and again he’s bringing out the big guns with awesome hardware …read more

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New Part Day: A $6 Linux Computer You Might Be Able To Write Code For

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The latest news from the world of cheap electronics is a single board computer running Linux. It costs six dollars, and you can buy it right now. You might even be able to compile code for it, too.

The C-Sky Linux development board is listed on Taobao as an ‘OrangePi NanoPi Raspberry Pi Linux Development Board” and despite some flagrant misappropriation of trademarks, this is indeed a computer running Linux, available for seven American dollars.

This board is based on a NationalChip GX6605S SoC, a unique chip with an ISA that isn’t ARM, x86, RISC-V, MIPS, or anything else that …read more

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Hackaday Links: The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month, 2018

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For the better part of the last five years, the Great War Channel on YouTube has been covering the events of the Great War, week by week, exactly 100 years later. It’s hundreds of episodes designed for history buffs, and quite literally one of the most educational channels on YouTube. It’s the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eighteenth year, which means the folks behind the Great War Channel are probably taking a well-deserved vacation. If you haven’t heard of this channel, it might be a good time to check it out.

Ikea is now selling NFC locks. …read more

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Redesigning the Musical Keyboard with Light-Up Buttons

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A piano’s keyboard doesn’t make sense. If you want to want to play an F major chord, just hit an F, an A, and a C — all white keys, all in a row. If you want to play a B major chord, you hit B, a D#, and an F#. One white key, then two black ones. The piano keyboard is not isomorphic, meaning chords of the same quality have different shapes. For their entry into the Hackaday Prize, [CSCircuits] and their crew are working on a keyboard that makes chords intuitive. It’s called the Kord Kontroller, and it’s …read more

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TouchYou: Wearable Touch Sensor and Stimulator

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Some of us might never know the touch of another human, but this project in the Hackaday Prize might just be the solution. It’s TouchYou, [Leonardo]’s idea for a wearable device that allows anyone to send tactile and multi-sensorial stimulation across the Internet. It’s touching someone over the Internet, and yes, this technology is right here today.

Inside the TouchYou is an Arduino Pro Mini connected to a Bluetooth module. This Arduino communicates with force sensors and touch sensors and also has an output for a small vibration motor. With that Bluetooth module, the TouchYou becomes an Internet of Things …read more

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Competitive Soldering Gets Heated at Hackaday Superconference

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The Hackaday Superconference is in full swing, and in addition to the greatest hardware hackers, a great gathering of tinkerers, awesome talks, badge hacking, and so much more, we’ve also got competitive soldering. This year, we’re making soldering competitive with the SMD Solder Challenge. It began Friday morning as hackers go heat to head, hand soldering frustratingly tiny parts.

The rules are simple: you’re given a light, a magnifying glass, some solder, wick, flux, and the standard Hakko soldering iron (with the standard tip). The task is to solder up our own special version of the SMD Challenge Kit from …read more

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Voice Controlled Glasses and Magnifying Lens

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If you’re reading Hackaday, you’re probably intimately familiar with really small parts. 0201 resistors are tiny, and even smaller parts aren’t unheard of. The screws that go in your phone are minuscule, and a magnifying glass is really handy if you want to check out the detail on your 3D prints. While this is easy if you have good eyesight and you’re young, a lot of us don’t have that luxury and instead must rely on magnifying glasses and loupes. [Mauro]’s project for the Hackaday Prize makes wearing these loupes and lenses even easier by adding a voice-controlled servo.

The …read more

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Analog Synth, But In Cello Form

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For one reason or another, electronic synthesizing musical instruments are mostly based around the keyboard. Sure, you’ve got the theremin and other oddities, but VCAs and VCFs are mostly the domain of keyboard-style instruments, and have been for decades. That’s a shame, because the user interface of an instrument has a great deal to do with the repertoire of that instrument. Case in point: [jaromir]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize. It’s an electronic analog synth, in cello form. There’s no reason something like this couldn’t have been built in the 60s, and we’re shocked it wasn’t.

Instead of an electrified …read more

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